Dozens of people will no longer be able to use an over-engineered machine to squeeze cold press juice from a bag in the near future. Juicero, the startup that became a symbol of the tech industry’s mission to solve problems no one has, is officially shutting down.
Image: Chrissy Trampedach
In a public statement, the company explained that over the last month it’s been studying ways to bring the price of its overpriced $US399 ($502) juicers down to a still-overpriced $US200 ($252) range. Over time, the team began to realise that this goal just wasn’t possible. As professional product designer Ben Einstein demonstrated in a detailed blog post back in April, the Juicero machine is a crazy piece of design. And as Bloomberg demonstrated in an article that certainly played a part in Juicero’s demise, this complex machine doesn’t squeeze out its pre-packaged bags of juice much better than a human can using their bare hands.
The statement explains:
We are confident that to truly have the long-term impact we want to make, we need to focus on finding an acquirer with an existing national fresh food supply chain who can carry forward the Juicero mission.
For the next 90 days, we are offering refunds for your purchase of the Juicero Press. Please contact help@juicero.com by December 1, 2017 to request a refund for your purchase. If you have an active Pack subscription, you will receive your final delivery next week (week of September 4th).
Today, a small number of people are figuring out what their future juice squeezing strategy will be (sorry Ivanka), and an even smaller number of people are likely regretting the $US118.5 million ($149 million) they invested in this company. It’s hard to imagine a single person would consider buying its corpse.
[Fortune]