Choosing Not to Settle

We were BEYOND excited to take our first look at the bottles we'd ordered.

Take into account the fact that we'd been waiting about eight MONTHS for them and the idea of finally holding an ACTUAL bottle was a BIG deal.

We cut open the box, pulled out a bottle, and...

...the color was wrong.

Our amber bottles were not amber.

Throughout our entire eight months of on-going discussions, not once were a bottle of another color OTHER than amber even mentioned.

The bottles were black.  

We dug up the contract we signed and...

...it said "black".

It was frustrating.

The amount of time we'd carefully spent selecting and putting together a cohesive expression of an idea was suddenly called into question.

Do we launch anyway for the sake of speed?

We were already months behind.  Doesn't that mean we should be trying to make up for lost time?

Even more infuriating was the fact that the black bottles ONLY affected our full-size bottle.  Our travel and sample-size bottles were both made in amber.

How did this happen??

At no point in our entire design and communication process was another color even brought up.

Who's fault is it?

Is it solely ours for not reading the contract thoroughly?

Is it acceptable to have only ONE bottle size in our lineup look different than the others?

And most of all...

What do we do?

We let the decision settle overnight and into the next day.  Our thoughts went back and forth, debating every feeling with logic that was probably more biased than we'd like to admit.

Ultimately, we decided not to accept them.

For better or worse, we want to do things the way that we intended rather than settling for less.  A mistake was made.  It was ours.  And so we're taking accountability for it.

We strongly do not believe this was a case of perfectionism.  Rather, it was an acknowledgement that trying to force a repairable mistake to work is fundamentally different from doing the best you can and growing from it.

Luckily, not all the bottles had been completed, so we were able to stop production.  With additional help and support from one of our manufacturers, we're not working through a solution together.

Choosing this route though, stings. 

We wish we hadn't lost that time or money.

But building something means making decisions and taking responsibility for them.

So that’s what we’re doing - with intention and for what we believe in.