Stop Running the Flawed Glass

Honest Tea: A Case Study

Here's something I see founders learn the hard way: you can have high standards for your own work and still end up with a disaster if the people you're working with don't share them.

It's not enough to care about quality. You have to choose partners, manufacturers, vendors, and contractors who care about it too. And when they don't deliver, you have to be willing to stop the line rather than push forward and hope it works out.

The founders of Honest Tea learned this when they nearly let their customers drink glass shards.

They had landed shelf space at Whole Foods. They had a bottle manufacturer lined up, and things were moving. Then the manufacturer delivered a batch of bottles with visible imperfections, air bubbles so large that anyone could see. The founders ran them through the production line anyway.

The assumption was that the manufacturing line would automatically reject the bad bottles. It didn't. Honest Tea ended up with products on Whole Foods shelves that had broken glass inside them. A disaster waiting to happen. 

They had to pull everything. The financial hit was severe. And the whole thing could have been avoided two different ways: by working with a manufacturer that didn't ship visibly defective materials in the first place, or by refusing to use them once they arrived.

This pattern shows up constantly in startups. You're moving fast, you're under pressure, a vendor delivers something that's not quite right,  and you tell yourself it's probably fine. You don't have time to find someone else. You can't afford the delay. So you use it.

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you end up with glass in your product.

Good project management isn't just about timelines and deliverables. It's about knowing which corners you cannot cut, and building relationships with partners who meet your standards instead of forcing you to lower them. The cheapest vendor, the fastest turnaround, the "good enough for now" solution, these might save time right up until they cost you everything.

Before you commit to a partner, ask yourself: what happens if they deliver something substandard? If the answer is "we'll probably use it anyway because we're out of time," that's the problem you need to solve first.