5 ms·

There is definitely a market for the resurgence of some of high quality old-timey products, especially those with some novelty. Sunbeam should literally do a K

There is definitely a market for the resurgence of some of high quality old-timey products, especially those with some novelty. Sunbeam should literally do a Kickstarter to get the marketing going.

pengaru 5y ago
> Sunbeam should literally do a Kickstarter to get the marketing going. Sunbeam products are now Chinesium trash, the brand was sold off long ago. At my last startup we learned this the hard way after buying a Sunbeam set of knives in a butcher block for the office kitchen. Every single knife was dull and serrated identically, despite presenting in the Amazon ad as a comprehensive set of knives.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  You can thank Chainsaw Al for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chainsaw_Al https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chainsaw_Al https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/al-dunlap-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/al-dunlap-dead...
  - consp 5y ago
    That wrap-sheet reads like he should have been in jail for ruining so many peoples lives. White-collar crime pays, but we all knew that already.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    It's not like "Chainsaw Al" inherited a pristine Sunbeam and ran it into the ground: "Allegheny's four principal divisions, including Sunbeam, went into decline through the late-1980s. Since Sunbeam-Oster was one of the most important divisions, responsible for nearly half of all sales, the stockholders were very concerned about the leadership. In 1986, the stockholders accused the Chairman and CEO, Robert Buckley of mis-appropriating funds.[10][11] Buckley's successor, Oliver Travers, downsized considerably and by 1988, the company was essentially just Sunbeam and Oster. The decline continued aided by the stock market crash of October 1987 and Allegheny filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[12] In the fall of 1989 an investment group called Japonica Partners[13] purchased the remains of Allegheny for $250 million ($521.9 million today) in a hostile takeover.[14] The company was renamed Sunbeam-Oster Company, Inc. At this point the business was then divided into four divisions: Outdoor Products, Household Products, Specialty Products, and International Sales. The company headquarters were moved again from Pittsburgh to Providence, Rhode Island and then finally to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.[15] By late 1991, Sunbeam-Oster's sales had increased 7% enabling it to make the Fortune 500 list." [0] It sounds to me like he was brought in to be the axe man, and he obliged, while adding some fraudulent flair to the mix. One could argue the fraud was just a best-effort attempt to turn the sinking ship around, with flagrant disregard for the law. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunbeam_Products#Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunbeam_Products#Growth
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
quacked 5y ago
I've thought about this for a while. Imagine a line of "dumb" dishwashers, toasters, ovens, stoves, microwaves, etc., all well-designed and made with sturdy materials. Unfortunately, I think they'd cost 6-10x going rate as modern "smart" appliances, and also the market for them would be restricted to HN commenters.
- varelse 5y ago
  Maybe less dumb and more easily repairable? Microcontrollers are great, just make a standardized component for all the things that can be unplugged and replaced and have at it. Why must we late-stage capitalism everything?
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    I don't think that dishwashers and related appliances are fragile or that they are too hard to repair. It's just that the brand new manufacturing cost has become so insanely cheap while human labor has become extremely expensive. So when the dishwasher finally craps out, it just isn't worth paying someone to crack it open and fix it. Hobbyists are able to fix almost anything when they do it for fun in their free time as long as DRM isn't involved. It just isn't something that scales or can make a profit.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Every new dishwasher is assembled the same way; potentially, every broken dishwasher is broken in a different way, and needs some different part and different fix. (I mean, there are probably a handful of problems that account for 90% of the failures of any appliance. But still.)
      - Gigachad 5y ago
        OEMs mostly deal with this by grouping everything in to modules. If a chip fries, they don't bother checking every chip to find it. They just replace the entire board. But it still requires someone to go to your house, pull the thing apart, and put the new one in which costs way more than robots in India putting the thing together almost unassisted.
johnohara 5y ago
Sunbeam is currently owned by Newell Brands (Carl Icahn) whose other brands include Coleman, Parker Pen, Calphalon, and First Alert. They certainly don't need the money to kickstart a campaign, but it would be interesting to know if Kickstarter would entertain the idea of a subsidiary of Newell Brands running a marketing campaign on its platform. Are there other large corporate brands that you know of that have launched marketing campaigns on KS?
- jsnell 5y ago
  Yes. At least for boardgames, sub-brands of billion dollar companies regularly run Kickstarters. Why would KS have any problem with that?
  - johnohara 5y ago
    Not sure. But I've always had the impression Kickstarter was about small business entrepreneurs/solopreneurs unable or unwilling to raise capital through traditional means. Per the KS Mission Statement, "It’s where creators share new visions for creative work with the communities that will come together to fund them." It just seems unusual to me that a multi-billion dollar global corporation would decide after 60+ years to go back to building high-quality versions of their products, perhaps considering it to be a "new vision for creative work," not really need a community to come together to fund it, and not have KS pause to think about whether it fits with their mission.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Yes, I mean Kickstarter as a marketing tool to tap into to an engaged and authentic starter market.
plebianRube 5y ago
It would be great to have something last so long. But then the marketing team wouldn't be able to come up with a new redesign every 6 months. And there would be less overall profit than building cheaper versions to fill our landfills with. Which unfortunately means that this won't be realistic.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Thus the Kickstarter model. Pre-sell 500, do a total production run of a 1000, and when they’re gone they’re gone.
gnicholas 5y ago
It would probably be easier for a new company to decide to do this than an existing company with bureaucratic cruft. And it's not like Sunbeam has any critical IP rights here, since the design is from many decades ago. My grandparents gave me one of these and I used it for a decade or so before it stopped working. I considered trying to fix it, but with little kids on the horizon, I was concerned about the safety issues (unlike new toasters, these old ones can electrocute you). If I'd known I could have had my old one retrofitted and made safer, as other oommenters have pointed out, I'd have done that instead. At least I got 50 bucks for it on ebay though!
- jollybean 5y ago
  Yes, some ops are cruft, in which case new company could buy old company brand. The other problem is distribution. These things are about channel power, which is >50% of the story on both sides: manufacturing, distribution, sales, etc.. 'The Product' is actually less important than the system in place that makes all of this work, at least at scale. Ideally, this would be a subdivision of a 'well run company' with operational resources and distribution power.

