Wednesday, September 25, 2013

A bad color choice for the Honda Civic

This story is from Honda designer Margo Beylen, from the Honda "Power of Dreams: Failure" video. 

One of my worst ideas happened the very first week I worked at Honda. My boss said, "I'm going to Japan in a couple of weeks and I need proposals for new colors for all the 1996 models." This was Civic, Accord, Accord Wagon.

I completely panicked. I was asked to do more in my first week at Honda than I had done in 4 years at my previous job.

I had been really wanting to do an orange car. Really wanting to do orange. And decided: OK, 96 Civic, we're going to do orange. Without doing my homework, completely, I proposed this color. I get into this big room. Sales, engineering, design, the balance of powers, whoever makes this decision to go into mass production. They're all looking at this new person, this new designer, saying, "Well, maybe we should trust her." So they went ahead and put the orange into production. And the dealers flipped. It's like, "What is this hideous, hideous color?Stop production of this immediately!"

You take chances. Everybody in that room understood they were taking a chance, but they were willing to take that chance.

No comments:

Post a Comment