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Sunny Delight

Made largely with water, 10% sugar, various additives and 5% juice, Sunny Delight launched in the UK in 1998. Within 12 months it had reached sales of £160 million and was the UK's third best-selling soft drink behind the giants of Coca Cola and Pepsi.

Despite the high sugar content, its place in the chiller cabinet with fresh fruit juices and milk and its added vitamin content initially made busy parents feel good about buying Sunny Delight for their kids.

This juice juggernaut was, however, halted by a very unhappy Christmas in 1999 when news broke of a toddler whose skin had turned yellow after drinking an excessive amount. The reaction was down to the ingredient beta carotene (Vitamin A). Despite not being harmful long-term, alarm was raised. Then an unfortunate coincidence raised the stakes even higher – Sunny Delight's Christmas TV advert that year showed snowmen turning yellow after drinking it!

This double-whammy, coupled with growing concerns about the sugar content, saw sales plummet to £38 million in 2003. A year later, Sunny Delight's makers Proctor & Gamble sold the business. The drink is still available in some UK supermarkets but has a different recipe and is nowhere near as popular as it was in the late 1990s.

For Sam, the demise of Sunny Delight was down to the company not making sure that their customers “are purchasing what they think that they're purchasing.” Sam also believes that Sunny Delight was “the scapegoat for parental guilt and shame” over what they provided for their kids.

Hear more about why the juice ran out for Sunny Delight and what lessons were learned by listening to the episode in full on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sounds.

Club 18-30

Sun, sea and partying was the holy trinity for the iconic holiday company Club 18-30. The venture started out in the mid 1960s as a way to fill up empty seats on night flights, attracting young singles and couples without kids. Flourishing despite two changes of ownership in the 1970s and 1980s, Club 18-30 became the byword for cheap and cheerful youth holidays.

Their market share was relatively small, but they had a better rep to guest ratio than their competitors, and entertainment – from sangria and singing competitions onwards – was one of the main ways the company made its money.

“Deliberately cheesy and not trendy,” as rep-turned-exec Andy Tidy puts it, Club 18-30 enjoyed exposure – for better or for worse – through its suggestive adverts and, in the 2000s, a reality show and a documentary.

The firm didn't get chance to pivot to the experiential holiday needs of Insta-led millennials, as Thomas Cook, who bought it in 1998, started Cook's Trips for this. This venture was sold off separately when Thomas Cook closed in 2019, less than two years after they closed Club 18-30.

“You have to deliver what people want,” says Sam “but Thomas Cook kind of left it [Club 18-30] in the corner, so I think it would have been killed off no matter what.”

Find out more about why the sun set on Club 18-30 despite its best efforts by listening to the episode in full.

Commodore Computers

The iconic Commodore 64 personal computer burst onto the market in 1982. It was sold on the strength of exciting videogame adaptations of big-name Hollywood blockbusters like Top Gun and Rambo and was lapped up by the younger generation.

Founder Jack Tramiel, who had started out selling typewriters and then calculators, actually left the business in 1984. An earlier deal he did with financier Irving Gould meant Gould was left in charge of the company. There were lax financial controls and “no external auditing” of accounts, according to David Pleasance, a former Commodore international executive and later joint managing director of its UK subsidiary.

Commodore's fortunes were made harder by its failure to keep pace with the development of Windows software. Meanwhile, an attempt to update its Amiga PC range ended up undermining the previous model and proved more costly than anticipated.

Jamie Oliver pictured in 2008.

Commodore declared voluntary bankruptcy and liquidation in 1994.

For Sam, the lack of financial direction was key to its demise. “Businesses, no matter how big they are, have to be able to know exactly how much money is coming in and how much money's going out,” she says.

To find out more about why Commodore had to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, listen to the episode on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sounds.

Jamie's Italian

An instant hit when it opened in Oxford in 2008, Jamie's Italian aimed to disrupt mid-market dining in the UK with “great value and much higher quality ingredients and best in class animal welfare standards”.

The business recipe whipped up by talismanic celebrity chef Jamie Oliver really caught the public's imagination, with more than 40 restaurants opening up in seven years.

By 2016 things had turned sour because of massive expansion by competitors, the scramble for sites driving up rents. Two years later Jamie's Italian entered into a CVA, a Company Voluntary Arrangement, to pay creditors.

Twelve restaurants closed, and, a year later, the company collapsed into administration.

“I didn't have any levers left to pull,” Jamie told Kirsty Young in an episode of her ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 series Young Again last year: “I wasn't going to pull the lever of poor quality produce. I'd die before that happens.”

Sam feels that customers were only prepared to go so far to match Jamie's enthusiasm and “did not care enough about the things that he cared about to bridge the gap when the market was under pressure.”

Find out more about why Jamie's Italian felt the heat and the efforts to keep it afloat by listening to the full episode.

Toys R Us

Toys R Us launched in the US in 1957, complete with backwards R (to make it look like a child had written it) and later with a mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe. The stores, which peaked at just under 2,000 outlets worldwide, were big and brash but still maintained an air of innocent wonder.

Though the business pivoted to selling online in the 1990s, the competition from Amazon and others was, as Simon Cartey from the company admits to Sean, “severe”. The nature of business was further changed in 2005 when three investment companies bought it by leveraging the debt.

By 2018 all its UK stores had closed. Though the brand is coming back on a franchise basis and through concession stores in the US and UK, the experience is very different.

For Sam, the diagnosis of failure is clear – “bad capital”.

“They got the wrong backers,” she says, “and that destroyed the flow of energy and probably destroyed the team dynamic for a period of time.”

To find out more about the ups and downs of Toys R Us, and to hear what lessons can be learned from its story, listen to the full episode.

And to hear about more stories of business calamity, listen to the latest series of Toast on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sounds now.

The information contained in this article was correct at the time of broadcast on 11 January, 2024.