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This is the core issue that prevents reliable consumer products from becoming more widespread. Even if demand exists for more reliable consumer goods, consumers

This is the core issue that prevents reliable consumer products from becoming more widespread. Even if demand exists for more reliable consumer goods, consumers don't have the ability to actually evaluate reliability at the time of purchase. Manufacturers can't justify producing a more reliable product at a higher price point, because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price.

ericd 4y ago
There is a way, it’s the reputation that builds over time and is associated with your brand. It’s why many people buy Toyota by default. It’s why we paid 5x the price for a Miele vacuum (which are awesome, by the way). It’s just that most people either can’t or just won’t pay a significant premium for it, so those products tend to be niche. Of course, many execs look at brand value as something to be harvested for short term gains to the value of their options, but that’s a different problem.
- benj111 4y ago
  The problem then is if the brand cashes in on the reputation while moving production to China and using cheaper parts whilst charging the premium price still.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Yeah, that's the exec short term gain thing. But it doesn't take too much research to check if that's happened before pulling the trigger, people are pretty vocal when that happens to their favorite brands.
  - eru 4y ago
    In some sense, the longer the brand has been around, the less likely they are to pull an exit scam.
    - lazide 4y ago
      It’s the opposite in my experience - older brands have a hard time keeping up with newer trends and are more likely to be bought out by PE to ‘harvest value’, as they’re not as profitable right now.
      - eru 4y ago
        In order for something to become old, it has to have resisted attempts on its life so far.
        lazide 4y ago
        That didn’t work out well for Craftsman (or Sears in general), Milwaukee, and a bunch of other brands!
        phpisthebest 4y ago
        The tool market is an example of that not being the case Craftsman, Portal Cable, Bosch, Stanley, the list goes on and on, of once independent brands that have been bought out by mass marketers to sell lower quality tools under those names
        lazide 4y ago
        Another point - there is a difference between being 'old' (a 40 year old veteran solder is 'old', for instance, even if they're still in extremely good physical condition), and being 'old' as in 95 years old and can barely get out of bed. From a PE/market perspective, the sweet spot seems to be the 95 year old with a good reputation that still carries weight. I imagine it's because of the good spread between current price and expected returns, as the 'old' brands this is done with aren't usually very profitable, if at all.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  Not being able to trust brand reputation is the same problem, not a different problem.
- lazide 4y ago
  PE buying a brand to ‘harvest the brand value’ has become extremely common in tools, and has ruined a lot of things.
  - dllthomas 4y ago
    I almost feel like it should be deemed fraud or false advertising, although I have no idea how we should draw the line and ultimately we probably shouldn't.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      That was liking riding along in your mind as you constructed your thought! :)
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    They have more techniques too, like having store- or region-specific models that probably are all essentially the same but have different model numbers and slightly different feature sets just to make searching for reviews and price comparisons more difficult.
    - NathanielK 4y ago
      Sometimes they aren't essentially the same, but instead different in invisible ways. DeWalt grinders at Canadian Tire used to use plastic parts where metal was typically used. Outside of the different SKU it was difficult to tell the difference.
      - lazide 4y ago
        Walmart is notorious for this - they push really hard on suppliers to reduce prices, and suppliers usually do so by cutting quality. However everyone still pretends it’s the same (including identical outside appearance).
    - jabl 4y ago
      This so much. At least over here it's completely impossible to find reviews of whiteware (refrigerators, washing machines etc.), at most a handful on the local reseller homepage.
- stevage 4y ago
  Yeah just look at the recent reviews of Dyson vacuum cleaners. People buying the reputation but the quality has gone to shit.
  - hgomersall 4y ago
    I used to work with a mechanical engineer that was formerly at Dyson and he was rather scathing of their design policies, the tolerances being calculated badly and so on. The effect is everything feels "a bit loose".
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Yep, I wouldn't buy Dyson again. If a manufacturer wants to preserve its reputation it shouldn't be making cordless vacuums with batteries that run out within 10-15 minutes.
- nuker 4y ago
  Many execs have short term personal incentives, so short term gains suit fine.
- twoWhlsGud 4y ago
  Re Miele - my sample size of one dates to 1987 and still is my main vac. So at some point in the past they were probably quite good (or I got really really lucky). FWIW
  - ericd 4y ago
    Ha awesome. Before I bought, I did some reading about vacuums that repair shops thought were good, Miele seemed to top the list at the time. It’s been great, despite suffering a decent amount of clumsiness-related abuse.
lutorm 4y ago
I don't agree with that. There is a way to clearly signal that you're standing behind the quality of your products: offer an outstanding warranty. If I was choosing between brand A and twice as expensive brand B, and brand B said "we trust that our stuff will last so we offer a 10-year, no questions asked warranty", I would go for B in a heartbeat. (As long as it was a brand with some history so I can trust they don't just go out of business.)
- ouid 4y ago
  warranty has been replaced with AAS.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Don't know that acronym, is is "a-hat as a service?" like help lines which charge 80 cents/minute to not help you?
    - ouid 4y ago
      as a service already has 2 'a's.
- fomine3 4y ago
  The problem is that the confident is just a confident by brand B, and possibly the warranty term is not decided from confident but from competitor's warranty term. Personally I don't want very long warranty term for some products (I came up with PC PSU 12yr warranty). Warranty increases product cost that I should pay finally, but some products never be used so long by me.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Some brands have gotten around this by offering a 10 years warranty* * insert terms so onerous you’re very unlikely to claim, you have to ship the item on your own dime halfway across the world, if defect is deemed not covered (and you bet it won’t be) disposal at your expense or return as is at your expense, extended warranty void if you didn’t do $frivolousThing at time of purchase and not a day later, extended warranty doesn’t transfer to new owner, etc.
slowmovintarget 4y ago
It's not easy, but it can be done. We found Miele for dishwashers. Zwilling for our toaster, JennAir for microwave... We explicitly avoided "smart" anything. I shouldn't need to connect my refrigerator to wi-fi. But we've watched the crap curve take hold on a bunch of product categories, especially U.S. brands. Hannah Anderson used to make good quality, reliable children's clothes that didn't wear out when you looked at them funny. Not any more. Other brands that used to make clothing that lasted 20+ years now makes thin garbage that might last a season. Many of these transitions were to "Made in China" manufacturing. We went to replace a ten-year old electric coffee grinder and couldn't find one for less than $1700 that wasn't garbage. We switched to a hand grinder as the only reasonable alternative. It is very frustrating to try to find things that will last. My parents bought one refrigerator, and it lasted for more than 30 years. Most of their stuff they were able to get once. Not every two or three years.
- switchbak 4y ago
  I must disagree on the coffee grinder front. There's a great number of decent options well under your given price (I just took the plunge recently). Brands like Ceado and Eureka make a bunch at various price ranges. 600 gets you a decent one, 1200 and you're well into very nice grinder territory (unless you wanna go all audiophile here). There's not a ton to go wrong: good motor, bearings, a well designed adjustment mechanism and a good hopper design. Of those I'd really only expect the bearings and motor to die in any reasonable time frame. If you're that concerned you could always get a commercial model. There's no way home use will kill one of those, but it'll just be big and impractical.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    We landed on commercial coffee grinders for any with motors. The hand mill we ended up with does much better for pour-over coffee than any of the electrics at roughly a tenth of the price and counter space. Only requires elbow-grease and some good hand-torque.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
switchbak 4y ago
I think there's a growing level of knowledge in some niches that's leading to higher quality items in some circumstances. In power tools for instance, there's a number of YouTube channels that do high quality testing. In some cases some identified faults appear to have caught the eye of the manufacturer. Hopefully over time this feedback loop will result in higher quality products that still hit their price target.
krisoft 4y ago
> because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price That is what warranties are for. You say it is reliable? Put it in writing how long you think it will keep working and what will you owe the customer if it ain’t so.
- salawat 4y ago
  MTBF. The Engineer's secret way of measuring relative Quality. MTBF is exec poison. Too high, and the customer doesn't come back, you see, or worse, it's too expensive to build! (According to finance).
wizofaus 4y ago
Warranties? If you're gonna charge 3 times more for a product, then you should be able to offer a warranty that's much better than that for lower spec equivalents. Yet that rarely seems to happen.

ericd 4y ago

There is a way, it’s the reputation that builds over time and is associated with your brand. It’s why many people buy Toyota by default. It’s why we paid 5x the price for a Miele vacuum (which are awesome, by the way). It’s just that most people either can’t or just won’t pay a significant premium for it, so those products tend to be niche. Of course, many execs look at brand value as something to be harvested for short term gains to the value of their options, but that’s a different problem.

benj111 4y ago
The problem then is if the brand cashes in on the reputation while moving production to China and using cheaper parts whilst charging the premium price still.
- ericd 4y ago
  Yeah, that's the exec short term gain thing. But it doesn't take too much research to check if that's happened before pulling the trigger, people are pretty vocal when that happens to their favorite brands.
- eru 4y ago
  In some sense, the longer the brand has been around, the less likely they are to pull an exit scam.
  - lazide 4y ago
    It’s the opposite in my experience - older brands have a hard time keeping up with newer trends and are more likely to be bought out by PE to ‘harvest value’, as they’re not as profitable right now.
    - eru 4y ago
      In order for something to become old, it has to have resisted attempts on its life so far.
      - lazide 4y ago
        That didn’t work out well for Craftsman (or Sears in general), Milwaukee, and a bunch of other brands!
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        The tool market is an example of that not being the case Craftsman, Portal Cable, Bosch, Stanley, the list goes on and on, of once independent brands that have been bought out by mass marketers to sell lower quality tools under those names
      - lazide 4y ago
        Another point - there is a difference between being 'old' (a 40 year old veteran solder is 'old', for instance, even if they're still in extremely good physical condition), and being 'old' as in 95 years old and can barely get out of bed. From a PE/market perspective, the sweet spot seems to be the 95 year old with a good reputation that still carries weight. I imagine it's because of the good spread between current price and expected returns, as the 'old' brands this is done with aren't usually very profitable, if at all.
TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
Not being able to trust brand reputation is the same problem, not a different problem.
lazide 4y ago
PE buying a brand to ‘harvest the brand value’ has become extremely common in tools, and has ruined a lot of things.
- dllthomas 4y ago
  I almost feel like it should be deemed fraud or false advertising, although I have no idea how we should draw the line and ultimately we probably shouldn't.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    That was liking riding along in your mind as you constructed your thought! :)
- tshaddox 4y ago
  They have more techniques too, like having store- or region-specific models that probably are all essentially the same but have different model numbers and slightly different feature sets just to make searching for reviews and price comparisons more difficult.
  - NathanielK 4y ago
    Sometimes they aren't essentially the same, but instead different in invisible ways. DeWalt grinders at Canadian Tire used to use plastic parts where metal was typically used. Outside of the different SKU it was difficult to tell the difference.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Walmart is notorious for this - they push really hard on suppliers to reduce prices, and suppliers usually do so by cutting quality. However everyone still pretends it’s the same (including identical outside appearance).
  - jabl 4y ago
    This so much. At least over here it's completely impossible to find reviews of whiteware (refrigerators, washing machines etc.), at most a handful on the local reseller homepage.
stevage 4y ago
Yeah just look at the recent reviews of Dyson vacuum cleaners. People buying the reputation but the quality has gone to shit.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  I used to work with a mechanical engineer that was formerly at Dyson and he was rather scathing of their design policies, the tolerances being calculated badly and so on. The effect is everything feels "a bit loose".
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Yep, I wouldn't buy Dyson again. If a manufacturer wants to preserve its reputation it shouldn't be making cordless vacuums with batteries that run out within 10-15 minutes.
nuker 4y ago
Many execs have short term personal incentives, so short term gains suit fine.
twoWhlsGud 4y ago
Re Miele - my sample size of one dates to 1987 and still is my main vac. So at some point in the past they were probably quite good (or I got really really lucky). FWIW
- ericd 4y ago
  Ha awesome. Before I bought, I did some reading about vacuums that repair shops thought were good, Miele seemed to top the list at the time. It’s been great, despite suffering a decent amount of clumsiness-related abuse.

