What Happened To Juicero's Founder?
Disgraced Founder Returns. Doug Evan's Aftermath.
Today we are going to talk about what happened to the founder of juicero after the company was shut down. Juicero used to be a startup that sold 400 dollar juicers.
The idea was to place a fruit pouch into the juicer and you would have freshly squeezed juice at your home. The problem with this was well, the juicer was too expensive. Not only was using juicero’s juicers complicated, the business model didn’t make any sense.
Many users of juicero found out that they could just squeeze the juice out of the pouches without using the machine at all. And you would still get the same amount of juice squeezing by hand. The pouches of freshly sliced fruits and vegetables were also expensive. They also had a very short expiry date. You had to scan the qr code of the bag with wifi on before you could get the juicero machine to work. If it was past the sporty date which was roughly a week or so, the machine just wouldn’t squeeze the juice. The fruit pouches were also expensive, costing up to 8 dollars a pouch. People who don't have a juicero machine were not allowed to buy them at all. That meant you had to pay 400 dollars for an inefficient machine just to buy an 8 dollar pouch of sliced fruits and veg. What’s more the juicero machine used to cost 700 dollars, they had to lower it to 400 dollars because customers complained it was too expensive.
The machine was too large. You need wifi to use it and it took a long time to make your juice. Juicero spent 120 million dollars of VC money on an overengieered product that failed to take over.
Dough evans justified this expensive juicer machine because he believed over time once economies of scale took over, the price would go down. He compared it to a Tesla, our apple product.
The lacklustre sales of juicero meant they couldn’t afford to make the juicers that cost more than 700 dollars to make. Many media companies bashed juicero’s expensive garbage of a machine. The internet joined in, poking fun at the over complex machine. The negative pr drove many supporters of juicero to turn their back on the juicer.
The founder of juicero Doug Evans was forced to step down. Jeff Dunn took over the company as CEO so he could fix the founder’s mistakes. But it was too late. The damage had been done and the company would eventually shut down.
So what happened to Doug Evans, the founder of juicero after the downfall.
#business #juicerun #juice