The thing I keep circling back to is the confidence. Not the failure. The confidence.
The boardroom where somebody stood up and said "perfume" and nobody stopped them.
Harley-Davidson. A company whose entire identity is a V-twin engine and the smell of hot oil, and at some point in the nineties a room full of adults decided that what that brand needed was a cologne called Black Fire.
Twenty-five to sixty dollars a bottle, woody aromas with hints of tobacco. I want you to picture the meeting.
I'd rather not.
And that is exactly what Daniel's asking about today. Corn, take it away.
Daniel wants a countdown, and he's got a rule for it. Big established brands only, no startups. Products a famous company launched with total corporate swagger and then quietly pulled, ideally inside a year, the ones the company now hopes everybody has forgotten so thoroughly that you'd struggle to find them in their own history.
And he's explicit about the ones he doesn't want. Skip New Coke, skip the flops everyone already knows by heart.
He name-checked three to get us started. Colgate and frozen lasagna. Harley-Davidson and perfume. Bic and pens for her. So let's start with the first one, and I should warn everybody up front, it's not the story they think it is.
Start with the lasagna that never existed.
Because here's the thing. The Colgate Beef Lasagna, the box everybody's seen, the red-and-white Colgate logo over a photo of frozen pasta, that box is a fabrication. It was made by the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden, which opened in 2017. Not a photograph of a real product. A mock-up.
And the museum's founder, Samuel West, has been pretty candid about it. He said the reconstruction was based on images they found online, and even those could have been constructions. He's since floated the theory that either Colgate has a bad memory or the museum got pranked by some branding consultant who started an urban legend years ago.
So the museum built a fake box to illustrate a story, and the internet ran with it as documentary evidence.
And it worked. Google Trends shows searches for "Colgate Lasagne" only start after 2017. The phrase barely exists before the museum puts up the display. So this isn't a folk memory of a real product. It's a legend with a timestamp.
Which raises the obvious question. Did Colgate sell frozen food at all, or did we all just get got?
They absolutely did. Colgate-Palmolive in the sixties was a conglomerate, and that's not a small thing. George Henry Lesch takes over as chairman, Procter and Gamble is beating them senseless in the domestic market, and the strategy of the day is diversification. You already own food companies, so food is the logical adjacency.
And the real product?
Colgate Kitchen. Dried chicken and crabmeat entrees. Not lasagna. Five products, test-marketed in 1964, and here's the detail I love, only in Madison, Wisconsin.
One city. They test five dried chicken products in one city in Wisconsin and pull the whole thing a year later.
There's no national rollout. There's no ad campaign anybody remembers. It's a regional experiment that failed and got filed.
Then in 1975 they try again with Bambeanos.
Roasted, flavored whole soybeans. Launched 1975, discontinued by May 1976, and the official reason is the best sentence in corporate history. It gained a reputation for causing excessive flatulence.
They discontinued a food product because of the gas.
It cost Colgate seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to develop and market. It sold fewer than twenty-five thousand cases. And then there's the litigation. Colgate pulled out, and their roasting contractor, United Roasters, sued. A jury awarded United Roasters five hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars.
So the soybeans cost more in court than they did in development. That's the whole arc. You wanted to know what the company was thinking. Nobody was thinking about the soybeans.
And they made other things in this period. Puddin'Head chocolate pudding, an apple chip called Snapples. There's a whole food division that just evaporates.
Which brings us to how hard they've worked to forget it, and this is where the story gets strange. Prospect Magazine went at Colgate about this. They found 1966 trade press coverage of the food ambitions. They put it to the company.
And the director of corporate communications, Thomas DiPiazza, says flatly: "There was no Colgate Lasagne." When they show him the trade press evidence, he says, "Where are you headed with this? An article? For whom?" And then he closes off communications.
He never mentioned the lasagna again. He conceded that there was a period when Colgate-Palmolive was a conglomerate with a diverse array of businesses including food companies, and that's as far as it goes.
Which is a fascinating response, because he's defending a position nobody actually holds. The journalists know the lasagna is fake. They told him the lasagna is fake. He denies it anyway, because the real thing, the dried crabmeat entrees, is somehow worse to admit.
The denial is itself a kind of erasure. The company's official position is that the flop you've heard of didn't happen, and the flop that did happen, they're not going to bring up.
