WD-40 didn’t just listen to customers — they solved their own frustration.

For decades, the biggest problem with WD-40 wasn’t what was inside the can.

It was that darned little red straw.

Everyone lost it. I couldn’t even tell you how many I have lost.

They fell off, rolled under tool benches, got taped to the side of something else, or vanished completely.

The company’s own engineers were just as annoyed as the rest of us.

So they fixed it.

They built the Smart Straw — a permanently attached, flip-up straw that never gets lost.

It’s a perfect example of insight hiding in plain sight. (Only took ’em 50 years!)

The team didn’t need focus groups or AI analysis.

They just watched themselves struggle with their own product.

The best innovations often start there: a pain point so obvious you stop seeing it.

Until someone inside finally decides to fix it.

For makers, that’s the real insight:

You don’t always need new data or deep research to innovate.

Is YOUR next breakthrough sitting right there on your own workbench, quietly annoying you?

Want to make your product irresistible? That’s what we do as product marketing consultants at Graphos Product, helping innovators turn need-driven ideas into market-ready successes.