Price Isn’t Everything

Debbie Sterling, founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, describes how she learned to focus product design on customers, not on the retailer. The maker of construction toy kits for girls dramatically increased production and dropped retail prices to appease Walmart, only to have products end up on clearance because no one wanted them. “It doesn’t matter how much it costs,” Sterling says. “If it’s not a product that excites and gets every girl interested in wanting to build more and more, we failed.”