And the fake one is now more famous than the real one. The Museum of Failure's Beef Lasagna gets taught in marketing lectures as a brand extension disaster. Colgate Kitchen gets a Wikipedia footnote. The story outlived the product and then replaced it.
Which gives you a pattern before we even get to the bikes. Colgate shows us a flop erased so thoroughly that the internet had to invent a replacement. Harley-Davidson is the opposite. Harley has a flop so embarrassing they can't even pretend it didn't happen.
Because you can buy it on eBay.
So tell me what the company was thinking.
So in the nineties Harley decides it isn't a motorcycle company, it's a lifestyle brand. This is the era of the party drinks, the infant clothes, the Christmas ornaments. And somewhere in there, 1996 by most accounts, though some sources say 1994, they launch a line of perfumes and colognes.
Under what name?
There's a "Hot Road" line. Scents called Black Fire, Destiny, Legendary, Hot Rod, and Territory. Marketing copy promises woody aromas with hints of tobacco. Twenty-five to sixty dollars a bottle. The Museum of Failure dates the line as running from 1996 to 2005.
So nine years. That's not a flop that gets pulled in a season. That's a flop with a product roadmap.
It limped along. And the reasoning is the interesting part, because it's coherent on paper. Harley's asset is loyalty. The most tattooed logo in America. The theory was that owners would buy anything with the bar and shield on it.
And that's the trap, isn't it. The loyalty was real, and it's precisely what killed it.
Core riders looked at a seventy-dollar bottle of Territory and saw the brand being turned into a souvenir. The word people used at the time was that Harley was Disneyfying itself. The thing that made the brand magnetic was that it stood for something specific, and the perfume proved it didn't.
The asset became the liability.
And the retreat was total. RideApart's line on it is that the line was quietly shuffled off into the dustbin of failed branding exercises and everyone agreed never to speak of them again. Not on the Harley site, not in the dealerships. If you want a bottle now you go to eBay or a discount perfume site, and the bottles are still in the original packaging, which tells you everything about how much use they got.
Which is a different kind of forgetting to Colgate's. Colgate denies the lasagna. Harley just stops stocking the perfume and lets it become a collector's item for people who collect things nobody wants.
And this is where I'd put the pivot, Corn, because Harley's perfume failed because the brand was too strong. Bic's pens failed for almost the opposite reason. Bic had no business being in that argument at all.
So walk me through the pens, because I remember the Amazon reviews more than I remember the pens.
Bic Cristal for Her launches in 2011. Pink and purple pens, and the marketing copy is real, they said the pens were designed to fit comfortably in a woman's hand.
Did the previous pens not fit?
The previous pens were a hexagonal barrel that had been in production since 1950 and that people write with for hours. There was no ergonomic problem to solve. The product is a black pen in a pink shell.
With an attractive barrel design.
Now here's the part that matters. It comes out in 2011 and nobody notices for a year. It goes viral in August 2012 after a Jezebel writer, Margaret Hartmann, posts about it. And then the floodgates open.
The Amazon reviews are the actual product here.
TIME quoted one reviewer going by breemeup. I'll read it, because it is one of the great pieces of internet writing. "Finally. For years I've had to rely on pencils, or at worst, a twig and some drops of my feminine blood to write down recipes." That's it. That's the whole genre in one review.
That's better than anything the marketing department wrote. And there's a pricing detail, isn't there?
That's the part that killed them. Business Insider found the For Her pens cost more than the equivalent black Bics. Adweek put it at nearly twice as much for what are ninety-nine percent identical products. So you're not just pink-penning the market, you're charging a premium for it, and the pink pen contains the same ink.
And Forbes had a former brand manager write a defense.
David Vinjamuri wrote a piece explaining what they were actually thinking, and the answer is unfashionable but honest. Gender segmentation works. It works in razors, it works in deodorant, it works in shampoo. Bic looked at a tactic that had succeeded in adjacent categories and applied it to a category where the underlying product was identical between users.
The pen is the rare product where there's no physical difference to sell against. Everybody holds a pen the same way. The only lever left is the pink and the price.
And Ellen DeGeneres does a bit on it, which is the moment it stops being a marketing misfire and becomes a national joke. Which is the real punishment. Not the sales figures, the fact that it becomes a punchline you can't retire.
