Buzz
We’ve all had those moments where an idea seemed brilliant at the time, only to later think, "What on earth was I thinking?" Typically, these thoughts are linked to things like bacon wrapped in more bacon or inventing bizarre ways to use the claw of a hammer—resulting in nothing more than mild regret or an unscheduled trip to the emergency room.
However, things take a turn when such ideas come from consumer product manufacturers. In this case, it often leads to wasted marketing dollars, stockpiles of unsold goods, and relentless mockery online that never fades. Here's one example:
10. Colgate Frozen Meals
Colgate has long been a company known for mastering one thing: producing toothpaste. Since toothpaste is something that goes into your mouth, someone came up with the idea that Colgate should diversify into other products that also end up in your mouth—like food.
This led to the creation of Colgate-brand Frozen Meals, low-cost microwave dinners bearing the Colgate logo. Unsurprisingly, consumers didn't rush to buy TV dinners from the makers of their toothpaste, much like they wouldn’t flock to drink soft drinks produced by Listerine.
This product was so poorly conceived that it not only failed to catch on, but it also resulted in a decrease in Colgate’s toothpaste sales—making it perhaps the most disastrous diversification effort in corporate history.
9. Dumbbell Eating Utensils
It’s easy to understand why this might seem like a brilliant idea at first. The common belief is that people gain weight due to a lack of exercise and overeating. The obvious fix: get them to work out while they eat! But how? The solution is simple—using weighted dumbbells as utensils! Okay, so maybe this idea doesn’t even hold up on paper either.
As it turns out, you can still find these online, under the name “Knife and Fork Lift,” which is honestly... we don’t know what to say about that. Each knife and fork weighs a kilogram, while the dessert fork weighs twice as much, because, as we know, desserts are more fattening. So, you can burn more calories with the heavier spoon when you eat your calorie-rich dessert. We’re struggling to imagine someone pitching this idea to a loan officer with a straight face—and failing.
These items are being marketed as the perfect “gift” for people on diets, but unlike most gifts, the full set will cost you $160.
8. Egg Cuber
We had to do some serious investigating to make sure this wasn’t just an elaborate photoshop hoax—but nope, the Egg Cuber is a real product. It doesn’t cut the eggs into cubes; it molds them, resulting in a hard-boiled egg straight out of a nightmare.
At first glance, this might seem harmless enough—but we wouldn’t go near a square egg any more than we’d pick up a square apple. Just looking at the image makes us uncomfortable, because the shape itself screams that this is unnatural, and perhaps not something to eat—or even gaze upon for too long.
7. Wonder Sauna Inflatable Pants
The odd part about these, aside from the fact that the people modeling them on the box don’t appear to be doing so under duress, is that the image doesn’t quite seem to match its description. We’re not sure what we’d expect from something called “Wonder Sauna Hot Pants,” but this certainly isn’t it.
For one thing, the term “Hot Pants” has a different meaning, and by the 1970s, it was a well-established one, as the image clearly shows that this product was available. And honestly, we wouldn’t expect a “Wonder Sauna” to have anything to do with short shorts—or any type of clothing, really. Are these pants even hot? Don’t saunas typically have burning coals? We’ll spare you from asking the next logical question.
Apparently, these were designed to “help” those poor souls who thought they could lose weight through some vague, unproven method. But we’d bet the only thing this product ever helped anyone do was be mistaken for a flotation device.
6. The CueCat
The CueCat, launched in 1999, was a sleek, overhyped barcode scanner that connected to your PC. Its purpose? To scan tiny barcodes, or “cues,” that would direct your browser to a URL. The least of its issues was the fact that you’d need to be sitting in front of your PC, magazine in hand, to make use of it.
In an astounding turn of events, this product earned the trust of major investors, including Coca-Cola and Radio Shack, raking in a whopping $185 million. The barcodes even made it into the pages of magazines like Forbes and Wired for a whole year. Yet all it ever did was attempt to solve a non-existent problem, earning the title of “unnatural and ridiculous” from tech critics. It assumed people would want to make their print magazines interact with their computers, a notion that was utterly preposterous.
