They say the devil is in the details, but sometimes at Heaven in Earth the devil ends up on our shelves. Sometimes bad things happen to us. Sometimes we do the bad things ourselves. But they say you learn from your mistakes, so if that’s true we hope to be geniuses any day now.
Here are few examples. Enjoy, and if you want to feel bad for Jocelyn, she won’t mind too much.
Quality control can be a chore and sometimes things don’t turn out as expected. In one case, Heaven in Earth contracted with a manufacturer in India to make a bird feed container. But in India, Jocelyn said, “You never know what you’ll get.” In this case, what she got was a BIRD FEED container — the letters on it were gigantic.
“I thought, oh crap. It’s like I’m being yelled at,” Jocelyn said. But she held her breath, and people happily bought them. “People don’t mind being yelled at,” she concluded with a shrug.
Sometimes a product is too good. One of those seems to be the glass citrus jug and juicer. This is a product Jocelyn designed herself; using medical equipment to make sure the measurements were accurate (so many on the market are not!), and which measurements to include. In her deal with the Chinese company she hired to produce it, the mold for which she paid thousands of dollars wasn’t to be used for anyone. Imagine her surprise when she saw products made with her mold being sold first in the United States and later in Australia — even with Heaven in Earth’s logo on the bottom!
“I should be flattered that so many people want to copy it,” Jocelyn said.
But sometimes she makes the wrong turn with no help from others. To have an idea what customers want, she regularly goes to design and trend conferences. At one of them, she got an idea to paint the slate coasters that husband Justin produces. They went to great trouble to find a food-safe, eco-friendly paint and painted patterns on coasters.
“I was all excited and figured the whole thing out, but it didn’t work,” she said. “No one bought it.”
She said she still has them, in case customers someday realize her genius.
Genius, however, does not explain “the bit of fun” that coding errors can be. One must be careful when placing orders.
In one case, Jocelyn thought she was ordering a bunch of brushed shapes like a bent finger, used to clean out overflow drains in bathroom sinks.
But alas, what they got instead were a bunch of fairly ordinary toilet plungers. “These have been somewhat harder to move,” she said, ruefully.
These things, thankfully, are more the exception than the rule.