Let me show you what that looks like out in the world, because I watched it happen to me not long ago — and I was the customer, not the seller.
On Oct 28, 2025 at 11:40am (I checked; sober, mid-morning, no beer involved) I bought a book. From a stranger, in Japan. An illustrator called Luis Mendo, whose work had captured me online — and I couldn’t unsee it.
Then I forgot I’d ordered it. (I know, don’t judge, these things happen to the best of us.)
I genuinely forgot — the way you forget a tab you left open. Months went by. And the book, it turned out, had been quietly having an adventure of its own: sent to an old address in a different country, marked unclaimed, shipped all the way back to Japan. Six months after I’d ordered it — and long after I’d stopped thinking about it — I got an email from Luis himself, a little distressed, asking what on earth he should do.
“It’s CRAZY but I have received your book back in Japan this week! OMG.”
We sorted it out. He sent it again. And a few weeks later it arrived in Bath: copy 0662 of 1000. Numbered. Signed. A small, dense, specific object made by an actual human who cared how it smelled. (Japanese FSC certified paper, it turns out, smells a certain way.)
Now — here’s the part I want you to sit with.
A funnel does not survive that. No sequence, no cart-abandonment email, no “complete your purchase” nudge is built to hold a relationship across six months of silence and a parcel lost on the other side of the planet. By every metric a marketer would track, I was gone. Churned. A dead lead.
And yet what I actually did, once the book was finally in my hands, was go back to Luis’s World — and join his (yearly) membership.
Not because I was funnelled there. Because the whole drawn-out, slightly absurd episode had done the one thing a funnel can’t: it had earned something. Resonance, then a small act of support, then life getting in the way, then a moment of reconnection six months later — and then, only then, the deeper yes.
There’s a beauty in that. And it has nothing to do with a funnel.
(I wrote the whole story up here, if you want it — the lost-parcel comedy of it, and where it points.)
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