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> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more
by johnfn 1y ago
> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform
I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and many of them now swear by them as well. And don’t just take my word on it - Consumer Reports also says they’re the top rated sleep mask brand.
There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if I should be complaining.
- nemomarx 1y agothey really could try and stand out more as a brand name? do you know how they compare to manta btw
- johnfn 1y agoI haven't tried Manta, though it's hard to imagine anything that could be improved on MZOO. Probably my only complaint is after a year or two of use they tend to lose some of the elasticity, but at $10 you could get at least 4+ years of use for the same price as a single Manta :)
- rjh29 1y agoI don't think it detracts from his point - there are so many almost identical brands that you can't tell what's good and what's bad anymore. Hopefully, MZOO will establish word-of-mouth reputation much like Anker did.
- johnfn 1y agoMZOO is the #1 brand that comes up when you search sleep mask on Amazon.
- rjh29 1y agoYeah but what does that mean? Does that imply the item is better quality?
- xboxnolifes 1y agoYes, but you can't know that the #1 brand is actually good, or just chance. Does every #1 brand that shows up actually offer the best product? Or is this one instance a happy accident?
- _kidlike 1y agoI still can't believe that Anker has not completely dominated the market... I almost always see other inferior brands when people pull out their powerbanks.
- xyzzy_plugh 1y agoAnecdotally I've had a lot of problems with Anker products over the years. On two separate occasions my power banks died while I was travelling. I had a few Ravpower products that were at least as good. And now Ugreen seems to be producing good stuff. I don't think there is any stickiness here, and it's a cutthroat market. These things are all at a price point where there will never be a winner-takes-all.
- novaleaf 1y agosame here regarding Anker powerbanks, and the bluetooth earbuds I got from them have all been disappointing: bad bluetooth compatibility, and waterproof levels far worse than advertised. I have had good luck with their chargers though, so still buy those.
- _kidlike 1y agoThat's very surprising... Between me and my partner we've gone through 4 of these over the last 10 years. One was lost to airport security, another (the first) just became too slow with newer phones. The other two still work perfectly fine. Maybe they last for us because we're not heavy users? We only use them on vacations.
- creamyhorror 1y agoAnker's gone a little pricier compared to other Chinese brands. Ugreen and Essager were good value several years ago, and Vention more recently.
- Fwirt 1y agoThere's an art to sifting through the "random letter" products on Amazon. While there is a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel garbage that gets churned out by grey market factories, bought in bulk on Alibaba and silkscreened with a random throwaway trademark, there are also smaller Chinese brands that have their own injection molds, engineers, etc. and are actually making quality products, but the easiest way to reach yet another global market is to slap together a random brand on Amazon. Even a Chinese company that's making good quality stuff isn't going to go through all the hassle of setting up a US office, hiring a US marketing team, etc, just to sell their coffee maker. As many have noted, this happened in the 1960s-1980s with Japan. My specific experience is with guitars: all kinds of random companies would buy mass-produced Japanese guitars, slap their own label on them, and sell them in their tiny music shops. Despite the disparate labels, the guitars were mostly coming out of the same handful of factories (Matsumoku et. al.). Of course there were exceptions like Yamaha. Some of the early examples were mediocre at best, but as the product landscape improved, many of the later examples from the 1970s and 80s are competitive with much more expensive guitars today. The only difference with today's landscape is that the Chinese manufacturers are starting to realize they can cut out the middleman. Imagine you were in the 1960s, pre-internet, trying to decide whether you should get a guitar from a brand name you recognized, like Decca, a record company, or some random Japanese company called "Yamaha". Also, after a while you learn to spot the "Alibaba bulk" listings and can then decide whether you want to optimize for price and just buy the cheapest one that is exactly the same as all the others.
- robinkunz 1y agoawesome - was looking ages for a good sleep mask! and i saw mzoo but had the same preassumption. the stuff in europe is so overpriced with 70-100 bucks lol
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- slg 1y agoIt isn't ironic, that is the whole point of a Market for Lemons, the inability to distinguish a good product from bad before purchase due to asymmetric information. That is why I think the author makes a mistake saying that it has no relation to enshittification. The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little preventing them from slowly make their product cheaper and cheaper until they are delivering the same quality of those other brands. That would be the same process as enshittification. The primary difference is that enshittification can happen for other reasons such as a monopoly while a Market for Lemons is specifically because information asymmetry. MZOO might be good now, but the economic incentives suggest they are just in the first stage of this process. It would take an owner committed to quality to not succumb to those incentives and it's impossible for us to know if MZOO has that type of owner.
- aanet 1y agoLiterally, anecdata