Off the Mall: Museum of Failure 

This bimonthly series highlights lesser-known museums in and around D.C.

The Museum of Failure, now on a three-month stop in D.C.’s Georgetown Park, showcases undeniable fails by some of the world’s best-known companies, from Coca-Cola BlāK to Google Glass. The Museum is loosely organized around themes, including medical mishaps, digital disasters and bad taste (literally and figuratively). With items spanning back more than a century, the museum offers a lens onto the changing times — from diet and exercise fads to well intentioned, badly designed products conceived by men for women. 

Photo courtesy of SEE Attractions/Museum of Failure.

Originally housed in Sweden, the traveling collection of 100+ product flops is the brainchild of innovation researcher and psychologist Dr. Samuel West. The museum founder worked as a consultant helping organizations improve their climate for innovation and observed how the fear of failure stymied it, even in the most progressive companies. Fascinated by the stigma attributed to failure, West conceived the museum to help spark a dialogue around the idea of learning from failure in order to move forward. 

It would be easy to walk through the Museum of Failure and scoff at the bad ideas (bottled water for pets – yikes) and bad execution (a Cabbage Patch Doll that accidentally ate kids’ hair and fingers – oops), but that would be missing the forest for the fallen trees. Yes, many of the exhibition’s curios could be filed under “What Were They Thinking?” – see pink and purple “Bic for Her” pens especially designed for ladies’ dainty hands. Yet just as many others paved the way for breakaway successes through the iterative process of innovation, like the Nintendo Power Glove that spawned the technology behind the wildly popular Wii.

“You learn more from failure than from success,” said exhibition organizer Johanna Guttman. “The most successful companies exhibit a high degree of experimentation and a high degree of failure. If you don’t take meaningful risks, you don’t have innovation. From food to climate, we have lots of global problems to tackle, and if we only go the safe way, we aren’t going to solve them.” 

Who It’s For:

MBA students, serial entrepreneurs, dropouts of all kinds, failure-phobes

Don’t Miss:

The collection of failed Donald Trump products, from board game to airline; the wall of failed and discontinued Oreo flavors; a spine-swiveling ride in the hula chair, intended as an office workout device; the “adult content” room, featuring spray-on condoms, Hooter Airlines and a 1950 vibrator prototype called Handy Hannah, among other sex objects.

The D.C. edition of the museum also features some 2023 products (hello and goodbye, Starbucks Oleato – I guess the world wasn’t ready for olive-oil coffee) and a no-punches-pulled list of the District’s fails, including “hall of shame” ex-Commanders’ team owner Dan Snyder. Stop in on the Wall of Failure, where visitors are invited to reflect on and disclose their own failures on post-it notes.

Fun Facts:

The museum has already traveled the globe since it opened in Sweden in 2017, with stops in Taipei, Shanghai, Hollywood, Minneapolis and more. The museum showcases some daringly dumb forays successful companies took into adjacent product lines, such as frozen beef lasagna by Colgate toothpaste and “Gerbers Singles” – sad jars of ready-to-eat food for bachelors and bachelorettes by baby food behemoth Gerbers.

Tips:  

The exhibit is small but mighty – don’t fail to check out the smartphone audio guide, which features interactive virtual tour elements and supplemental content, including cheeky product videos and trivia. QR codes throughout the exhibition take museum visitors into an extended catalog of failures, while a free microsite provides a catalog of the exhibition’s items for online visitors.

 

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In town through December 10, the Museum of Failure is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., with the last entrance at 6 p.m. Ticket prices start at $25; children six and under are free with an adult ticket purchase. 

Museum of Failure: 3270 M St. NW, DC; museumoffailure.com // @museumoffailure

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April Thompson