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They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US. Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
by hurturue 10mo ago
They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US.
Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
- krackers 10mo agoIt's not just marketing, iRobot basically stopped innovating. For commodity items like robot vacuums or pool cleaners, there is a relentless pressure to innovate. You can't simply coast or else you will soon find yourself left behind. This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-sweeping-the-pool-robot-market https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoThe best robovac was Neato. Lidar and mapping 13 years ago. No cloud. Too bad our American leaders sold us out.
- temp0826 10mo agoIt's pretty crazy just how much better the Neatos were than brand new ones. I wonder if that (German?) company has tried to sell the IP? RIP...
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoVorwerk group. No idea, but it’s pointless imho. Roborock and Eufy (and other competitors) clearly either stole or reverse-engineered the tech. If the IP had enough value then I’m sure Vorwerk would’ve pursued it in court. But here we are.
- sudosysgen 10mo agoThere is not much tech to steal here. 2D lidar mapping is something a high schooler could do 10+ years ago, and that was their core tech. The value was in executing earlier and better, and applying existing tech to robovacuums. If they could have sued they likely would, this is a valuable market.
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoIt’s not just mapping. Also, I recall Neato was often purchased and cannibalized by researchers for its lidar. This was all cutting edge 10+ years ago. Even today, the features it supported offline then is just matched at best today in 2025/2026. Not exceeded; and often crippled when offline.
- sudosysgen 10mo agoThere is not that much more to it than lidar and 2D slam as far as the core technology. There are a lot more features yes but they are not nearly as valuable. I agree they are better, but that's for reason of execution and non-enshitiffication, not core tech.
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoUnintentional I’m sure, but that’s a goalpost shift. What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was. It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused. I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline. Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
- darkwater 10mo agoVorwerk makes really good hardware and home appliances. Its only negative part is the almost pyramidal sales style. It's not really pyramidal as in the scam, because you actually buy something and you don't need to become a seller, but it uses "regular housewives" [1] as sellers. [1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoAny idea why they just sat on the product? Even today, I feel the product is unmatched. Zero creep factor (ignoring later cloud offering)..
- darkwater 10mo agoWell, I don't know how much you can innovate in that space, while keeping things reliable for decades like Vorwerk does. I own a (2n hand) TM31 that's probably 15 years old now, and I have friend with the TM21 (I guess?) which is like the first version and it has over 20 years now and it's still perfectly working. Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking. I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoNot all innovation or value offerings are technical, though admittedly it's what first drew me in. Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives. Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
- _ea1k 10mo agoYeah, this company went through an amazingly bad period. They quite innovating, and also worked really hard to segment their products in a way that would extract every last $ out of the consumer. "Oh you want it not to run into things? You'll need one more step up for another $100-200" It wasn't really based on the hardware, so much as the intentional limitations of the software. Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing. I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.
- lazide 10mo agoI haven't seen a useful innovation in a robovacuum for at least a decade. What are you talking about? Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).
- Izkata 10mo agoEmptying into the dock instead of having to empty the robot's dustbin weekly and almost everything involving mopping in combined units is within that time range. Lidar mapping was also pretty rare a decade ago, Neato was the first and it took a while before others did it too, then there was apps for controlling no-go zones using those maps instead of variations of virtual walls, if they had anything like that at all. Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
- tguvot 10mo agoI got roomba with self emptying dock back in 2018 or so (i think the only one who had it before was ecovacs). same model also came with virtual walls.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoThere are ones that integrate into your furniture, a bit like a dishwasher - plumbing included. Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.
- makeitdouble 10mo agoHow many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ? As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.
- yorwba 10mo agohttps://oec.world/en/profile/hs/domestic-vacuum-cleaners https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/domestic-vacuum-cleaners shows China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Mexico as having a significant trade surplus in domestic vacuum cleaners.
- pbmonster 10mo agoThe German luxury brands have made the "made in Germany" shtick a core part of their marketing. So Miele, Gaggenau, Vorwerk, ect. Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
- okanat 10mo agoI don't know about individual parts but all of my home appliances are BSH and they are all made in Germany. Some of them actually has the factory location in the nameplate.
- rerx 10mo agoBSH (Bosch, Siemens, Neff brands) have their main production sites in Europe, a lot in Germany still. But of course China as well. https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/ https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/ Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm (Edit: No replies after 8 hours, but of course they then came in quickly after Europe woke up..)
- mlrtime 10mo ago
- jack_tripper 10mo ago>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too. Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west. Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones. Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
- pmontra 10mo agoBecause that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products. It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably. By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
- miki123211 10mo agoThis is replication. THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
- leoedin 10mo ago> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them. I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas? Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.