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Anatomy of a Product Failure

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Recently I launched the Sonic Bow Tie – the first project I’ve ever designed from the start to be a product, instead of a project that turned into a product by accident. The Bow Tie is an electronic kit with a circuit board shaped and sized like a real bow tie. It’s a blinking, beeping, musical tuneable theremin-type thing you can actually wear – perfect for those nerd-centric formal occasions, or project night at the local hacker space. Following the examples of the Weevil Eye, the Simon, the Drawdio, and basically everything at ThinkGeek, it’s intended to be a fun project kit to assemble with a friend, appealing to engineers with a sense of humor. I mean who wouldn’t want a dazzling neck-based audio-visual spectacle?

Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to agree that bow ties plus electronics is a match made in heaven. Since I launched the Sonic Bow Tie about ten days ago, it’s received zero feedback, zero interest, zero sales, zero anything. It’s enough to make me wonder – did I actually hit the “publish” button on that product announcement? Yup, I did.

This isn’t the end of the world, and my financial investment in bow tie kits is small. But what disturbs me is that something I thought would be fairly popular, or at least fairly amusing, proved to be such a complete flop. I spent many hours iterating on the circuit design and physical layout, sourcing parts, and manufacturing kits for an idea that proved to be a total non-starter. It shows that using yourself and your immediately family as a proxy for public opinion may not be the smartest idea. Meanwhile, if I don’t find more bow tie enthusiasts, I’ll be buying space in a New Mexico landfill next to all those unsold Apple Lisas and E.T. cartridges. Live and learn!

Do you have any good product failure stories you’re willing to share? Post ’em here and make me feel better. 🙂

Read 9 comments and join the conversation 

9 Comments so far

  1. Erik Petrich - March 3rd, 2015 9:59 pm

    I thought the old-school note sequencing done with the counter outputs driving the timer’s control input was clever. Of course you can do all sorts of things with a microcontroller, but you can also do quite a bit without one too and this seems to be often overlooked these days.

    On the other hand, my wife heard the beeping from the video and commented something about how long that would actually last in our house (before the tie would suffer from an “accident”).

    Not quite a product failure, since the final version eventually sold fairly well, but for the first PCB I designed for a commercial product I managed to mix up the top and bottom layers. Nothing quite like excitedly opening the box of all those blank PCBs, soldering on all the components to the first board, turning it on and seeing nothing happen. “But the prototype worked perfectly!?” Oh well, live and learn.

  2. Buddy - March 4th, 2015 12:45 am

    bet you could see a few at Maker Faire!

  3. Felix - March 4th, 2015 5:40 am

    Looks like a nice design, and I can imagine the amount of work that went into it. Reading your post I am surprised it has no interest although I am not into wearables, but 10 days is not that long actually, I would wait around a while so it gets more exposure. There’s always a little niche market somewhere for everything.
    I am sure adafruit would love to sell it in their funky wearable section, maybe try that avenue 🙂

  4. Jeremy - March 4th, 2015 9:10 am

    Take them to Planet Comic-Con and sell them as the Dr’s Bow Ties combined with a Sonic Screwdriver, you will sell out faster than you can imagine.

  5. aris - March 4th, 2015 2:54 pm

    Maybe send one out with each order of other stuff you sell. Everyone likes a fun freebie.

  6. aris - March 4th, 2015 3:04 pm

    Hmm.. taking the freebie comment back. Also looked at the shop and the bow tie is last on the page. If you want to promote it maybe it should be the first listing? Have you ran the bow tie page through some SEO checkers to see that you are using the sort of keywords relevant to your product? Instead of taking the promo video indoors under yellow dim lights, find a nice shady spot outside for nicer colours. Those LEDs are quite bright.

    Finally, show it to some more people and get reactions. Maybe it is too loud, or too bright, or too random. Maybe not programmable enough. Maybe it should connect to an arduino so people can make it do what they want.

    Maybe I should use all this typing to write a chapter in my autobiography!!

  7. Charles - March 4th, 2015 5:52 pm

    hey don’t beat your self up, so what this one sucks… The next one might suck too… But keep at it, if i were you , i would do what Mike McMaster did, re did the scsi2sd, and will probably have one much smaller (cheaper/easier to manufacture) product with adaptor pcb’s that allow db25 or Laptop connections. Its like Apple’s LISA, lisa it was crap. But the Macintosh 128k was lots better. the 512k was even better. I mean dude you are so fucking awesome its almost not right… Why did you drop the ball on the PLUS II? I mean dammit how many people would love to have a little PLUS II? And your floppy emu cases? what happen to the Birch? that one was the bestest. You were talking about make move to the the Cypress chip for the floppy emu, I think you should redesign it and give the floppy emu like a Console Game Controller feel with the cable coming from the middle at the top, and put Select and Reset one one side and up down left right on the other side.
    and maybe sell modules for it… BW-Logger / Floppy Emu / HD20 Emu / Lisa support / PLUS II / like for instance you could make the screen bigger, Include the Date and Time, Hell maybe Ambient temperature, Voltages + 5 12 -12, Make it like a little info center.
    maybe add a lithium battery pack, so you don’t need it to be connected to the mac, but when it is connected its charging the the battery pack.
    integrate a little leg into it so it sites back at a nice angle on the desk.
    maybe the PLUSII module has and ADB port, for a mac mouse and keyboard?

  8. Sherry Haibara - March 5th, 2015 12:28 pm

    I totally second Jeremy’s suggestion. I’m not in this kind of things, but I know Dr.Who is fairly popular and this might be a perfect companion for a sonic screwdriver!
    I also think you’re targeting the wrong audience – I see this kind of products much better as funny things you sell in fairs (or to kids?) rather than to nerds.
    Give it a try, it may work much better than trying to sell them online!

  9. Nate - March 6th, 2015 5:57 pm

    Maybe if it was based on SMD components it would be more “elegant”

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