Issue #100

Grown-Ups Don’t Want Sexy Bins

I ran the supply chain of a hospital group for a while before fate saved me (that’s a story for another week).

One of my departments was procurement. Having been in sales for such a long time, I expected being on the other side to be easy.

It wasn’t.

Finding anyone who was willing to actually sell me something was hard. They just rang up, got the tender details and then emailed a price list.

I got fed up with that and started to call suppliers in for a proper chat.

Many stories came from this and here’s a great one. The CEO of a manufacturer of plastic goods (Hey, Mike!) told me this.

Where You "Bin" All My Life?

We bought their “sharps” bins, the sturdy plastic buckets hospitals use for chucking needles and other dodgy stuff.

They dominated the cheap domestic bin market, too.

Newlyweds, students, anyone moving out for the first time, all bought these bins for their kitchens. Nothing glamorous, but solid and profitable business.

Looking to expand, the company decided to “go upscale.”

Here’s how you expand whilst staying profitable, btw, click here, or the picture.

They wanted a piece of the posh bin market. The kind that costs eighty quid and has a little logo that screams: Look at us, we have the carbon footprint of a Puffin.

They tried everything:

• Trendy colour ranges
• Bins with multiple compartments
• Plastics that self-deodorised so your bin smelled like a fairy’s fart.

Every time you looked at them they had extruded another brilliant concept.

And guess what? Absolutely nothing sold.

The marketing gurus were tearing their hair out. The “demographic consultants” might as well have been reading tea leaves.

Of course they could have persisted with their products and just tried to reframe them in the market place, as explained click here.

But, luckily for this story, they didn’t.

Here's A Tip

So, one day, the CEO himself was dropping off rubbish at his local tip. Probably a fully degradable bird bath and definitely not an IKEA wardrobe that he hammered to death following two days of DIY torture.

He spots a woman about to throw away one of their perfectly good bins. He’s curious (as well as a bit miffed).

He walks over and asks her, as calmly as possible, “Why are you getting rid of that? Looks fine to me.”

She glances to her car, where two toddlers are trying to kill each other in the back seat, and says, “Nothing’s safe around those two. I need a bin they can’t open and don’t even want to touch.”

Boom. Insight. Suddenly something clicked for the CEO.

No wonder scented, brightly-coloured bins weren’t selling to his target market. They were all grown-ups with kids.

Parents didn’t want fashionable bins. They wanted bins like their mum and dad had: boring, safe, and utterly uninteresting to small humans.

The Fight Just Started

But even with that knowledge, the CEO had to fight like hell inside the company to convince everyone to drop their fancy notions and actually listen to the customer.

So they did wider research and confirmed it:

• The expensive end of the market wanted bins that were plain, discreet, and childproof.
• The market was overpriced.
• They could undercut the old suppliers easily.

So they did and they crushed it (much like Mike's wardrobe).

Who Cares, Wins

The person who wins isn’t the one who guesses the best. It’s the one who knows the most about what people really need - and has the guts to act on it.

Sometimes all it takes is a chat at the local tip to save your business.

And then £75k in well planned market research and a fight with the CMO and the board, who think they know better.

Here’s a LinkedIn post about dealing with C suite saboteurs, click here, and you ca​n download the carousel here -

​Saboteur strategies.pdf​

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