In 2014 I wrote a Trade Me listing to sell what was left of a business called easyVAC. The lot was 35 robot vacuum cleaners, the domain, a free-to-call number, 0508 EASY HOUSE, the logo files, and a set of correctly translated English manuals, and the listing is the most honest thing I have ever written about one of my own failures, because I wrote it as a selling point: the branding and packaging looks fantastic, as this is where the majority of our skills lie. However the quality of the easyVACs has been a little bit intermittent.
A hundred easyVACs came in from China and we sold 50. Twelve came back and were replaced, so the listing does the arithmetic for the buyer: out of the 64 that have gone out, 14 were bad, 15%. The truck driver dropped a pallet off the truck on delivery day and some of the boxes still had the dents from the tumble.
The rest of this essay is in Marketing Curious.
