The Impossible Idea Is Usually the Right One
- Feb 20
- 2 min read
By Floris van der Meer
The idea that changed everything for me sounded unrealistic from the start: make high-quality swim shorts out of ocean plastic. Not as a novelty, not as a marketing stunt, but as a product people would actually want to wear every day.
At the time, I didn’t have a fashion background, a factory lined up, or a roadmap. What I had was a conviction that if you can recycle plastic into fabric, it should be possible to use ocean plastic for it. Swim shorts felt symbolic for this, bringing the plastic from the ocean back to the ocean. However, the challenge wasn’t coming up with the idea. The challenge was believing it could actually exist.
Execution started with a simple but critical mindset shift: instead of asking “Is this possible?” I asked “Who has already solved parts of this?” That led me down a long path of yarn suppliers, material scientists, small manufacturers, and sustainability certifications. None of it was linear. Every answer created two new problems. The fabric felt wrong. The fit was off. The costs didn’t work. The minimum order quantities were intimidating. But each step proved something important: the idea wasn’t impossible, it was just unfinished.
The biggest challenge early-stage entrepreneurs underestimate is how hard everything really is. Not the big vision stuff but the daily friction. The months of uncertainty. The decisions you make with incomplete information. The feeling that progress is invisible even when you’re working nonstop. If most people truly understood how difficult building something from scratch is, very few would ever start.
Optimism is often the only thing that gets an idea off the ground. And in my experience, you need a certain kind of belief: blind confidence, even when the path feels completely unclear. I didn’t always know how it would work. I just believed that there was a way.
My creative and execution process is simple but strict. I start with the end state: what the product should feel like, how it should fit into someone’s life, and what values it must reflect. Then I work backward, removing anything that doesn’t serve that outcome. If a decision compromises the core idea, it’s a no - even if it’s cheaper, faster, or simpler.
What surprised me most was that once the product existed, customers understood it immediately. They didn’t just buy swim shorts; they bought into the belief that thoughtful choices can exist without compromise.
That feedback loop, between belief, execution, and validation, reinforced the lesson I keep coming back to.
Impossible ideas don’t usually fail because they’re impossible. They fail because belief runs out before execution catches up. For me, the turning point wasn’t a funding round, a launch, or a press hit. It was deciding that the outcome was non-negotiable, and committing to finding a way, no matter how long it took.
That belief didn’t make the process easier. It made it survivable.
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