April• 2018 | 87READER’S DIGEST
Colgate frozen dinners, entitled
Colgate Kitchen Entrees. And there
are unwanted gadgets such as the
Rejuvenique Electric Facial Mask.
his ‘rejuvenating’ facial mask looks
like something from a horror film
and gives mild electric shocks to the
user’s face. It wasn’t a hit.
One of West’s favourite failures is
Frito-Lay’s Wow range of potato crisps
made with olestra, a kilojoule-free fat
substitute that can cause diarrhoea.
“You won’t get fat, but you might be
sitting on the toilet for a long time!”
he hoots.
Joking aside, the museum does
have a serious point. “If people are
afraid of failing and get penalised for
it, that doesn’t encourage creativity,”
says West. “It’s important to know
that even huge brands like Coca-Cola
sometimes risk getting it wrong.”
Fittingly, West experienced a fail-
ure of his own while setting up the
museum. “One of the irst things I did
was to buy the Internet domain of
museumoffailure.com,” he says. “I
was very happy that it was still avail-
able. hen a couple of days later I got
the receipt and to my surprise it said,
‘Congratulations, you have bought
musumofailure.com.’ I missed out
the ‘e’. I really screwed up!”communicating his research into
business failures, and suddenly a
light bulb lit up above his head.
“I was fascinated by how they could
communicate an abstract concept
with concrete items and short sto-
ries,” he says. “It was there and then
I decided I was starting a Museum of
Failure. It was a eureka moment.”
West is an ebullient Californian who
married a Swede and ended up living
in Helsingborg, Sweden. Fired with
enthusiasm by his trip to Zagreb, he
successfully applied for funding from
the Swedish Government to set up his
own museum, which opened in Hels-
ingborg last year for a limited period.
It turned out to be a big hit with the
general public. “No attraction in Swe-
den has got such positive press in such
a short amount of time,” says West.
As a result of its popularity, it has
now reopened in the city’s Dunker
Culture House. On show will be more
than 70 objects that satisfy West’s key
criteria for inclusion: “It has to be an
innovation, it has to be a failure, and it
has to be somewhat interesting.”
This means the inclusion of such
high-profile flops as New Coke,
but also of the less well known un-
successful brand extensions such
as Harley-Davidson perfume and
NOT APPRECIATEDThe problem with having a sense of humour is often that people
you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.LOU HOLTZ