There is definitely a market for the resurgence of some of high quality old-timey products, especially those with some novelty. Sunbeam should literally do a Kickstarter to get the marketing going.

pengaru 5y ago

> Sunbeam should literally do a Kickstarter to get the marketing going. Sunbeam products are now Chinesium trash, the brand was sold off long ago. At my last startup we learned this the hard way after buying a Sunbeam set of knives in a butcher block for the office kitchen. Every single knife was dull and serrated identically, despite presenting in the Amazon ad as a comprehensive set of knives.

dredmorbius 5y ago
You can thank Chainsaw Al for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chainsaw_Al https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chainsaw_Al https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/al-dunlap-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/obituaries/al-dunlap-dead...
- consp 5y ago
  That wrap-sheet reads like he should have been in jail for ruining so many peoples lives. White-collar crime pays, but we all knew that already.
- pengaru 5y ago
  It's not like "Chainsaw Al" inherited a pristine Sunbeam and ran it into the ground: "Allegheny's four principal divisions, including Sunbeam, went into decline through the late-1980s. Since Sunbeam-Oster was one of the most important divisions, responsible for nearly half of all sales, the stockholders were very concerned about the leadership. In 1986, the stockholders accused the Chairman and CEO, Robert Buckley of mis-appropriating funds.[10][11] Buckley's successor, Oliver Travers, downsized considerably and by 1988, the company was essentially just Sunbeam and Oster. The decline continued aided by the stock market crash of October 1987 and Allegheny filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[12] In the fall of 1989 an investment group called Japonica Partners[13] purchased the remains of Allegheny for $250 million ($521.9 million today) in a hostile takeover.[14] The company was renamed Sunbeam-Oster Company, Inc. At this point the business was then divided into four divisions: Outdoor Products, Household Products, Specialty Products, and International Sales. The company headquarters were moved again from Pittsburgh to Providence, Rhode Island and then finally to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.[15] By late 1991, Sunbeam-Oster's sales had increased 7% enabling it to make the Fortune 500 list." [0] It sounds to me like he was brought in to be the axe man, and he obliged, while adding some fraudulent flair to the mix. One could argue the fraud was just a best-effort attempt to turn the sinking ship around, with flagrant disregard for the law. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunbeam_Products#Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunbeam_Products#Growth

