With the passing of George Foreman last week, it’s an appropriate moment to reflect on the role branding plays in home products—and how sometimes the most outrageous choice turns out to be a winner, while far more obvious marketing partnerships fall flat.

George Foreman is known to sports fans as a two-time heavyweight world champion with a vicious knockout punch who took on some of the best boxers of his generation, including Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. But to far more people, Foreman is forever associated with a kitchen cooking device that sold more than 100 million units and redefined the concept of branding throughout the industry.

The George Foreman Grill, introduced in 1994 by a long-gone kitchen appliance company called Salton, is generally acknowledged to be the largest-selling housewares product of all time. It’s still available in multiple configurations—$34.99 for the original on Amazon. Despite its runaway success, Salton was never able to find traction by co-branding Foreman’s name on its other products; the company was eventually sold off for a fraction of its onetime value.

Foreman himself did quite well with this deal. A few years after the grill’s initial success—driven by the charming and seemingly endless infomercials he did for it—Salton gave him a buyout deal that was reportedly worth about $160 million, which enabled the company to use his name in perpetuity without paying substantial annual royalties. Foreman said he ended up making far more money from his grill deal than from his right hook.

The product itself had already been around for years in one form or another before Foreman came along, but it never really took off until it was branded with the boxer’s name. The remarkable success of that marketing move is a prime example of the seeming randomness of branding. Logic often has very little to do with it. Take Disney, one of the gold standards of the branding business, which has tried and failed several times in the kids furniture business, which ought to be a natural fit. Similarly, the Elvis Presley furniture collection was a colossal failure when it debuted two decades ago—after his death but at a time when his name still brought shrieks from fans.

The road to success is riddled with countless other failures and flops. Did you ever buy Mary Martin sheets or a Hemingway couch? There’s an endless list of branded goods that somehow sounded good at the conference table but turned out to be disasters on store shelves. Even Martha Stewart, who has had several rounds of home brand success—first at Kmart, then Macy’s, and seemingly everywhere these days—experienced huge gaps between each hit when her company appeared dead in the water. The highs and the lows illustrate that evergreens are a tough thing to pull off.

There’s no disputing that a good brand name can produce good business—often a very good business at that. But if you think you have the can’t-miss formula for making it work, imagine thinking about putting a prizefighter’s name on an electric grill and laughing to yourself, “Yeah, that will never work.”

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Warren Shoulberg is the former editor in chief for several leading B2B publications. He has been a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; received honors from the International Furnishings and Design Association and the Fashion Institute of Technology; and been cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media as a leading industry expert. His Retail Watch columns offer deep industry insights on major markets and product categories.