The other night I was out buying some last minute groceries for dinner (with everyone else in the neighbourhood by the looks), and while waiting in line I saw these massive bags of Jelly Belly jelly beans marked down to $2.99. Jelly Belly beans aren’t the cheapest candy around, for that price you’d be lucky to get a handful of them, so naturally I whipped them up.
Turns out, they are called Belly Flops. Jelly Belly produce more than 17,000 tons of candy annually and as you can expect, with volumes like that, things don’t always go as planned. So what does Jelly Belly do with all the ‘defective’ jelly beans? Well, the company sells them.
In these massive bags you’ll find round ones, square ones, long ones, flat ones or you may even find a bunch stuck together. They might be cracked or marked, and on very rare occasions, a flavour may not match a colour. Each Belly Flop bag is randomly packed with different assortments from all their flavour ranges.
Originally, these Belly Flops were only available at the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, California for people taking the world-renowned factory tour. Due to their immense popularity for the variety and reduced price, demand grew and grew. When they started to sell online their popularity grew even more and now they are sold in bargain bins around the world and make Jelly Belly a nice little profit for something that otherwise would have been THROWN AWAY!
Many companies are embarrassed by anything less than perfect, but not Jelly Belly. They have some fun with the inevitable imperfections of product manufacturing. As a designer, I have resold logo design revisions and website design revisions other clients didn’t like. I’ve seen a restaurant give a 10% discount to anyone who ate at the “worst table in the house” because it is in a crammed noisy corner.
What could you be doing to make money off of your worst failures?