Eulogy for Espresso: Our First Product Flop
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 on paper
Every morning at our house runs the same way. The dogs go out to do their business, the brewing cycle kicks off, and the day starts in a glorious, body-warming, engine-revving way. Chrissy and I are devoted to the caffeine ritual. When it’s missing, the whole day feels off. So when we were building Celeste Naturals’ first scent lineup, an espresso line felt less like a product decision and more like a love letter to the coffee bean.
And the logic stacked up beyond sentiment. We wanted to lean on kitchen ingredients across our products wherever we could, and coffee fit that strategy perfectly. Caffeine has known enlivening skin benefits. We used real espresso grounds in the bar soap as an exfoliant. We even swapped straight distilled water for brewed drip coffee as the added liquid. This wasn’t a coffee-scented product, it was a coffee product.
We had market signals too, or what we told ourselves were market signals. Plenty of other brands run successful coffee and espresso scents. Coffee beans, grounds, and fresh brews photograph beautifully, and you need to feed the social media beast. And in the interest of full honesty about the vibes of that moment: Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” was inescapable at the time. We’re not saying a pop song drove our product roadmap. We’re saying it didn’t hurt.
The product was actually good
Here’s the part that makes this a useful story instead of a simple screwup: the products were lovely. Warm espresso notes, chocolate undertones, a hint of mocha. As coffee lovers, we were obsessed. Friends who smelled it gave positive feedback too.
Now, we knew even then that friends and family are not reliable critics. People who love you smell your soap the way they listen to your band. We took the praise with a grain of salt. Then we moved forward anyway, which tells you what a grain of salt actually weighs when you’re excited. Soaps, scrubs, and lotions, all wrapped in a bath of caffeinated joy, ready for the masses.
How a flop actually looks
Here’s what nobody tells you about product flops: they’re quiet.
I expected failure to be dramatic. Someone wrinkles their nose, puts the bar down like it’s radioactive, and you know. That never happened. Nobody held their nose and ran. People smelled Espresso, said pleasant things, and bought something else. Over and over. The sales just weren’t there, certainly not relative to our other scents, and in retail there is no more honest reviewer than the cash box. Consumers vote with their dollars, and the polls were brutal.
We had one loyal buyer who mercifully worked through most of the remaining inventory. If you’re reading this: we love you, and Espresso loved you most of all.
The sting wasn’t just emotional. We had made real investments: label design, scent oils, ingredients, plus outreach to local coffee shops about collaborations that went nowhere because the interest simply wasn’t there. None of it was ruinous, but all of it was real money and real hours spent on a product the market shrugged at. Espresso had to go.
Why new products fail (ours included)
The mercy of this whole episode is timing. It happened early, when the lessons were cheap. The same flop two years in, at bigger volume, with a wholesale order behind it, costs a lot more than bruised pride. Three things came out of it.
What we love and what customers love can be very different things. Our own taste is a fine starting point. It’s where product ideas come from, and you probably shouldn’t sell things you hate. But we aren’t making products for us. We’re making them for customers, and our morning ritual was never going to transfer to their shower by force of our enthusiasm alone. We were the target market for Espresso. Unfortunately, the target market was two people, and we already owned soap.
A small group of honest testers is worth more than a hundred polite friends. The fix for the friends-and-family problem isn’t ignoring feedback, it’s finding better sources of it. What we needed, and have since worked to build, is a small circle of people who genuinely support the brand, actually sit in our target demographic, and will tell us plainly when something isn’t a fit. They’re invested in our success because they love the products, which is exactly why they won’t lie to us about a new scent. That combination of loyal and candid is rare, and it’s invaluable.
Someone else’s success is not your validation. Other brands sell coffee scents just fine. That fact felt like evidence and functioned like permission. But their customers aren’t our customers, their brand isn’t our brand, and copying a note from someone else’s lineup skips the harder, more important work of finding your own voice, style, and scents. The stuff that sells best for us now sells because it’s ours, not because it worked for somebody else.
Rest well, you glorious bean
So farewell, Espresso. You smelled like our best mornings. You exfoliated with integrity. You were survived by scents that sell.
If your favorite product idea is sitting in the “obviously a winner” pile because you love it, other companies sell it, and it’ll look great on Instagram, we’d gently note that Espresso checked all three boxes and still died at a folding table. Run the test anyway. Just run it small, run it early, and listen to the cash box instead of your friends.
The market has spoken. The market prefers our other scents. The market, unlike our friends, has never once worried about hurting our feelings, and that makes it the best product advisor we’ve ever had.