Here’s something you probably didn’t wake up worrying about today:
Soap bars.
Specifically, those tiny hotel soap bars, no bigger than a credit card, wrapped in enough plastic to survive a nuclear event.
You know the ones. You check into your room, maybe after a long flight. You find a neat little bar sitting on the sink like a soldier awaiting orders. You tear it open, give it a quick lather, and… that’s it.
One use.
Maybe two if you’re disciplined.
And then?
Straight to the trash.
Here’s the thing:
The manufacturers know.
They know that 90% of that soap’s life will be spent sitting there, slowly drying out, or being tossed half-used into a bin. Yet they still dutifully design, produce, and distribute millions of them every year.
It’s not incompetence. It’s not carelessness. It’s designing for discard.
The point was never that the soap bar would be fully used.
The point was that it would be available.
There. Present. Making you feel cared for. Hygienic. Safe. Even if you barely touch it.
In product development, there’s a hidden lesson here:
Sometimes the function of a product is not what you think.
The soap bar isn’t just a cleanser.
It’s a signal.
It tells you, “We thought about you.”
Even if you don’t finish it, even if you barely use it, the soap served its real purpose the moment you saw it.
It’s the same reason most car owners have spare tires they’ve never touched.
Or why high-end gadgets ship with velvet bags no one ever uses.
Or why luxury brands sell handbags so delicate you’d be insane to actually carry them daily.
Utility isn’t always the goal.
Sometimes it’s reassurance. Status. Presence. A little nudge to your limbic system that says: you made a good choice.
The tragedy, of course, is that the soap bar, unlike the spare tire or velvet bag, is actually useful.
In a better world, maybe we’d have a communal soap jar that refills itself like magic. (Or a tiny “hotel soap seed” you plant in water to grow a full bar overnight.)
But for now, the poor travel soap will continue its short, tragic life: born in a factory, flown across oceans, briefly admired, hastily unwrapped, used once, and abandoned forever.
A reminder that in product development — and maybe in life — it’s good to ask:
Am I building something to be used…
or just something to be seen?
And more importantly:
Would I want to be the soap bar?