Juicero
2017-04-19 18:09:51.389647+02 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
We are a household with a Norwalk juicer. This has a grinder, you place a cotton cloth or bag below the grinder portion, then fold it up and put that packet in the hydraulic press portion. So I know from expensive hydraulic press juicers.
This is glorious failure: Bloomberg: Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze.
Google's VC arm funded them for $120M(!). They sell the juicer for somewhere between $1,200 and $400, and then sell pre-packaged bags of chopped veggies with bar codes on them for DRM (and "freshness") purposes for $5-$8 a pop.
Except they won't sell the bags to you unless you've purchased a juicer. And it turns out that you can squeeze out almost as much of the juice from the bags by hand as you can with the juicer. So somehow they managed to get funded doing the exact opposite of the razor blade model.
What really gets me, though, is this idiocy from the founder:
“There are 400 custom parts in here,” Evans told Recode. “There’s a scanner; there’s a microprocessor; there’s a wireless chip, wireless antenna.”
Two things here: First, if the microprocessor, bar code scanner and the internet connectivity are the expensive bits, $400 is way too much. The mechanical parts of this are where it's pricey.
Second: What investor looked at this business model and didn't immediately see that building a whole new fresh vegetable distribution system was the difficult part of this business? Holy crap!