The Importance of Knowing Your Product
Honest Tea: A Case Study
Honest Tea is an organic tea brand that prides itself on being a healthier alternative to other competing brands, notably less sugar. In the founder’s interview with Guy Raz on the podcast How I Built This, he discusses issues caused by a lack of planning that could have ruined the company.
In general, there is a difficult balance when running a startup between pushing forward too much or too little. Startups need to do something instead of planning all the time, but they can’t overpromise. Honest Tea was lucky because they pushed much too fast but didn’t crash and burn.
They knew they wanted their product to be in grocery stores, but the founder jumped the gun when looking for a grocery store contact. He did not have a sample product prepared, meaning he had to experiment in his kitchen the week before the meeting. He used an old Snapple bottle to show the investors the sample.
Once they had the contract, they had to figure out how to mass-produce. To actually brew the tea, they used mesh bags originally designed for pools that would break and clog the brewing tank’s pipes with tea leaves and plastic debris. Most industrial tea bags are made with some kind of plant or fabric fibre because they can withstand a greater amount of sustained heat changes than plastic made for water that is cold or room-temperature. This information is readily available but would have required project management.
They almost faced catastrophe again after they had bottles of Honest Tea on Whole Foods shelves. The bottle manufacturer gave the company a delivery with visible imperfections and air bubbles, but the founders ran the bottles on the manufacturing line anyway. What was supposed to happen was that the manufacturing line would kick out the flawed glass, but this did not happen. There were Honest Tea bottles on the shelves that had broken glass inside of them, posing a significant health risk. Honest Tea took all its products off of the shelves, which incurred a heavy financial burden. This is a stark example of project management failure. This could have been easily avoided if the founders had not run the faulty glass under the production line or even pre-sorted the faulty glass. Project management could have helped them with this problem and helped them find more reputable manufacturers.
Project management can help find the balance by planning out a general direction and making sure that deadlines are actually met. In practice, project management forces the overpromisers to actually make a product, and pushes overthinkers into committing and making decisions. Both of these actions make sure that their ideas actually come to life.
