Why was Wasabi-Lime Was the Right Move

Wednesday, September 23, 1998
The New York Times Entrepreneurs

Martha Furst, 36, and her sister, Susan Furst, 32, returned to their hometown of Freeport in rural Illinois to open a business. Martha had been an investment banker with Morgan Stanly. Susan was a professional chef with a resumé that included the Four Seasons of Chicago and the Flying Fish restaurant in Seattle. Backed by money from an agricultural-feed company founded by their great grandfather, the sisters started Terrapin Ridge, a line of gourmet mustards. In early 1997, they unveiled the mustards at a fancy-foods show in San Francisco. A year and a half later, the sisters now have about 1,000 accounts, according to Martha, and expect sales of about $400,000 this year.

"We almost made a big mistake when Susan wanted to introduce a wasabi-lime mustard," Martha recalls. "We really hesitated. We thought it might be too esoteric. But we launched it, and it has been our single best seller. We really nailed that one."

She continued: "On the other hand, and I do not know if this is a mistake or a success, we did a lot of product formulation on a line of spreads. We probably had four to six months invested in them. But we pulled the product because we could not make it all-natural, and we had a strong commitment to producing a line as natural as possible."

"We had something we thought was a good concept, but rather than compromise we tossed the product. I think we sacrificed short-term gain for long-term product integrity and hopefully long-term profitability, brand-name recognition and reputation. We are not afraid to make mistakes, but we learned it is important that we try to edit ourselves."

The moral? "You need multiple products in the product-development hopper because you want to put only the best ones forward in the marketplace," Martha said. "Build up that pipeline."