It's a sad day. Firefly waters - launched with a flurry of awards and publicity a year ago - will disappear from the shelves tonight.

We love our waters - low calorie, all natural, full of antioxidants, and really rather delicious - but they haven't taken off.

Why didn't they take off, and what can we learn?

The reasons...
1) Rubbish timing. Within a month of launching Firefly Waters, Pepsi bought V Water, and Coke brought out Vitaminwater - so we had to compete against "buy 3 cases get 3 cases free" deals that filled up everyone's fridges and squeezed us out. Vitaminwater's campaign was well-executed: they had vans delivering to all the London newsagents and cafes every day, with good clear "point of sale". And the Vitaminwater name is nice and clear - it makes you think "vitamins plus water" - even when you know it's actually got a fair bit of sugar and other stuff in there, you still get a subliminal feeling of doing yourself some good. We met our match.

2) Dull packaging. Our Firefly drinks are so gorgeous, they practically leap off the shelves. But for our waters, we made lots of compromises: use this bottle because it's available, settle for this design because we have to hit our Spring launch date, etc. The bottles ended up looking bland, and indistinguishable from the other enhanced waters - or as AA Gill put it, like Scandinavian Antifreeze.
And if people don't pick up your bottle, it doesn't matter how engaging the writing is or how delicious the drink is - it's not going to sell.

3) Bottling problems. We had a run that went wrong (a few drinks went mouldy before their shelf life was up). So we had to recall every bottle from the shelves, and re-launch a month later. But after all that shenanigans, we weren't too surprised that the shops that had Firefly water before weren't exactly begging to have it back.

The lessons.
1) Focus on the core brand. We launched a new range because we saw growth slowing on the core Firefly range... So we thought "let's make a new range of antioxidant waters to add some extra sales" - and devoted all our sales and marketing energies to the new range, leaving Firefly to languish, unloved.
It's a classic marketing error. If the core range isn't growing fast enough, work out why, and fix it. Firefly's a fantastic brand with a loyal following - don't give up on it the moment it hits a rocky patch. In this instance, there were two problems with the Firefly brand. First, it was too "cryptic" for a mainstream audience. And second, the herbs weren't delivering enough of a noticeable "boost" - or in marketing-speak, we weren't delivering enough on our brand promise. Watch this space...

2) Don't compromise. When we launched Firefly, we had a clear vision of what we wanted, and we bent over backwards to make it perfect. But when we developed our waters, we were trying too hard to fit within cost constraints, bottling constraints, time constraints - we were acting like a big business rather than an entrepreneurial business. We settled for "good enough" rather than "mind-blowing". Our lives didn't depend on how fabulous this drink was - and it showed.

Still, we'll miss our waters - we're all hooked in the office. Maybe one day we can dust down the recipes, come up with a great name and a radical bottle, and watch them fly. But in the meantime, it's good to be focused on Firefly again: and our first quarter sales are looking really rather encouraging...