Trenchies is cooked. No amount of explaining can fix what Fredo did with Trenchies. He launched a bad product.
I watched Fredo's video. And I sat there thinking the same thing everyone else is thinking. You can't fix a product nobody wants by explaining it harder.
According to his latest on www.youtube.com, Fredo is out here telling the world he's going to "fix the taste" of Trenchies. Like that's the problem. Like the flavor profile is what tanked this thing. He's framing it as a simple R&D adjustment. Tweaking the formula. Getting the sweetness ratio right.
But that's not what happened.
The TikTok Shop is now closed for business. Not because the logo was wrong or the shipping was slow or the marketing needed another round of A/B testing. It closed because people tasted the product and recoiled. Then they left reviews. And the reviews were brutal. They can't even give these things away.
The TikTok Shop Closed For A Reason
Here's what Fredo won't say out loud. Trenchies didn't fail because customers were confused about whether it was candy or a supplement. It failed because nobody wants to suck on something that tastes terrible for ten minutes straight. You can call it a supplement. You can call it a functional lozenge. You can call it whatever you want. The tongue doesn't care about your positioning document.
You can't educate your way out of a bad sensory experience.
If something tastes bad, consumers don't need a frame shift. They need a different product. Trying to convince people that the bad taste is actually a feature, not a bug, that's the kind of logic that sounds great in a mastermind and dies instantly in the real world.
And the influencer thing is even more telling. These are people whose entire livelihood depends on their audience trusting their recommendations. They put something in their mouth on camera and say it's good, their followers buy it, and if it tastes like garbage, that trust evaporates overnight. They're not going to risk that for Trenchies. Not after the reviews came in. Not after the TikTok Shop got closed down.
"When influencers won't promote your product to their own brands, you don't have a marketing problem. You have a product problem."
The Warehouse Was The Mistake
This is where the story gets uncomfortable.
Fredo bought the warehouse way too soon. I don't know the exact numbers but the timeline tells you everything you need to know. You scale inventory when demand is proven, not when demand is projected. The sequence matters. Validate first. Then scale. Not the other way around.
But this is a pattern. It's not just Trenchies. Look at what happened with Brez and the Fiducia watch launch. Brez couldn't even get his own ERT students to pay $300 for a custom watch. These are the people who paid thousands for his programs, who trust his frameworks, who want to see him win, and they still wouldn't open their wallets. That's not a conversion rate problem. That's a signal. You can't fool even your most loyal fans into buying everything.
Teaching brand scaling and doing brand scaling are two different things. One requires frameworks and confidence and the ability to hold a room. The other requires actually building something people want at a price they'll pay. When you skip the validation step, the market doesn't care how good your content is.
The question I keep coming back to is why Brez Scales thought joining the Trenchies team was a good idea. Maybe he saw the numbers on paper and they looked right. Maybe he believed the logic that a supplement you suck on slowly is a novel delivery mechanism. Maybe he trusted the process over the evidence.
But the evidence was always there.
You don't need a focus group to know if something tastes good. You just need to hand it to ten people and watch their faces.
What This Actually Reveals
There's a principle underneath all of this that matters more than any single product launch. When your identity is built on being the expert, every public failure isn't just a lost investment, it's a credibility hit. The audience watches. They remember. They factor it in.
This is why so many people who teach business never actually launch businesses. The risk is asymmetrical. If it works, they get a case study. If it flops, everyone sees the cracks in the expertise.
Fredo and Brez took that risk. And Trenchies is what happens when you take that risk without the foundation.
So now Fredo is back on YouTube explaining how he'll fix the taste. The warehouse is still sitting there. The inventory still needs to move. And the market is still the same market that already said no.
You can't talk your way out of a product-market fit problem. You can only go back to the beginning and start again.
That's the part nobody wants to hear. Because starting again means admitting the warehouse was premature and the launch was rushed and the validation never happened. It means eating the sunk cost instead of doubling down on the narrative.
The Smarter Way
Here's what actually works when you're building a physical product. You test demand before you buy inventory. You get strangers who have no reason to be nice to you to try the product and tell you honestly what they think. You don't explain what it's supposed to taste like. You just watch their reaction and take notes. You iterate until the product earns the purchase. Then, and only then, do you think about a warehouse.
This is the validation first approach. It's not sexy. It doesn't make for good launch content. But it prevents the exact situation Fredo is in right now.
There's a process for this. A way to test physical products with real audiences before committing to inventory. I've mapped out the exact method in a free training that walks through how to do it step by step. No warehouse. No sunk costs. Just real feedback from real buyers who tell you whether your product is actually ready.
If you're building something and you want to skip the expensive mistakes, that training is at the link below. Watch it before you sign a lease on anything.
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