There Is Perfection in Imperfection

At John Lewis johnlewis.com, I was Lead UX for Findability: search and browse so a shopper could reach stock that actually existed. Women’s fashion owned how the assortment spoke. I was responsible for whether she found a dress she could buy, or a beautiful grid that omitted the truth.

I designed two answers to that mess. First, hide out-of-stock in the filter grid: when a size or colour had no inventory left, pull it out of the path so browse did not send people into dead ends. Second, Notify when available: when the thing was gone, leave the limit visible and offer a way back when stock returned. I learned how easily the first erases the limit, and how the second is the harder kind of finish.

Carlie was the lead UI designer on the womenswear fashion team. She was not inventing a philosophy for a slide. She taught me a word I had only ever seen on moodboards: wabi-sabi, attention to incompleteness under real limit. From her, a missing size was a fact the shopper was allowed to see, not a stain on the assortment. The out-of-stock state was not a failure of craft if we told the truth and offered notify. It became a failure when we hid every gap so the first viewport looked inevitable.

I did not learn that from a Pinterest board of cracked ceramics. The title of this essay is easy to misuse. There is perfection in imperfection. In design, that does not mean “pretty flaws.” It means honesty under constraint: the incomplete, the impermanent, the unfinished that still tells the truth. On a fashion browse, that looked like a sold-out size you could still see, with notify attached, instead of a grid that had quietly deleted the problem. Leonard Koren’s 1994 book for Western makers compressed the English phrase into a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. koren-wabi-sabi-1994 In plain English: wabi prefers the austere and restrained over display spectacle. Sabi names beauty that arrives with age, wear, and time’s mark. Together, as a practice, wabi-sabi is accepting incompleteness under real limit. A moodboard that borrows the word while the product still hides every stock gap has not adopted the practice. The perfection Carlie pointed at was not the smooth grid. It was the limit hide out-of-stock was about to erase.

Who Benefits When Scarcity Disappears

Hiding out-of-stock can serve the shopper when it stops a false promise on a dead product page. It can also serve the review, the agency, and the brand lead who cannot narrate stock limits or ranking trade-offs to a board that only understands gloss. In those rooms it is pitched as care, as conversion, and as SEO browse hygiene: cleaner category grids, fewer dead-end paths, not as proof that Google rewards deleting temporary out-of-stock product URLs. The test is intent: does the limit stay speakable, or does it disappear so the demo looks full? That is Design is Attention Control under inventory constraint: who decides what the shopper is allowed to notice first.

Koren named the cultural enemy: wabi-sabi’s beauty is the antithesis of Classical Western perfection as something lasting and monumental, and the antithesis of slick, seamless, massively marketed digital objects. koren-beauty-dailygood-2013 A findability interface that erases every out-of-stock gap while selling authenticity is that slick object. Fashion web and Findability can both push the same move in different tools: make hide out-of-stock more aggressive and Notify quieter. The word travels easily as décor. The stock limit still has to stay speakable in the product.

What the Warm Case Gets Right

Craft finish still matters. A readable button, a working filter, a clear “out of stock” label, and a working Notify when available control protect the shopper. Imperfect aesthetics can warm a brand. Borrowing “wabi-sabi” to resist sterile chrome is not automatically theft. I am not arguing for broken search or dead ends. I am arguing against treating perfection as the absence of any stock limit.

What Carlie Named

From Carlie, while I owned search and browse, wabi-sabi meant stop deleting evidence of limit so a store catalogue looks full. Notify when available is that honesty in a control. In Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts (2015), Koren returned to the English career of the words he helped popularise in 1994. He wanted attentiveness to incompleteness and impermanence, not a kit of distressed props. koren-further-thoughts-2015 If the word survives only as décor while stock gaps still vanish before a walkthrough, the practice did not transfer.

What Shipping Cost

In a stakeholder review of women’s browse, the ask was simple: make the grid look shoppable. Hide out-of-stock would do it. Notify when available would leave sold-out sizes in view and invite a wait. I designed both. When the walkthrough favoured the cleaner path, I took the nod for hide out-of-stock. Notify stayed in the product; it was not the story that earned approval that day. That is the decision I own. Shipping hide out-of-stock also taught me how to make a filter grid look inevitable. Notify when available was slower: a visible absence and a path back when stock returned. In later product reviews I have watched “authentic imperfect” sit in a title. Approval arrives faster when nothing looks unfinished. Including me: I designed how easy hiding was.

Where the Shoe Rubs

A new shoe can look finished on the shelf and raise a blister on the first walk. The blister is information: this last does not fit this foot under load. Cover the blister for a fitting-room photograph and the shoe still fails on the pavement. Hide out-of-stock used only so the catalogue never looks thin is that photograph. Notify when available is closer to the blister: the limit stays speakable, and the path continues under constraint.

The Objection

There is no problem with wanting finish. Hiding out-of-stock from a filter can cut abandoned clicks and support tickets, and when Notify is unreliable, hiding a false path can be the more honest default. Borrowing Japanese aesthetic vocabulary can be exchange, not theft. Teams do not need a tea practice to use a word on a slide.

Grant that. Then ask what remains when hide out-of-stock only protects the demo, and Notify is a footnote. If scarcity still vanishes before the walkthrough, you did not adopt wabi-sabi. Empty words still cost the shopper who never saw that the size was gone.

Whether Notify Still Speaks

There is perfection in imperfection: honesty under constraint, not a caption on a moodboard. In the next review, name the limit hide out-of-stock is about to erase, and whether Notify still speaks. The shopper waiting on “when available” is the human the finish was never for.