We are in 2009. Slovakia joins the euro zone, The name of Satoshi Nakamoto It begins to resonate in certain forums, the first Metro line from Andalusia is inaugurated in Seville, Spain gets gold in the Eurobasket and half -world dolls dress with miraculous bracelets called Power Balance. These bracelets, whose price was just 30 euros, promised to improve strength, balance and flexibility thanks to holograms that fixed our biocampus.
They also turned out to be a millionaire scam.
Power Balance’s story goes back to 2007, when the Josh and Troy Rodarmel brothers founded the company in California. Although the concept was not new, the two brothers developed a marketing campaign that worked perfectly, starting with Give your first 50,000 bracelets in the US Open of Surfing of 2007.
Power Balance bracelet | Image: Wagner Bonifacio Leite
In just a few months, these bracelets began arriving at personalities dolls such as Michael Jordan, Cristiano Ronaldo, Leonardo DiCaprio and even Shaquille O’Neal, which It appeared on video saying “I don’t give many testimonies, but this does work.” The Power Balance arrived throughout the world, Spain included. Until Infanta Elena had one.
In 2010, the company reported some Sales worth $ 35 millionnothing wrong for a product without any scientific basis. Various studies They began to demonstrate that these products were useless, thus arriving the beginning of the end of the company. The key was, undoubtedly, the placebo effect, but that there was a hologram that balanced and isolated frequencies to improve our body was simply false.
At the end of 2010The company had to admit that its products were not based on scientific evidence. In 2011, she was sentenced for fraud and forced to pay 57 million dollars. That led Power Balance to bankruptcy. Finally, the company was sold in 2012 to a Chinese company for eight million dollars. The original founders disregard them completely, but the product is still sold today (only without announcing effects of any kind).
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