I'll put the worst of it up front, because that's the whole point of this piece: WAES won the awards, smashed its Kickstarter, made the world's first plastic-free footwear — and never made money. I tell people this on a page meant to win them as clients, which sounds like a strange thing to do. It isn't. It's the most useful thing I can offer.
WAES set out to do something genuinely hard. Not a greener version of an existing shoe — the actual first plastic-free footwear. We funded it on Kickstarter at 200% of target, which tells you the idea resonated. We won the SAS Plastic-Free Design Innovation award, which tells you the work was good. By the metrics that get you written up, we were a success story.
Here's what those metrics hide. To make a plastic-free shoe you have to more or less invent a supply chain, because the existing one is built on plastic at every step. Every material is a research project. Every supplier is a negotiation with someone who's never made the thing you're asking for. It is slow and it is expensive, and we were doing it as the timing turned against us — we started just before Brexit, which reshaped costs and logistics under our feet.
It cost me six figures and very nearly my marriage. I'm not saying that for sympathy; I'm saying it because the price of the lesson is part of the lesson. When someone tells you what kills companies, it matters whether they've felt it or just read about it.
And the lesson is simple, almost embarrassingly so: awards and revenue are not the same thing. They are not even closely related. You can build something the industry celebrates, that the press loves, that wins the design prize — and watch it fail to clear the only bar that actually keeps a company alive, which is selling enough of it at a price that works. Recognition is not traction. A standing ovation is not a purchase order.
The strange part is that this is precisely what the wins didn't teach me. When something works, the mechanism stays hidden — you can't easily see which decisions carried it and which it survived in spite of. Winning is a poor teacher because it flatters everything you did. The failure is where the transferable lessons live, because failure shows you the wiring.
So when I sit with a client now, I'm not the person who only shows you the trophies. I'm the one who'll ask the unglamorous question early — not 'is this brilliant?' but 'will this make money, and how, and when?' Most agencies are paid to make you look good. I'd rather make you a profit, even if it means telling you the award-winning idea is the wrong one. That instinct cost me a lot. You get it for free.