The email came in just after nine on a Tuesday morning. I had been at the boutique for less than an hour, the scent of fresh coffee still drifting from the back room, when I saw the subject line: Delay in Shipment – Urgent.

At first, I scanned it quickly, expecting a short delay, a matter of a day or two. Then I read it again, slower this time, letting each line settle. Our primary silk supplier had run into a production issue—something about a machine failure combined with a backlog from ...