How Juicero's Story Set the Company Up for Humiliation
A boring juice product sold itself as the next great technology phenomenon. There was only one way things could go.
Juicero is a startup that sells a $400 machine that squeezes packets of diced fruit and vegetables to produce fresh juice. A person might assume that a product so simple and boring, yet weirdly expensive, couldn’t possibly attract the entire internet’s derision. A person would be wrong.
It’s best to begin this story in March of last year, when the published a profile of the company’s founder Doug Evans, a former Army paratrooper who had already started and sold the successful Organic Avenue line of cold-pressed juices and healthy snacks. Evans was not a Silicon Valley veteran, but he spoke like one, rhapsodizing his product with. “How do you measure life force? How do you measure chi?”
