Epic Fale - and why it's cool

The text continues the joint project of Colta.ru with the official website of Sweden in Russia Sweden.ru - “For example, Sweden” .

In early June, an unusual museum opened in Helsingborg, a town in the south of Sweden. Among its exhibits are the same ill-fated “female” ballpoint pen (in pastel colors and exceptionally elegant shape) , toilet water of the Harley-Davidson brand (apparently with the smell of highway), a video player of the Betamax and Twitterpeek standard-a mysterious device for 200 dollars, from which could only be written in in Twitter.

Or here is another exhibit. In books about branding failures, you can find a story about how in the 1980s the Colgate decided to release a line of frozen semi-finished products under its brand-lasagnu, ready-made dinner for warming up in a microwave and so on. Naturally, no one wanted to eat food from the manufacturer of toothpastes and soap, so that the foods failed ingloriously.

It was not possible to find the original packaging from these dishes, therefore, in the first one of the kind, the Museum of the failures is set up “reconstruction”. When the international press drew attention to the museum, Colgate-Palmolive , who stated that no one in the company was remembered by any lasagna, called the Museum almost immediately.

“Either Colgate has a bad memory, or some kind of branding consultant divorced us, who launched this city legend many years ago,” the director, founder and curator of the museum Sam West shrugs. He complains that so far, except for Kolgate, no one got in touch with him - "sorry, because it would be possible to make so many interesting things." Companies, according to him, for some reason do not want to have anything to do with the museum of failures.

The museum’s collection is a personal meeting of Vesta from about 70 innovative products that did not justify themselves, but at the same time they were quite interesting and “tell some story,” the curator explains. The psychologist and specialist in innovation, as he calls himself, West is terribly pleased that for the sake of his museum, people specially come to a small Helsingborg.

For example, in an interview with Failure magazine (and who else, if not the magazine “failure”, give such an interview!) He said that full buses of Chinese tourists who want to look at the table game from Donald Trump come to him. Judging by his description, this is something like a terribly boring “monopoly” of those times when Trump has not yet been the 45th president of the United States-but he already portrayed himself on money.

The Museum of the failures has an appropriate cultural program: in mid -July, an evening beer was held there, on which a small local brewery was played by all those who wish to be unsuccessful for the drink, and the next day a concert of classical music was held in the museum - from the least popular works of Mozart and Beethoven. On August 6, the museum will hold an open lesson in jazz music, where he will offer visitors to try their forces on a saxophone, thrombone and other wind instruments - “two and a half hours of sound torture”, West laughs.

Then the exposition will go on a trip around the world: it will be possible to see it, for example, at the conference of the Swedish technological company Semcon , in Istanbul, Miami, New York and in the native to Vesta California. There, the museum will show and tell starters, similar to the characters of the Silicon Valley , that in their inevitable failures they also stand on the shoulders of giants.

After all, giants are mistaken no worse than startups: the museum has, for example, Coca-Cola Blak , a coffee drink that the corporation for some reason produced in 2006, the inexplicably green ketchup Heinz , one of the earliest versions of Google Glass and Apple Newton is a pocket personal computer, which is due Prudently stopped Steve Jobs.

West says that he was simply too lazy to arrange a museum in a larger city or in the same California, but in fact in 2017, Stockholm occupied the second place after the same Silicon Valley in terms of the number of companies with an estimate of more than a billion dollars per capita. He also takes second place in terms of fast -growing companies. In 2016, Swedish technological startups attracted more than one and a half billion euros of funding - only about 20 thousand small companies are based in Stockholm.

“We must take failures if we want progress. I would like visitors to understand the importance of failures and appreciate them as an opportunity for development, ”says the curator of the museum. In Sweden, this is well understood: there they built a special museum for the only surviving sailing ship of the XVII century - “VAZ”.

This flagship of the Swedish fleet, named after the then reigning dynasty, capsized and sank into the first exit from the Stockholm harbor. So the Swedes even fail with brilliance and splendor.