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It sounds like the projections were caught up by reality. They spent too much, expecting the new shops to be as good as the old ones. It's like if my mom and d

It sounds like the projections were caught up by reality. They spent too much, expecting the new shops to be as good as the old ones. It's like if my mom and dad had decided to mass produce spring rolls. My mom actually made about 100K of them over 30 years, manually. If they'd built a factory, it would be a totally different thing. In fact, another immigrant did just this and his product is still for sale in supermarkets. As an armchair CEO, why not just license? What you've produced with Oprah and Disney is not an amazing ice cream, you've made attention. By some stroke of luck, too. Chances are, ice cream being a rather ordinary thing, that your ice cream is ordinary and appeals to people about as much as an ordinary ice cream does. But you have that Disney tie-in, and you have celebrity attention. Why not turn your business into an Instagram marketing thing, go around chasing celebs, and let other people make the stuff, which they probably can scale better than you?

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> What you've produced with Oprah and Disney is not an amazing ice cream, you've made attention. By some stroke of luck, too. Chances are, ice cream being a rather ordinary thing, that your ice cream is ordinary and appeals to people about as much as an ordinary ice cream does. But you have that Disney tie-in, and you have celebrity attention. They seem to have been aware of this: >> He wanted Ample Hills — named after a line from the 1865 Walt Whitman poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — to have flavors that would appeal to “seven-year-olds and to the seven-year-old in the 40-year-old.” Over time, flavor inspiration would come from pop culture. One called the Elvis Impersonator featured banana ice cream with swirls of honey-sweetened peanut butter and candied bacon. A flavor called Heisenberry came from Breaking Bad — vanilla ice cream with a swirl of strawberry preserves and blue rock candy that stood in for meth on the show. “We think of a story and then a flavor that draws on that story,” Smith later told Bloomberg. The story, Smith often said, was what made Ample Hills ice cream “more than just milk, cream, sugar, and eggs.”

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> What you've produced with Oprah and Disney is not an amazing ice cream, you've made attention. By some stroke of luck, too. Chances are, ice cream being a rather ordinary thing, that your ice cream is ordinary and appeals to people about as much as an ordinary ice cream does. But you have that Disney tie-in, and you have celebrity attention. They seem to have been aware of this: >> He wanted Ample Hills — named after a line from the 1865 Walt Whitman poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — to have flavors that would appeal to “seven-year-olds and to the seven-year-old in the 40-year-old.” Over time, flavor inspiration would come from pop culture. One called the Elvis Impersonator featured banana ice cream with swirls of honey-sweetened peanut butter and candied bacon. A flavor called Heisenberry came from Breaking Bad — vanilla ice cream with a swirl of strawberry preserves and blue rock candy that stood in for meth on the show. “We think of a story and then a flavor that draws on that story,” Smith later told Bloomberg. The story, Smith often said, was what made Ample Hills ice cream “more than just milk, cream, sugar, and eggs.”