The value was in the organization of the research, marketing, sales and distribution which had been built over decades to maximize the profit from the factory.

The value was in the organization of the research, marketing, sales and distribution which had been built over decades to maximize the profit from the factory. You could look at it like chicken & egg, was the product more expensive because it was being sold through a direct network? (A network which grew to become more valuable than the factory even though the factory started out as their only hard asset.) Or was it really a research company, where it took so much to build a product which was noticeably superior, that it had to be sold at a premium in the most premium way possible, very direct-touch sales? Looks like the latter to me. In Wikipedia: >Earl Tupper (1907–1983) asked for pure polyethylene pellets from DuPont to build Tupperware products in 1938.[4] He developed the first product in 1946 Eight years of research before launch, that's pretty good for chemically-oriented things. I can only imagine there was enough momentum built up over a few decades after that to withstand cutting back on research without reversing the company fortunes for a few more decades. Maybe that time has come.