The Museum of Failure

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Ford overhyped the Edsel when it was introduced in 1957.
Customers thought it was ugly and overpriced, and the name
became synonymous with corporate failure.
Photo by Avishay Artsy

"Trump: The Game," the Betamax cassette recorder, Bic for Her pens, the Delorean car, Olestra, Pepsi Crystal, not to mention Google Glass and a Chinese sex doll for rent called "Shareable Girlfriend." These are some of the 100 or so concepts on display at a new pop-up museum called the Museum of Failure, located at the A+D Museum in downtown LA.

DnA tours the exhibition with its founder Samuel West, a clinical psychologist and an "innovation researcher," and finds out what connects the over-hyped products and ideas that crash the moment they hit the stores, that are short lived and that are launched before their time.

Despite a trend in Silicon Valley to wear start-up failures like a badge of honor, generally, says West, "as a society we worship success and the more we worship success the more failure gets stigmatized. And I think this museum says let's re-evaluate failure, it hurts and it's nothing we want but it's something that we can actually learn from, if we're willing to talk about it."