lutorm 4y ago

I don't agree with that. There is a way to clearly signal that you're standing behind the quality of your products: offer an outstanding warranty. If I was choosing between brand A and twice as expensive brand B, and brand B said "we trust that our stuff will last so we offer a 10-year, no questions asked warranty", I would go for B in a heartbeat. (As long as it was a brand with some history so I can trust they don't just go out of business.)

ouid 4y ago
warranty has been replaced with AAS.
- mellavora 4y ago
  Don't know that acronym, is is "a-hat as a service?" like help lines which charge 80 cents/minute to not help you?
  - ouid 4y ago
    as a service already has 2 'a's.
fomine3 4y ago
The problem is that the confident is just a confident by brand B, and possibly the warranty term is not decided from confident but from competitor's warranty term. Personally I don't want very long warranty term for some products (I came up with PC PSU 12yr warranty). Warranty increases product cost that I should pay finally, but some products never be used so long by me.
ornornor 4y ago
Some brands have gotten around this by offering a 10 years warranty* * insert terms so onerous you’re very unlikely to claim, you have to ship the item on your own dime halfway across the world, if defect is deemed not covered (and you bet it won’t be) disposal at your expense or return as is at your expense, extended warranty void if you didn’t do $frivolousThing at time of purchase and not a day later, extended warranty doesn’t transfer to new owner, etc.

slowmovintarget 4y ago

It's not easy, but it can be done. We found Miele for dishwashers. Zwilling for our toaster, JennAir for microwave... We explicitly avoided "smart" anything. I shouldn't need to connect my refrigerator to wi-fi. But we've watched the crap curve take hold on a bunch of product categories, especially U.S. brands. Hannah Anderson used to make good quality, reliable children's clothes that didn't wear out when you looked at them funny. Not any more. Other brands that used to make clothing that lasted 20+ years now makes thin garbage that might last a season. Many of these transitions were to "Made in China" manufacturing. We went to replace a ten-year old electric coffee grinder and couldn't find one for less than $1700 that wasn't garbage. We switched to a hand grinder as the only reasonable alternative. It is very frustrating to try to find things that will last. My parents bought one refrigerator, and it lasted for more than 30 years. Most of their stuff they were able to get once. Not every two or three years.

switchbak 4y ago
I must disagree on the coffee grinder front. There's a great number of decent options well under your given price (I just took the plunge recently). Brands like Ceado and Eureka make a bunch at various price ranges. 600 gets you a decent one, 1200 and you're well into very nice grinder territory (unless you wanna go all audiophile here). There's not a ton to go wrong: good motor, bearings, a well designed adjustment mechanism and a good hopper design. Of those I'd really only expect the bearings and motor to die in any reasonable time frame. If you're that concerned you could always get a commercial model. There's no way home use will kill one of those, but it'll just be big and impractical.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  We landed on commercial coffee grinders for any with motors. The hand mill we ended up with does much better for pour-over coffee than any of the electrics at roughly a tenth of the price and counter space. Only requires elbow-grease and some good hand-torque.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago

switchbak 4y ago

I think there's a growing level of knowledge in some niches that's leading to higher quality items in some circumstances. In power tools for instance, there's a number of YouTube channels that do high quality testing. In some cases some identified faults appear to have caught the eye of the manufacturer. Hopefully over time this feedback loop will result in higher quality products that still hit their price target.

krisoft 4y ago

> because there isn't really a way to get consumers to trust that it really is a more reliable product worthy of the price That is what warranties are for. You say it is reliable? Put it in writing how long you think it will keep working and what will you owe the customer if it ain’t so.

salawat 4y ago
MTBF. The Engineer's secret way of measuring relative Quality. MTBF is exec poison. Too high, and the customer doesn't come back, you see, or worse, it's too expensive to build! (According to finance).

wizofaus 4y ago

Warranties? If you're gonna charge 3 times more for a product, then you should be able to offer a warranty that's much better than that for lower spec equivalents. Yet that rarely seems to happen.