How eComID Chose Quality Over Scale in Year One

How eComID Chose Quality Over Scale in Year One

Every growth metric points in one direction: more customers, faster. CAC/LTV ratios, MRR hockey sticks, user acquisition funnels. The startup playbook says scale fast or die trying. Oscar Rundqvist is ignoring all of it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Oscar Rundqvist, CEO and Co-Founder of eComID, revealed a counterintuitive approach to early-stage growth. Despite having brands signing up to their waitlist weekly, eComID is deliberately turning customers away. Not because they can’t handle the volume. Because they refuse to.

“We have a waitlist on our side with brands signing up on a weekly basis right now,” Oscar explains. But here’s the twist: “We intentionally right now are not onboarding all brands at the same time. We rather want to have fewer but better and I guess in a way deeper relationships with a few brands we select to onboard.”

This isn’t a capacity issue masquerading as strategy. It’s a deliberate choice about what matters in year one when you’re not just building a product, but inventing the category it lives in.

The Problem with Scaling Before You Know What You’re Scaling

To understand why eComID is moving slowly, you need to understand what they’re building. The company operates in what Oscar calls “pre purchase product returns reduction technology.” Not returns management. Not logistics optimization. Something that didn’t exist as a category until eComID created it.

“The category that we’re inventing, kind of returns reduction or pre purchase returns reduction is quite new,” Oscar notes. “It’s not that they actively know it’s something to look for.”

Here’s the trap most founders fall into: they treat early customers like users when they should treat them like co-creators. When you’re establishing a new category, your first 10 customers teach you infinitely more than your next 100. They help you discover what the product actually needs to be, how to talk about it, and what success looks like.

Scale that too fast, and you’re scaling the wrong thing. You’re codifying processes before you know if they work. You’re building features based on limited feedback. You’re spreading your team too thin to learn deeply from anyone.

What Quality Over Scale Actually Looks Like

Oscar’s priorities for the year reveal what “quality-first” means in practice. “Product focus, brand focus and team focus, I guess,” he says. Notice what’s absent: growth targets, revenue milestones, customer acquisition goals.

This isn’t lack of ambition. It’s strategic sequencing. The product focus comes first because they’re still figuring out what pre-purchase returns reduction needs to be. The brand focus comes second because each customer relationship is a learning opportunity. The team focus comes third because you need the right people to execute.

The depth-over-breadth approach serves multiple purposes. First, it allows eComID to become genuine experts in each customer’s specific returns challenges. When “54% of all dresses that was bought online in Europe last year were returned,” generic solutions don’t work.

Second, it creates “deeper relationships” that function as partnerships rather than vendor relationships. These early customers aren’t just using the product. They’re validating the category itself and becoming evangelists.

Third, it prevents the quality death spiral. Onboard too many customers too fast, and your team splits attention. Customer success becomes reactive firefighting. Product feedback becomes noise instead of signal.

The Scarcity Signal

There’s another dimension to eComID’s approach worth examining: scarcity creates value perception. When brands see a waitlist and learn that eComID is selective, it signals something different than a company desperate for customers.

This matters especially in enterprise sales. That selectivity becomes part of the value proposition. You’re not buying software. You’re gaining access to something exclusive, working with a company that cares more about fit than volume.

The waitlist also creates natural urgency without manufactured scarcity. Brands aren’t waiting because eComID can’t handle them. They’re waiting because eComID won’t compromise on quality.

The Category Creation Timeline

What makes eComID’s approach particularly relevant is how it aligns with the natural timeline of category creation. You can’t force a market to understand a new category faster than it’s ready to.

“We’re trying to engage wherever this is discussed, trying to encourage this to be discussed even more,” Oscar says about their category evangelism. This takes time. You’re not just selling a product, you’re teaching the market to think differently.

During that education period, having 50 customers with 50 different implementations doesn’t accelerate learning. It creates chaos. Having 5-10 deeply engaged customers who help refine the message and validate the approach? That creates leverage.

When to Break Your Own Rules

The critical question isn’t whether eComID’s approach is right. It’s when this approach makes sense and when it doesn’t. Oscar offers a clear signal: they’re waiting for product-market fit within their initial segment before scaling.

The company is focused on fashion e-commerce specifically, where return rates hit 30-50%. “Most of myself and most of the team comes from the fashion segment,” Oscar explains. “So that’s what we know best and can really adjust the solution to that segment specifically.”

Once they nail fashion e-commerce, once they can predictably help brands reduce returns, once the category messaging resonates consistently, then the equation changes. Then scale makes sense. But scaling before that point just means scaling something that isn’t quite right yet.

The Principle Behind the Tactic

Strip away the specifics of eComID’s situation, and you’re left with a principle that applies broadly: in the early stages of category creation, depth of customer relationship matters infinitely more than breadth of customer base.

Your first customers are teaching you three critical things. First, what the product actually needs to do, not what you thought it should do. Second, how to talk about the category in ways that resonate, not how you initially described it. Third, what customer success actually looks like when implemented, not what you imagined in your pitch deck.

You can’t learn those lessons from 100 superficial relationships. You can only learn them from 10 deep ones. The companies that win new categories aren’t always the first movers or the fastest scalers. They’re the ones who figure out the right thing to scale before they scale it.

Oscar’s approach with eComID challenges the default startup playbook, but it’s grounded in a clear understanding of what stage they’re in. Year one isn’t about proving you can grow fast. It’s about proving you’re growing the right thing.