How hard have they worked to forget it?
It just quietly disappears. No announcement, no apology, no statement. It was never going to survive a search engine. You type "Bic for Her" today and you get the reviews.
Right, and I want to broaden this out now, because Daniel asked for a countdown, and the pens are only one entry. What else is on the list?
General Mills, 1993. Fingos. A hexagon-shaped cereal that was meant to be eaten dry with your fingers, no milk, straight out of the box.
That's a snack, not a cereal.
That's exactly what it was, and they spent thirty-four million dollars telling America that. One of the largest campaigns ever mounted for a cereal launch. The marketing manager, Barry Davis, told the New York Times they were breaking the traditional bounds of advertising cereal because they were trying to break the bounds of how people use cereal.
How did it go?
Dead by 1994. And I have to mention this because it's the kind of detail nobody would believe if you invented it, but in Hungarian, the word Fing means fart.
So the name was a problem in one market and the concept was a problem in all of them.
Coca-Cola BlāK. Coffee-flavored cola, mid-calorie, launched in France first, hits the US in April 2006, and it's gone by 2008 after Beverage Digest reports the pull.
Then Crystal Pepsi.
1992 to 1994. Clear cola. It captured one percent of US soft drink sales in year one, about four hundred and seventy-four million dollars, and then it disintegrated. And here's the part people miss. Coca-Cola launched Tab Clear specifically to kill the category.
A kamikaze product.
Sergio Zyman, Coke's chief marketing officer, said Pepsi spent an enormous amount of money on the brand and regardless, we killed it. Both of them were dead within six months. Coke sacrificed Tab Clear to take Crystal Pepsi down with it.
That's the most expensive act of spite in beverage history.
And the Crystal Pepsi guy, David Novak, has been remarkably honest about it since. He said it was the best idea he ever had and the worst executed. His line is, and I'm quoting, "It would have been nice if I'd made sure the product tasted good."
Which is the sentence you want framed above every product launch in history. There's a category of decision where nobody checks whether the thing actually works, and then thirty million dollars later everyone's surprised.
Heinz EZ Squirt, 2000 to 2006. Colored ketchup. Green, purple, pink, orange, teal, blue, in squeezable bottles. Gone by 2006.
McDonald's Arch Deluxe.
1996. An upscale burger for adults, backed by an estimated two hundred million dollars in advertising. It's routinely called the biggest marketing flop in McDonald's history. The food was fine, that's the thing. Eater's written about it, the burger itself was good. The campaign told customers that McDonald's was too sophisticated for kids, and the customers who actually eat at McDonald's did not want sophistication.
And Tropicana.
2009. They strip the orange and the straw off the carton and go minimalist. It's pulled after fifty days. Sales drop twenty percent. Tens of millions of dollars gone in under two months.
Fifty days. That's the fastest reversal on this list, and it's a packaging change, not even a product.
So, take stock, because there's a pattern here and it's worth saying out loud. Every one of these is a company with enormous equity in one category assuming that equity transfers to the next category over. Colgate assumes toothpaste trust transfers to dried crabmeat. Harley assumes motorcycle loyalty transfers to cologne. Bic assumes pen ubiquity transfers to gendered marketing.
And what's the mechanism of failure? Because the surface story is always "the product was bad."
Sometimes the product was bad. Usually the product was fine and the permission wasn't there. A consumer has a slot in their head for what a brand is, and the slot has walls. Colgate belongs in the bathroom cabinet. The moment it appears in the freezer aisle, the consumer doesn't evaluate the lasagna, they evaluate the betrayal of the slot.
And the stronger the brand, the harder the walls.
Right. Harley's whole identity is that it isn't soft. So a perfume isn't a product failure, it's an identity failure. The stronger the brand signal, the less room there is to move.
There's a smaller thread here too, and it's the one that I find funny. The failures that get scrubbed hardest aren't the ones that lost the most money. Tropicana lost tens of millions in fifty days and the whole thing is one of the better documented case studies in the field. Harley's perfume, which ran for nine years, is basically a folk story. So the erasure isn't proportional to the loss.
No, the erasure is proportional to the embarrassment.