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

quacked 5y ago

I've thought about this for a while. Imagine a line of "dumb" dishwashers, toasters, ovens, stoves, microwaves, etc., all well-designed and made with sturdy materials. Unfortunately, I think they'd cost 6-10x going rate as modern "smart" appliances, and also the market for them would be restricted to HN commenters.

varelse 5y ago
Maybe less dumb and more easily repairable? Microcontrollers are great, just make a standardized component for all the things that can be unplugged and replaced and have at it. Why must we late-stage capitalism everything?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I don't think that dishwashers and related appliances are fragile or that they are too hard to repair. It's just that the brand new manufacturing cost has become so insanely cheap while human labor has become extremely expensive. So when the dishwasher finally craps out, it just isn't worth paying someone to crack it open and fix it. Hobbyists are able to fix almost anything when they do it for fun in their free time as long as DRM isn't involved. It just isn't something that scales or can make a profit.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Every new dishwasher is assembled the same way; potentially, every broken dishwasher is broken in a different way, and needs some different part and different fix. (I mean, there are probably a handful of problems that account for 90% of the failures of any appliance. But still.)
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      OEMs mostly deal with this by grouping everything in to modules. If a chip fries, they don't bother checking every chip to find it. They just replace the entire board. But it still requires someone to go to your house, pull the thing apart, and put the new one in which costs way more than robots in India putting the thing together almost unassisted.

johnohara 5y ago

Sunbeam is currently owned by Newell Brands (Carl Icahn) whose other brands include Coleman, Parker Pen, Calphalon, and First Alert. They certainly don't need the money to kickstart a campaign, but it would be interesting to know if Kickstarter would entertain the idea of a subsidiary of Newell Brands running a marketing campaign on its platform. Are there other large corporate brands that you know of that have launched marketing campaigns on KS?

jsnell 5y ago
Yes. At least for boardgames, sub-brands of billion dollar companies regularly run Kickstarters. Why would KS have any problem with that?
- johnohara 5y ago
  Not sure. But I've always had the impression Kickstarter was about small business entrepreneurs/solopreneurs unable or unwilling to raise capital through traditional means. Per the KS Mission Statement, "It’s where creators share new visions for creative work with the communities that will come together to fund them." It just seems unusual to me that a multi-billion dollar global corporation would decide after 60+ years to go back to building high-quality versions of their products, perhaps considering it to be a "new vision for creative work," not really need a community to come together to fund it, and not have KS pause to think about whether it fits with their mission.
jollybean 5y ago
Yes, I mean Kickstarter as a marketing tool to tap into to an engaged and authentic starter market.

plebianRube 5y ago

It would be great to have something last so long. But then the marketing team wouldn't be able to come up with a new redesign every 6 months. And there would be less overall profit than building cheaper versions to fill our landfills with. Which unfortunately means that this won't be realistic.

sbierwagen 5y ago
Thus the Kickstarter model. Pre-sell 500, do a total production run of a 1000, and when they’re gone they’re gone.

gnicholas 5y ago

It would probably be easier for a new company to decide to do this than an existing company with bureaucratic cruft. And it's not like Sunbeam has any critical IP rights here, since the design is from many decades ago. My grandparents gave me one of these and I used it for a decade or so before it stopped working. I considered trying to fix it, but with little kids on the horizon, I was concerned about the safety issues (unlike new toasters, these old ones can electrocute you). If I'd known I could have had my old one retrofitted and made safer, as other oommenters have pointed out, I'd have done that instead. At least I got 50 bucks for it on ebay though!

jollybean 5y ago
Yes, some ops are cruft, in which case new company could buy old company brand. The other problem is distribution. These things are about channel power, which is >50% of the story on both sides: manufacturing, distribution, sales, etc.. 'The Product' is actually less important than the system in place that makes all of this work, at least at scale. Ideally, this would be a subdivision of a 'well run company' with operational resources and distribution power.