For this episode, the theme revolved around the two teams having to come up with a new line of swimsuits for both a men and women audience. To determine the winner, the two groups had to model the bathing suits in-front of a group of buyers and whoever made the most money would win. One strange thing, unless I missed something here, is that they mentioned that the two team names are Kinetic Corporation and Arrow Corporation. In the other seasons they actually showed how they came up with the name and what it meant to them.
The candidate named Carey on the Arrow team was so excited about the thought of being able to design a swimsuit for men’s line-up that he took initiative in designing it. When they showed the design that he made, one of them had this very tight and bright pink design to it. My first reaction was that there was no way the team would allow that to go through. That swimsuit looked like a one way ticket in killing a guy’s masculine identity. Instead, the rest of the team was simply dumfounded with comments such as they thought that was a design for the women’s line up. Of course, then there were comments that this gave it away that Carey was gay which was indeed true.
That was pretty much the main focus of the episode afterwards as that pink swimsuit got all sorts of reactions with most of them being negative. Carey also opted to model the pink swimsuit himself which as expected got a lot of reaction again. In the end, team Kinetic, earned $20,111 while team Arrow earned $19,618. The interesting fact about the loss is that the Arrow team sold $400 worth of swimsuits in the men’s line.
As to who was the main culprit for the loss, this is was a typical question on should the person in charge be the one to blame as they have the authority to let something pass through or should the person who created the end product be the one to blame for the bad sales as no one wanted to buy the product? Ultimately in these types of cases, I would be inclined to say the person in charge overall should be the one to blame as the product was seen and approved by them. Especially in this case where everyone thought that the product was kind of odd to begin with and yet they still went through with it.
In the boardroom, it mostly came down to Carey as he designed the swimsuit and Nicole who was the project manager. Now in my opinion normally Nicole should have been the one to get fired because as I mentioned the person in charge does have authority in determining what is going to be presented and that they took the risk to go with that pink swimsuit. What happened though was that Carey was persistent in how the pink design was so great and that people do buy it. I think this was the fatal mistake as it is one thing to have a strong belief of your own creation as most people do, but to constantly insist like in this case that he is confident that this product sells to a lot of people just demonstrates a complete lack of business and common sense in regards to marketing to the mass. In the end, Carey was fired. Here are some brief clips of the end part: