Yes, I am contrasting Red Wings's use by professionals to copies-of-copies. The professional use stops the degeneration of the design. If Red Wing had faded int

Yes, I am contrasting Red Wings's use by professionals to copies-of-copies. The professional use stops the degeneration of the design. If Red Wing had faded into oblivion, outcompeted by Chinese clones catering purely to fast fashion etc, you would start seeing pathologies evolve, like cancer or drawings of elephants by generations of artists who'd never seen elephants https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/index.html https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/index.html . This provides a long-term rationale for Red Wing to prioritize professionals even if it comes at the cost of short-term profits, and it provides a reason for non-professionals to free-ride on the informed professional choice. (To give a hypothetical boot example of what I mean: Red Wings have speedhooks, either by default or as options if you mail them in/go to a shop, because it can take quite a while to lace them up normally. But the clones might evolve speedhooks which didn't actually hold the laces or which were clamped shut around laces because at some point, someone didn't understand what the point of them was and made a change, and there was no pushback, because no one was actually shucking them on & off enough to care about speedhooks.)