Why this site exists

When I returned to EK earlier this year, nobody had to ask me whether trust had been lost. It had. The years that led EKWB into insolvency were years in which the company acted, in important ways, against its own stated values — and a community as engaged as ours noticed, remembered, and was right to.

Trust is not something a company can ask for. It is the cumulative result of a long history of decisions that align with what a company says it stands for. When that alignment is broken, the only way to rebuild trust is to put the alignment back in place and let it run for long enough that people start to believe the new behaviour is the real behaviour. There is no shortcut to that. The timeline is uncomfortable for the people doing the work, and far more uncomfortable for the people still waiting for the work to reach them.

Radical transparency does not replace that timeline, but it can shorten it, and it can give the public something concrete to look at in the meantime. If we publish the figures — including the ones we would rather not — and we publish them on a cadence we keep, and we do not revise them after publication, then over time the figures themselves become the argument. Anyone watching can decide whether to believe the recovery without having to take our word for it.

This site is the place where we do that.

The numbers published here are not chosen because they are flattering. They are chosen because they are the numbers a reasonable person would want to see to judge whether EK is rebuilding or merely making claims about rebuilding. We publish them with methodology notes. We do not revise them after publication. When something goes wrong — a missed cadence, a corrected figure, a metric that turned out to mean less than we thought — the updates page explains what happened and why.

Some of this data is uncomfortable. The Outstanding orders report lists 543 pre-paid orders from the EKWB period that were left unfulfilled at the time of the insolvency, with 31 resolved and 512 still in the queue as of this writing. That is a difficult page to publish. It is also the most important one on the site, because the people behind those order numbers were the first to be let down, and they are owed clarity above all else.

There are things this site is not. It is not a marketing surface, and it is not an apology. The work of rebuilding EK happens in the factory, in customer service, in supplier negotiations, and on the shop floor. This site only reports on that work; it does not replace it. Transparency without execution is theatre, and we have no interest in theatre.

I was not part of the management structure during the period that led EKWB into financial difficulty. That history is something I have inherited rather than authored, and I accept the responsibility that comes with it.

If you placed an order that never arrived, your obligation is preserved, your refund is being worked through, and you can look up your own order status on the Outstanding orders page — without entering your name or email.

If you are watching from the sidelines because you used to work here, or because you used to buy from us, or because you are simply curious whether a brand can come back from where ours has been — you can judge us on what is published on this site, on the cadence with which it is published, and on whether the figures move in the direction we say they will.

That is the only test we are interested in.