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Instant Pot has become a cultural icon, everyone has one. How does such an iconic brand go under so quickly? Just bad management? I'm not buying the excuses of

• alexb_ 3y ago
  Pyrex in particular switched to a new type of glass that is miles worse than their old glass, to the point where the brand name now is a negative.
  • kgwxd 3y ago
    The awful noise they used to make when 2 pieces touched was the brand.
  • theshrike79 3y ago
    The (urban legend?) I heard was that they changed the formula so that Pyrex couldn't be used for drug manufacturing. They still handle all temperatures a home chef will ever need, but a drug operation will reach the limits and the glass breaks.
    • wavefunction 3y ago
      Definitely an urban legend. Heat and narcotic substances do not mix very well beyond the barest threshold of baking temperatures.
    • jbay808 3y ago
      They do not handle the rapid temperature differentials a home chef often encounters when they aren't careful enough. Especially when they are expecting the resilience of borosilicate glass.
    • katbyte 3y ago
      the new formula was cheaper to make. think thats all you really need to know
  • katbyte 3y ago
    unless you are in the EU, pyrex glass from there is still the good stuff
  • neilv 3y ago
    Up until a few he Pyrex brand consumer food storage containers seemed to be this other glass (soda lime?, with the bluegreen if you looking into the edge). Then, a few years ago, they seemed to switch essentially the same SKUs to a third glass (whitish looking into the edge) in slightly different glass forms, and slightly different lid fit). (I don't think they were counterfeit.)
• branon 3y ago
  They changed the formula for Pyrex glass many years ago and the new formula is inferior to the old one. Somehow I doubt the current incarnation of these companies has much at all to do with their origin.
  • zinekeller 3y ago
    > Somehow I doubt the current incarnation of these companies has much at all to do with their origin. The origin of Pyrex is Corning, the Gorilla Glass maker. They divested Pyrex because they've got tired of dealing with the consumer market and wanted to focus on B2B sales. The US market was acquired by (as shown) eager to make a quick buck on brand recognition. The European market was acquired by a different company which still manufactures borosilicate cookware to this day (and are not affected by this bankruptcy).
    • myself248 3y ago
      Aye, and this drives me nuts. For 50+ years, "Pyrex" was the name of a material, borosilicate glass, with known material properties. You could count on it being safe in certain situations. Then Corning somehow decided that it was the name of a _brand_, and they could use whatever inferior material they wanted, and if you put it in those same situations it would explode and cover your kitchen/lab in glass shards. How that was even legal, I will never understand.
      • retrac 3y ago
        Pyrex, the term, was originally a brand for borosilicate glass. It has become partially generic over the years, like Aspirin or Kleenex. Aspirin is still a trademark of Bayer in Canada; if they want to switch to ibuprofen instead of aspirin as the active ingredient, and sell it as Aspirin, they could. Similarly, if Kimberley-Clark decides to start selling sandpaper and call them Kleenex, they could. If a trademark becomes fully generic it can be ruled so by a court, at which point the trademark protection is lost. Aspirin is like that in the US. But that is pretty rare these days.
• londons_explore 3y ago
  Sounds like they took on lots of loans to grow the business, relying on interest rates staying at ~0%. When those loans come up for renewal and they have to pay 7% corporate bond rates, of course they're going to collapse.
  • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    That's the crazy part of the "free money" short term loans of the past couple of years. Did these companies not think that they'd need to be refinanced?
    • coldpie 3y ago
      More likely the execs know they can take their piece and then bounce when the check comes due. There's no downside, they can just move on to the next victim and repeat until they have enough money to retire.
      • dylan604 3y ago
        When the interest rates bump up, that's not a per company thing. Where's the "next victim and repeat" opportunity going to be when there's no 0% available?
        • londons_explore 3y ago
          Well we've had 2 decades of super low rates... Thats plenty to build up a nice big retirement fund...
          • dylan604 3y ago
            is retirement the next victim?
            • michaelcampbell 3y ago
              "next"?
• redleggedfrog 3y ago
  "...everyone has one." Going to be difficult to sell more then. :^) Also, they don't fully replace more traditional cooking apparatus, like a pressure cooker, a crock pot, or rice cooker. We have all 4, and what the Instant Pot got a lot of use initially we found that the for purpose cooking pots worked better and got better results. So the Instant Pot slowly fell out of favor.
  • alanbernstein 3y ago
    I got one to replace all three of those, and it works great.