As if that weren’t enough, in September 2000, the company’s website suffered a security breach, compromising the personal data of CueCat users—something that had always been a concern. The product has since been labeled as one of the worst tech inventions of its decade, if not of all time.
5. Perfect Pancake
Amid the sea of absurd products featured in late-night infomercials, Perfect Pancake offers an almost ridiculously simple solution for those who struggle with flipping pancakes: flip the whole damn griddle. Essentially, it’s two griddles fused together with a handle.
Checking on how your pancakes are cooking can be tricky since they’re sealed inside a clamshell device. When you open it, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise: perhaps you left them in too long, causing the batter to stick to the inside, like a baked-on ceramic. Or maybe they’re undercooked, leaving you with a sticky, gooey mess. Turns out, flipping pancakes with a spatula... it’s just not that complicated.
4. Premier Smokeless Cigarette
What do cigarette smokers enjoy about the act of smoking? It’s the inhalation of the smoke. They savor pulling it into their lungs—this is, after all, why it's called smoking. While smoking is harmful, trying to reduce its dangers by introducing a smokeless cigarette is like attempting to avoid injury from a gun by designing one that can't be loaded with bullets.
This product went off track right from the start: users in test markets complained about its usability and awful taste, and the company’s hope that smokers would develop a liking for it after a few packs was dashed—most people tried one and gave away the rest of the pack.
The 'smokes,' produced by RJ Reynolds, operated by heating and aerosolizing tobacco flavoring. While they weren’t very effective at delivering the actual taste of tobacco, they proved to be quite popular with crack users as a cheap and simple way to alter their substance. This quickly discovered fact led to their swift removal from the market—they were gone in less than a year.
3. Spray-On Hair
You might be surprised to learn that this is the only Ronco product on the list, but many of their items at least had some utility for a niche market. We’re not entirely sure how this one managed to stay around for so long—who exactly is buying toupees in a spray can? Yet, here we are.
The product is officially called GLH, or Good Looking Hair, but since it first launched in the 1970s, it’s been better known as Spray-On Hair. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a spray can designed to cover up bald spots. It’s still available online today, though even the earliest commercials were far from convincing (as shown in the photo above), and the concept feels more like a parody from a Saturday Night Live sketch than a real product.
While the other products on this list may somewhat fulfill their (albeit misguided) promises, Spray-On Hair seems to do the exact opposite of what it claims. Spraying fake hair onto your head draws far more attention to your baldness than just embracing it ever would.
2. “Kush Support” Breast Separator
We feel compelled to emphasize that this is a real product—it’s not some Photoshop joke created by one of our editors.
The 'Kush Support' is a breast separator—another well-meaning but peculiar solution to a problem that we honestly didn’t even know existed. Its purpose is to keep large breasts from pressing against each other when the wearer is sleeping on their side—something we never even thought to consider as an issue.
We suppose there’s no design for a breast separator that doesn’t immediately evoke... well, we all know exactly what we’re thinking. But apparently, this isn’t a joke product—just another one born from a questionable sense of necessity.
1. Bed Books
Here’s an idea that must have seemed truly innovative at first: 'What if we print books... with the words sideways? People could read them in bed while lying on their side! How come nobody ever thought of this before?!'
The flaws with this concept should be obvious after just a few seconds of thinking. First off, people don’t stay in one position for hours while reading in bed. What if we want to lie on our backs for a bit? Do we switch to a standard version of the book? Or try to hold the sideways book in an awkward way—which only brings us back to the very issue we were attempting to solve? And, perhaps most importantly, what if we want to read a chapter or two while we’re not even in bed?
And it’s not like they print *all* the books this way, right? In fact, the website only lists a small selection of titles, and none of them are from any time in the last eighty or ninety years.
So, maybe for a few very unique individuals who always sleep in the same position, read the same handful of 'classic' books on repeat, and have never heard of a Kindle, this *might* actually be a pretty good solution.
