The Great Fail

We’re doing a special episode on cryptocurrency this week and covering what occurred in May of 2022 when the world watched as one of the biggest projects imploded. Once valued at $400 billion, the project was known as TerraUST, a stablecoin that was going to transform the crypto market and the way that traditional payments would be made in the future. Instead, investors watched as its market value...

Back in the early 2000s, the Von Dutch ubiquitous trucker hats were seen everywhere- and their line of denim brought us the classic low-rise, sometimes frayed at the hem, sometimes with tons of bling, but never without the iconic “Von Dutch” stamped logo. That uniquely distinctive font bared the cool culture Americana aesthetic. Von Dutch’s popularity was so tremendous that in 2003, the Company wa...

This week we’re releasing a bonus episode from one of our sister podcasts on the Adweek Podcast Network called The Speed of Culture Podcast . In this episode, host Matt Britton talks to Ken Ohashi about bringing a brand’s DNA into focus. Ken is a marketing expert with years of experience in the retail industry with brands like Aéropostale, and the Authentic Brands Group. Having acquired the iconic...

Get ready to hear about the most scandalous retail pharmacy chain of all time that was Phar-Mor. We hear about companies and financial misconduct frequently–stories of cooked books and misappropriated funds are hardly rare, but often leave us questioning–how do companies manage to pull these off, and more importantly how do they get past trained professionals, auditors and investors? In this episo...

Who doesn’t remember Kmart? At its height, Kmart was the second-largest retailer in the United States, operating 2,400 stores with 350,000 employees. The company was generating around $37 billion a year in sales, ranking 2nd to Sears. But by 1990 it would see a tectonic shift, with its fortunes beginning to change. Find out how a series of missteps and poor management would bring down an American...

Carrian Group was a tale made for fiction, running the gamut of corruption, human greed, fraudulent accounting, and false profits that spanned across countries. Despite it being almost 4 decades since the collapse of this huge conglomerate, we still don’t know the full story - but what we do know was that behind this catastrophic failure stood some very fascinating characters-The Prime Minister of...

Many regarded Jawbone as one of the pioneers in wearables. After making its mark as a Bluetooth headset maker, it pivoted to capitalize on the new and highly desirable fitness tracking market. This pivot and expansion into a hot new area allowed Jawbone to attract funding from top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms and helped them amass a world-class board that included Yahoo’s CEO Marissa...

In September 2021, Sean Gotcher, a Nevada-based real-estate agent, released an infamous TikTok video that ignited a tremendous amount of attention and criticism after alluding to a real estate iBuyer that may have been fixing home prices and engaging in market manipulation. Although many claimed this to be outrageous speculation, it would be a few weeks later when Zillow announced that it was shut...

Cinephile and film enthusiast, Stacy Spikes sought to reinvent the way people watched movies. His answer was MoviePass, a subscription-based service that allowed people to watch any movie, at any theater, at any time for one monthly fee. It was ground-breaking, well-suiting the Company to disrupt an entire industry. But what occurred next would see MoviePass topple from being a blockbuster hit to...

Since the 1930s, Ayds was a popular appetite suppressant touted by Hollywood celebrities and starlets. Despite being a success and household name for over 40 years, Ayds would find itself at the precipice of a PR nightmare, eventually, “crowning” itself as one of the greatest product flops in history. Find out how it all went down in Episode 43 of The Great Fail. Learn more about your ad choices....

The rise and fall of Circuit City is a fascinating tale full of ups and downs, when one Company paved the path and dominated the consumer electronics market only to perish after almost 6 decades. From having the largest selections, the best prices, and the brightest talent, Circuit City went from an all-American retail success story to one of the greatest failures in corporate history. Find out ho...

On June 22, 2020 Microsoft’s live game streaming service, Mixer, made a stunning announcement. After 4 years of building out its channel for gamers and its beloved community of streamers and fans, they were shutting down. As millions of Mixer active users, and even their own employees were blindsided by the news, it begged the question that was on everyone’s mind- how could this have happened to M...

The DeLorean was one of the most era-defining cars of the ‘80s. Sleek, sexy, and unconventional, this iconic car had much promise-- engineering ingenuity, celebrity fanfare, and media hype. But less than a year after it rolled out its first cars, the Company would collapse in a tailspin of lies, drug scandal, bankruptcy, racketeering, criminal trials, and government conspiracies. Find out what led...