It's proportional to how much of the story the brand can't explain away. Colgate can absorb dried chicken as a sixties conglomerate footnote. What Colgate cannot absorb is a pink pen.
Speaking of which.
There's a tin of meat sticks in my garage, and the brand on the tin has nothing to do with meat.
I'm going to need more than that.
A trade show, a few years back. Company had built a name on one thing, and decided the name would carry a meat snack. Protein Sticks. Original and Mesquite.
What was the company?
Doesn't matter. What matters is the texture. Close to a damp cigar. That's the product note. Original and Mesquite, and the Mesquite was worse, because it added a flavor to something that already tasted like the tin.
And you were working the booth.
I was working the booth.
What was the actual thinking on their end? Did they have a reason, or was it just a hope?
Bigger spend on the booth than on the product. They had a mechanical bull.
Of course they did.
The bull was the attraction. Whole convention, that's what people remembered. I'd run the thing for eight hours, and the queue never emptied. You know how many people asked about the Protein Sticks? Two. One of them wanted the tin, not the food. Product was gone inside a year. The bull, I believe, is still out there.
That's the whole pattern in one booth, though. They spent the money on the story they wanted to tell about the product instead of the product itself.
They spent the money on the bull.
On the bull.
What happened to the stock?
I kept a case. It's in the garage. Figured an emergency would come, and I'd have something to trade with the neighbors. The neighbors have declined. Twice. Most recent one, I opened a tin to make sure I still had a case worth keeping, and they've gone soft. That's worse than the original. The original had the texture of a damp cigar and it held it. These have aged past that into something else.
You're not bartering with them.
I'm not bartering with them. They're staying in the garage. That's not a decision, that's just where they are.
Eight hours a day on the bull, and the only thing anyone took home was the memory.
The bull outlasted the product. That's the whole thing. The one part of the operation nobody was selling is the only part that's still standing.
If I understand you, the flop that gets scrubbed isn't the one that fails. It's the one that fails in a way that's funny.
It's the one that fails in a way you can't explain. The two guys who asked, they didn't ask about the meat. They looked at the tin, then they looked at the bull. That's a worse day for the brand than any sales number.
Which is Colgate exactly. The real product, the dried crabmeat, is forgettable. The mock-up lasagna is unforgettable. The brand can survive a dry chicken entree. It cannot survive a photograph of the lasagna on every marketing syllabus in the country.
Maybe the real product of the nineties wasn't the perfume. It was the receipt.
The receipt's the only thing that lasts.
Which leaves us with a question about the whole exercise, and I want to put it to you, Herman. If these companies are so good at making us forget, what does it mean that the internet keeps remembering for them?
The Colgate lasagna that never existed is now more famous than the Bambeanos that did. That's the entire case in one sentence. Erasure used to be total. A product would be pulled, the ads would stop, the trade press would move on, and five years later there'd be no trace unless somebody had kept the box.
And now?
Now the box is on eBay. The bottles are on discount perfume sites. The Amazon reviews are permanent. So the scrubbing strategy has a hole in it. You can't erase a thing that somebody photographed, and in the nineties nobody was thinking about the photograph. They were thinking about the campaign.
As brand histories get more searchable and more contested, the scrubbing gets harder. The Museum of Failure exists precisely because somebody decided these flops were worth preserving. Samuel West built a museum out of exactly the material these companies were trying to lose.
That flips the incentive. In the old model, a flop disappears if nobody keeps the packaging. In the new model, a flop disappears if nobody decides it's interesting. Which is a much harder thing to control, because there's no accounting for what the internet decides is interesting.
So the next time a big brand launches something inexplicable, and they will, and there's probably a version of it happening somewhere this year with an AI feature bolted onto something that never needed one, remember that in five years they'll hope you've forgotten.
You probably will.
But the internet won't. The internet keeps the receipt. Hilbert's got a case of them in the garage.
He does. And a mechanical bull somewhere out there, still getting ridden by somebody.
That's the show. Producer Hilbert Flumingtop does the producing, as ever, and the case of meat sticks does not come up again.
It's coming up again.
This has been My Weird Prompts. The human-AI collaboration podcast. If you enjoyed the countdown, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you've got a flop of your own you want investigated, send us your own prompt on Telegram at t dot me slash MWP listener bot. That address is real. The lasagna was not.
See you soon.
