Crystal Pepsi was a clear, caffeine-free cola that PepsiCo launched in the United States in the early 1990s, riding a brief but intense cultural fascination with transparency as a signal of purity and health. It looked like sparkling water but tasted, more or less, like Pepsi — a deliberate paradox that the company bet would feel modern, clean, and futuristic to a health-conscious consumer. For a moment, it was one of the most talked-about new products in America.
The drink arrived during the early-90s clarity craze, when clear products were marketed everywhere as cleaner and more wholesome: Clearly Canadian sparkling water, Zima from Coors, and a wave of clear soaps and dish detergents from brands like Ivory. PepsiCo’s gamble was that the same logic could sell a cola — strip out the caramel color and the caffeine, keep the cola flavor, and present the result as a purer take on a familiar favorite. It test-marketed the product in 1992 and rolled it out nationally in 1992 and 1993, anchored by a famous Super Bowl XXVII commercial in January 1993 set to Van Halen’s song Right Now.
Trial was strong — curiosity drove a lot of people to try it once — but repeat purchases fell away quickly. Many consumers found a clear cola disorienting: it tasted like cola but did not look like one, a mismatch between expectation and experience that proved hard to overcome. A hurried reformulation, rebranded as Crystal from Pepsi, only muddled the proposition further, and an aggressive competitive response from Coca-Cola helped sour the whole clear-soda category.
PepsiCo pulled Crystal Pepsi in 1994, barely two years after its splashy debut. It has since become one of the most cited product flops in American marketing, studied in business schools and remembered fondly enough that PepsiCo brought it back in limited runs in 2016, 2017, and again around 2022 to capitalize on 90s nostalgia.
The Edsel is the rare product whose name became a common noun for failure, a fate few flops ever achieve. Launched by Ford in 1957 as an entirely new mid-price marque, it arrived wrapped in more secrecy, market research, and advertising bravado than perhaps any car before it. Ford promised the public something revolutionary, then delivered a competent but unremarkable automobile with an unusual grille, and the gap between promise and product became the whole story.
Named for Edsel Ford, the late son of Henry Ford and a respected company president in his own right, the Edsel was conceived to fill a perceived hole in Ford’s lineup between the cheap Ford and the upscale Lincoln, the territory General Motors dominated with Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick. On paper, the logic was sound. In execution, almost everything that could go wrong did, and most of it had less to do with the car than with timing, expectations, and corporate self-sabotage.
The Edsel debuted into the teeth of the 1957-58 recession, which hit the mid-price segment hardest of all, just as buyers were starting to shift toward smaller, cheaper cars. Its build quality suffered because Edsels were assembled on existing Ford and Mercury lines by workers unfamiliar with the new model. Its lineup overlapped confusingly with the very Fords and Mercurys it was meant to complement. And its styling, particularly the vertical horse-collar grille, divided opinion sharply.
Ford had projected sales around 200,000 cars a year. It sold roughly 63,000 in the first model year and far fewer after that. The company killed the Edsel on November 19, 1959, after barely three model years, absorbing a reported loss in the range of $250 to $350 million. The car itself was not a disaster; the launch was, and the launch is what everyone remembered.
Google Glass was an optical head-mounted display built by Google X, the company’s experimental “moonshot” lab, and championed personally by co-founder Sergey Brin. The hardware was genuinely novel for its moment: a featherweight titanium frame carrying a small prism display that floated a translucent screen above the wearer’s right eye, a forward-facing camera, a touch-sensitive temple, bone-conduction audio, and a voice interface activated by the phrase “OK Glass.” The pitch was that the smartphone could finally come off your palm and onto your face, freeing your hands and your attention.
Google unveiled the device with one of the most theatrical product demos in tech history. At the Google I/O developer conference on June 27, 2012, skydivers wearing Glass jumped from a blimp over San Francisco and streamed the descent live to the audience while Brin narrated from the stage. The marketing that followed was equally aggressive about positioning Glass as fashion as much as gadget, culminating in a twelve-page spread in Vogue’s September 2013 issue.
The reality on the ground was harsher. From 2013, Google sold a beta “Explorer” edition to developers and curious early adopters for $1,500, and the public quickly decided that a person wearing an always-available, hard-to-detect camera on their face was a problem rather than a marvel. Bars, restaurants, cinemas, and casinos banned the device; the wearers earned the durable slur “Glasshole.” Combined with a stiff price, weak battery life, thin everyday utility, and visible social discomfort, the backlash was fatal to the consumer dream.
Google ended the consumer Explorer program in January 2015, then quietly repurposed the technology as Glass Enterprise Edition for factories, warehouses, and clinical settings (2017, with EE2 in 2019). That pivot kept Glass alive for years as a niche industrial tool until Google discontinued it entirely on March 15, 2023. Glass became the canonical cautionary tale of “face computing” and a reference point against which every later AR and smart-glasses effort would be measured.