These 3 designers turned their biggest failures into success—here’s how

From Yves Béhar’s scrapped shoe to a Furby toy that missed the mark, these failed designs turned out to be an invaluable learning experience for their makers.

Failure is often said to be the best teacher. And in the design world, no matter the speciality, failure is also a constant companion. From the brainstorming phase to prototyping and production, small mistakes serve as stepping stones toward an eventual product. And sometimes, the product in itself just doesn’t get off the ground—that, too, is a ubiquitous learning experience.

But while so-called “failures” are an unavoidable part of working in design, it’s much more common to hear about the success story behind a finished product than all of the iterations that were scrapped before it, or the project that had to be put on pause to make way for something new.