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I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not

by rtkwe 2y ago

I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using a chair all day and out in the world.

maxglute 2y ago
I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending aluminum pipes to avoid amortizing capex costs. Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000. We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
  - maxglute 2y ago
    TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke. It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this. >IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.
      - dghlsakjg 2y ago
        > Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are. I think that's what people are missing. His competition is $5k wheelchairs that are often pictured with another $10k + of customizations. I don't think that most people realize that $5k wheelchairs don't come with so much as a seat cushion as standard.
      - maxglute 2y ago
        Looks like very little bespoke parts - the front pork pieces, that's some worker feeding pipe stock to an expensive machine after punching a few numbers for $10 an hour. The wheels are commodity, can't imagine the BOM for something like this is >$200. Competitors are other western companies charging even more exorbitant prices, they managed to charge less which is great. But that doesn't mean the cost is not still overall absurd for what you get. Maybe reasonable American manufacturing prices, sure, it's a good value product. I'm not familiar with the machine, but I've priced out bending aluminum pipes for various architecture details and fitness equipment and per piece price is peanuts in Asia compared to fabricating in NA.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products. It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either. [0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
  - maxglute 2y ago
    Looking the configurator (very cool btw) the bespoke part is a few bends in the front fork, rest of it is modular parts that are fastened together. Looks like you can stuff hundreds of these in a container to bring piece cost down. I do think the big selling point is speed since they talk about months of lead time from other vendors. Regardless, looks like much cheaper than competition - I admire what they're trying to do.
    - rtkwe 2y ago
      Stocking when you have 25k different variations is a whole different nightmare and massive cost that probably rivals the cost of just making them to order with the right equipment here in the US. Maybe there are common enough configs that people take you could prestock a subset and make to order the rest but it's still a huge amount of work and cost to manage and stock that vs the option they took of making the frames to order.

by rtkwe 2y ago

maxglute 2y ago

I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending aluminum pipes to avoid amortizing capex costs. Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.

Suppafly 2y ago
>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000. We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
- maxglute 2y ago
  TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke. It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this. >IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      > Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are. I think that's what people are missing. His competition is $5k wheelchairs that are often pictured with another $10k + of customizations. I don't think that most people realize that $5k wheelchairs don't come with so much as a seat cushion as standard.
    - maxglute 2y ago
      Looks like very little bespoke parts - the front pork pieces, that's some worker feeding pipe stock to an expensive machine after punching a few numbers for $10 an hour. The wheels are commodity, can't imagine the BOM for something like this is >$200. Competitors are other western companies charging even more exorbitant prices, they managed to charge less which is great. But that doesn't mean the cost is not still overall absurd for what you get. Maybe reasonable American manufacturing prices, sure, it's a good value product. I'm not familiar with the machine, but I've priced out bending aluminum pipes for various architecture details and fitness equipment and per piece price is peanuts in Asia compared to fabricating in NA.
rtkwe 2y ago
Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products. It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either. [0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
- maxglute 2y ago
  Looking the configurator (very cool btw) the bespoke part is a few bends in the front fork, rest of it is modular parts that are fastened together. Looks like you can stuff hundreds of these in a container to bring piece cost down. I do think the big selling point is speed since they talk about months of lead time from other vendors. Regardless, looks like much cheaper than competition - I admire what they're trying to do.
  - rtkwe 2y ago
    Stocking when you have 25k different variations is a whole different nightmare and massive cost that probably rivals the cost of just making them to order with the right equipment here in the US. Maybe there are common enough configs that people take you could prestock a subset and make to order the rest but it's still a huge amount of work and cost to manage and stock that vs the option they took of making the frames to order.