  • Forgeties79 3y ago
    Not that this means your response is wrong (I largely agree) but funny enough in my household our insta-pot is essentially just a rice cooker. We basically use it for nothing else, but it’s also really good for rice! Fluffy and perfect everytime.
    • redleggedfrog 3y ago
      "...our insta-pot is essentially just a rice cooker." Yeah, ours pretty much boiled down to that, too. :^D
      • bombcar 3y ago
        Or boiled up as it may be, they get nice and hot inside.
  • duped 3y ago
    But now you need to store three appliances instead of one, and not everyone has a large pantry or kitchen.
  • kevinmchugh 3y ago
    What do crockpots and pressure cookers offer that the instant pot doesn't? I have a breville instant pot-equivalent and can't see ever needing a crockpot. And I understood it to be fundamentally just a pressure cooker with some programmability
• goatforce5 3y ago
  I think the problem is that _everyone has one_. > The company's meteoric growth trajectory has slowed down in recent years. According to S&P, sales declined by almost 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the seventh consecutive quarterly contraction. We got one for the house ~4 years ago. It's still working fine, and we don't need to upgrade to one with Bluetooth connectivity or anything like that. I'm guessing they found the size of their market wasn't infinite.
  • _the_inflator 3y ago
    Yes, no commenter here ever said: I own at least 3 generations of pots. Unlike an iPhone, no one is willing to swap the model.
  • BobbyJo 3y ago
    Isn't that fine though? I mean, if you've created a popular product, and make margin on every sale, why would only making 100 million dollars instead of 400 million dollars in profit push you into bankruptcy? Did they take out a ton of loans to expand their manufacturing capabilities with out of touch sales projections or something?
    • hooverd 3y ago
      Private equity debt, mostly.
  • karaterobot 3y ago
    But then why wouldn't the same process result in the bankruptcy of all (relatively) durable goods manufacturers with a limited set of products? For example, why hasn't Vitamix (blenders) or Zwilling (knives) gone into bankruptcy? Also, I don't think the market for this stuff is ever truly saturated: every day, plenty of people get their first apartment and need to buy appliances. Instant Pot seems similar to other things like microwaves and toasters, which we don't think of as a dead end due to market saturation. I think the "bought by private equity and wrung dry" explanation makes more sense. Or if not that, perhaps just a poorly run business.
• skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  Because everyone has one...you have explained it yourself. Every consumer brand that expands quickly will keep expanding to the point that they saturate their market (GoPro, Doc Martens was a recent IPO in the UK that has self-destructed, it happens over and over). What is unusual about this case is that, afaik, they didn't IPO. Usually the IPO is the prelude to saturation and then bankruptcy because the incentives get totally skewed (and because companies will usually fiddle with supply before the IPO to boost the sale price).
  • harimau777 3y ago
    Declining quality might also be an issue. Doc Martens no longer have the quality or guarantee that they used to. Similarly, other posts have mentioned that Pyrex has apparently changed their formula to a lower quality substitute.
    • ksaj 3y ago
      If Doc Martens went public in the 70's, they'd probably be in a lot better shape today. They aren't nearly as popular now as they were in the 70's thru 90's. They picked a weird time to go public.
      • skippyboxedhero 3y ago
        They didn't. They were acquired by private equity a few years before their IPO. The company had some issues with production/distribution, PE owner fixed these, pumped up supply, created a lot of buzz, sales skyrocketed (they are massively more popular than the 90s, they weren't a particularly big brand then...you have heard of them now), IPO'ed the company and then sales collapsed because everyone has one and they could push the sales dial only so far. They massively increased penetration with young people, the brand was really very limited before PE came in (and tbf, PE have ruined it because everyone has them now). Btw, the bonus pool for the PE owners for the DOC IPO was sizeable. Iirc, it was £400m, there were junior bankers taking home multiple millions on one transaction (Permira has an eat what you kill approach, so the bonus pool was shared with junior staff...it was so large that I don't think senior staff could have taken all of it anyway). You had people in their mid-20s making 10x the value of their parent's house in a few years, it is one of the best PE deals of the last few decades (the bonus pool was actually larger than the purchase price). Consumers significantly under-estimate how easy it is to get them to buy shit. There are PE funds who specialise in just these kind of deals: buy old brand, pump it up with hot air, IPO to clueless retail investors or sell to a bigger company...it works.