Stanley’s Switchback and Trigger Action travel mugs sold for more than eight years before the problem became impossible to ignore. In late 2024, the company recalled about 2.6 million of them. The lid threads could shrink when exposed to heat and twisting, so the lid could detach and spill hot liquid. By then there had been 91 reports of lids coming off and 38 burn injuries worldwide, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Ninety-one reports across 2.6 million mugs is a tiny failure rate. That’s the point. A flaw that rare almost never shows up in testing. It shows up when enough people use the product, in enough kitchens and cars, for long enough.
New research in Harvard Business Review calls this the popularity trap.
Success Finds the Flaws
Johanna Glauber, Akhil Bhardwaj and Robert Langan studied millions of vehicle sales and recalls over a decade. They found that higher-selling products accumulate more recalls and are recalled sooner.
The mechanism is simple. Each extra customer is another test case. A best seller gets used by more people, in more climates, in more unusual ways, than any product team could ever simulate. Rare defects that slipped through development start to appear.
Scale also raises the stakes. Complaints add up, regulators notice, and journalists pay attention. “A breakout product can quickly become a liability,” the authors write.
Their core recommendation is a mindset shift: treat popularity as increased exposure, which requires stronger oversight, not the same process that worked when volume was small.
The full study is paywalled, and the preview doesn’t include its figures. But the pattern shows up clearly in public recall data.
The Numbers Are Getting Bigger
Automakers recalled more than 24.4 million vehicles in the U.S. in 2025, according to NHTSA data compiled by FOX Business. Ford alone logged 152 recalls covering about 12.75 million vehicles. That broke General Motors' single-year record of 77 in 2014.
Consumer products follow the same curve. In November 2025, Peloton recalled about 833,000 original Bike+ units because the seat post could break and throw riders off, Axios reported. It was the company's second seat-post recall: in 2023, it recalled more than two million seat posts on its original Bike.
One detail from the Peloton recall stands out. All three injury reports cited by Canadian regulators came from riders taller than 5'10" and heavier than 250 pounds. Peloton lists a maximum user weight of 297 pounds. The product was failing at the edge of the range it was designed for.
That’s where popularity does its damage. The bigger your customer base, the more people you have at the edges.
Why Small Brands Are More Exposed
A large manufacturer has quality engineers, field data, and a recall playbook. A small brand with a viral product often has none of these. It also tends to react to a hit the wrong way: by scaling production quickly, switching suppliers to meet demand, and cutting the testing time that the first batch got.
Each of those moves adds new ways to fail, just as more people depend on the product. For an online brand, the “regulator” may first arrive as a one-star review with a photo, then a TikTok video, then a news story.
The design question changes when a product takes off. Before the hit, the question is “Does this work?” After it, the question is “How could this fail for someone we never pictured?”
What This Means
Treat a best seller as a product that’s still being tested, because it is. Here’s how to build that into your process.
- Design for the edges, not the average. List the extremes of your customer base: the largest and smallest users, the hottest and coldest conditions, the heaviest use, the clumsiest handling. Test against those, not the typical customer. Peloton’s failures came from riders near the upper weight limit.
- Read complaints as data, not noise. A handful of similar reports out of thousands of sales is easy to dismiss. The HBR authors advise investigating anomalies and weak signals early, before they grow. Tag every return reason and review that mentions breakage, heat, leaks, or injury, and check the tally weekly.
- Retest when you scale, not just when you launch. A new factory, supplier, material, or packaging line is effectively a new product. Run the original tests again before the first big shipment, not after the first wave of complaints.
- Decide your response plan before you need it. Agree in advance who decides on a fix, how customers will be contacted, and what remedy you’ll offer. Stanley offered free replacement lids; Peloton offered free replacement seat posts. The authors recommend responding with transparency, accountability, and concrete corrective action, and that is far easier with a plan already written.
- Budget for quality in proportion to sales. If a product drives half your revenue, it deserves a large share of your testing and support time. Many brands do the opposite and focus on what’s new.
A hit product is the best thing that can happen to a small business. It’s also when the business is most exposed. The brands that keep their best sellers are the ones that keep testing them.
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