The Art of Failure and the Science of Success.
As a part of a team of artisans, sales people, builders, craftsman, ultimately representing our brand Solus we love to talk about our successes but rarely ( if ever ) have I ever talked about our failures. Well we just had one ( well another one ) and thought I would share it with the “larger design audience” and those who may know of the Solus brand.
As many of you may know we have been selling fire pits successfully for over 20 years. We have thousands of installations in over 40 countries. We have also been selling our Solus water domes for almost 10 years across North America, the UK and Europe.
We thought in our brilliance that we could marry these two very strong selling items into one and offer the best of both. Voila we have the world’s first integrated self-circulating water and fire feature. How hard could it be ? Who cares about fluid dynamics – can’t be that hard. We can do it !
Well after almost two years of prototyping ( 5 at last count I believe ) and blindly believing our bafflegab we have a giant flub on our hands. The Luna Fire and Water is kaput. Each prototype I kept thinking this will be it – we will sort out the last technical issue only to discover another one ! Crikey as they say in Jolly Olde England.
For neither love nor money could we get the water isolated with enough fluidity and the more we worked on it the more it looked like some concoction out of the Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Basically internally it resembled an octopus with way too many hoses.. Our spaghetti maze of hoses to connect to the isolated water tanks was like trying to untangle Christmas lights after storing them from the previous Christmas. And yet….. Nada.
I am almost embarrassed to think of the amount of time we dreamt that this time we nailed it only to discover we had wasted a whole lot of time and money or had we ? What is it we have learnt about failure? Without failure you cannot recognize success even when it stares you in the face. You don’t recognize that previous customers keep coming back to us time and time again – we must be doing something right. One third of our business is repeat business. Nice – especially for a product that lasts decades in the field. We still have firepits operating after two decades. Pretty successful. I guess the moral of the story is that you don’t know where you have got to unless you look and see where you have been.
Hopefully my next post will be about something new and wonderful that works !
Brad Carpenter
CEO and Chief Failure Officer.
PS: Next time….. As they say we will nail it.