I can’t count the business owners who can still tell you, down to the last invoice, exactly what their own brand attempt cost them. Some can even name the day they stopped believing in it — usually weeks before the product itself gave up.
“I tried building my own product and brand once. It failed. I won’t do it again.” I hear this a lot, and I completely understand. That’s real money lost on something they once dreamed about. A scar like that turns “let’s build our own thing” from a plan into a dare.
There are many reasons a new product or business fails. To name a few:
- A poorly written brief at the start — or simply no brief at all
- Outsourcing strategic work to incapable consultants and design agencies
- Poor decision-making in strategy or solution selection
- Treating a new product and brand as a one-off effort
- Not investing early in the internal capability that supports long-term growth
And here’s what rarely makes the list: the idea itself. In my experience, the failure is rarely the product idea or the execution. It’s the approach around it — especially the belief that a new product and brand is a one-off project you can simply buy.
A one-off project relies on outside helpers and ends when the project scope ends — taking the know-how with them. That “money-can-buy-success” mindset is the quiet culprit behind most first OEM-to-ODM and OBM attempts. The owner treats the transformation like an exercise with a finish line, instead of a chance to build internal innovation capability as a competitive advantage.
In my book, I share the story of helping an OEM business owner develop a new range of houseware and a brand, with a holistic product strategy and brand positioning that best leverages their resources to enable an ongoing product cycle and brand development roadmap. I even helped them build an e-commerce site, design a trade showroom, and create marketing campaign visuals and toolkits. They got listed and featured at the Design Gallery shop within nine months of the idea’s inception. It was a great start, with overseas enquiries and orders at the first trade show!
A few months later, I bumped into the business owner and was sad to hear that the marketing staff member who had followed the project had left his company. No one left in the business knew how to market or follow up on the overseas opportunities. The project died in its infancy.
That was a big lesson learnt for me!
I hope visionary business owners can learn from this story — without paying the tuition fee themselves — and invest in nurturing internal innovation talent as their most valuable asset to drive value growth.
One-off innovation builds a spark.
Capability builds lasting fire!
Related reading: solo founders and one-person companies.
PERSONAL post
“I tried building my own product and brand once. It failed. I won’t do it again.” I meet business owners who say this to me — usually with the exact invoice amounts still fresh in their memory. That part I never doubt.
Most OEM-to-brand attempts don’t fail because the idea was bad. They fail because of the approach: a weak brief, strategic decisions made in a hurry, an inexperienced team, or the assumption that a new product and brand is a one-off effort you can outsource and walk away from.
A one-off project relies on outside helpers and misses the bigger prize — building internal innovation capability as a competitive advantage.
This week’s Build Up shares how I once helped an OEM business build a new product collection and a brand from scratch, with great traction at the trade show — before it stalled because the capability wasn’t yet inside the business.
A real pity. It taught me that one-off innovation builds a spark — but only capability builds lasting fire.
Market competition keeps demanding new things, and I believe the leaders investing in innovation capability are the ones built to survive the age of AI.
Related reading: solo founders and one-person companies.
#Innovation #Leadership #ProductDevelopment #BrandStrategy
If this resonates, follow and check out this week’s Build Up article on the Innovation SWAT page.
Related reading: solo founders and one-person companies.
