We spent months getting Celeste Naturals’ products right. Ingredient research, formulation testing, brainstorming how different ingredients lined up with both performance and our actual brand values. Sizes, shapes, colors, scents, skin benefits. We treated the soap like it mattered, because it did. Then we got to the box, and decided that could just be our best…
I like to toot my own horn. I think I’m pretty damn smart, and I’ve got the receipts to back it up: top grades, a stint living abroad, an executive MBA from Georgia Tech, over a decade as a trusted advisor to serious organizations in consulting, then another decade practicing those same skills in industry….
Let’s be clear about something first: cash matters. It pays for ingredients, displays, tents, marketing, gas, and whatever you’re eating while you sit at a table for six hours praying someone buys a bar of soap. Run out of it, or fail to move product fast enough, and that’s a quick way to end a…
In our first post I ended with a promise: Espresso was never going to make it. This is its eulogy. It was a good product, a reasonable bet, and a commercial dud, and the space between those three facts is where most of the answers to why new products fail actually live. It made so much sense…
Nobody researching suppliers at 11pm after their 9-5 is lazy. Lazy people don’t build spreadsheets comparing fragrance oil vendors. They don’t have a notes app full of product ideas or a browser history that reads like a small business curriculum. If you’ve been sitting on a business idea for a year and calling yourself lazy,…
Chrissy and I spent more than a decade in corporate consulting. In that world, you do not put anything in front of a client until it has been reviewed, revised, aligned, re-reviewed, and blessed by at least three people with “senior” in their title. If we had ever walked into a client meeting with something…