The Great Fail is coming back with Season 2 on February 16, 2022! In the meantime, enjoy a new show from our friends at Wondery. During the 1-900 number craze of the Nineties, one company provided the vast majority of phone sex. American Telnet was an empire founded by the man who called himself “The Telephone Pimp.” He ran the company “like General Motors” and got filthy rich doing it. But for th...

On February 21, 2020, Mitchell Modell, CEO of the largest family-owned sporting goods retailer in the United States went on national TV and made a shocking announcement-he asked viewers to help save his company from financial collapse. The 130-year-old brand at one point was a fixture in the northeast U.S. as the premier sporting goods retailer. Find out how Modell’s winning streak came to an end...

Leather seats, marble floors, chrome buckles, and pearl necklaces- that was just the beginning of the luxurious Trump Shuttle saga. Back in 1989, Donald J. Trump, graced the covers of Time Magazine with the byline “Young, handsome and ridiculously rich.” He had just acquired Trump Plaza and with his growing casinos in Atlantic City, was looking to further boost his business brand by adding a luxur...

In its heyday, Pier 1 Imports had 18,000 employees and over 1,000 stores worldwide, bringing us the most eclectic and quirky array of home furnishing design and décor products-- from love beads, exotic rattan chairs to other treasured goods. For over 5 decades, Pier 1 took the reins of the home décor retail market, never thinking that its wares would ever go out of style. Find out how Pier 1 sank...

Cinephile and film enthusiast, Stacy Spikes sought to reinvent the way people watched movies. His answer was MoviePass, a subscription-based service that allowed people to watch any movie, at any theater, at any time for one monthly fee. It was ground-breaking, well-suiting the Company to disrupt an entire industry. But what occurred next would see MoviePass topple from being a blockbuster hit to...

For over 4 decades, Tower Records was a pioneer in the music industry and the bedrock of record store culture. It was run by rebels and outsiders, where founder Russ Solomon was revered and idolized. Tower would become the mecca for music fans creating a generation that lived by their diehard slogan, “No Music, No Life”. For decades, it seemed like the sun would never set on the iconic yellow and...

On April 9, 2017, passengers of United Airlines Flight 3411 watched as aviation officers dragged out a fellow passenger, Dr. David Dao. He was one of the individuals involuntarily bumped off the plane after United Airlines overbooked its flight. Ripped from his seat by law enforcement officers, Dr. Dao was knocked unconscious-- his glasses falling off his face, and his body dragged by the arms dow...

By 1995, Calgary's Bre-X became a $6 billion company when it declared it had discovered the world's largest gold mine within the jungles of Indonesia. What followed years later would entail all the elements of a Hollywood story: lies, betrayal, the collapse of an empire and a badly decomposed body. Thank you to our partners at AdvertiseCast. https://www.advertisecast.com/TheGreatFail Thank you to...

When HQ Trivia went live in 2018, it was an instant hit, generating a tremendous amount of mass appeal and gaining an immediate cult following that went beyond anyone’s expectations. They also had the blessings of the most influential people-from the celebrity world to the investment world. What would follow would be a set of glitches, cheating bots, internal turmoil, a toxic work environment, mis...

When Vince McMahon announced that he would be creating a new football league-- a grittier, more violent, and more entertaining version called the XFL, many seemed to think this idea would be an ultimate touchdown. When the highly anticipated, highly publicized event premiered on NBC in February of 2001, it received 54 million television viewers that weekend, the most the network had ever seen at o...

On March 26, 2021, the financial world awoke to the news that rattled some of Wall Street’s biggest players. To the outside world, and at the center of it all were some unfamiliar and obscure names-- Archegos Capital and its Founder Bill Hwang. The word on the street was that Archegos defaulted on billions of dollars of loans, creating a contagion amongst some of the world’s biggest banks that now...

Kodak dominated the consumer photography market for over a century and their downfall seems to be obvious in their inability to adapt to the digital age. But when you look closer at the company’s history, you’ll come to see that ironically what made them so successful was what ultimately killed off the Company. John Kotter, best-selling author, and professor at Harvard Business School will help br...