What's a $4000 Suit Worth? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#181

Post by jbigelow76 » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 3:46 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #180

jbigelow76 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'He just increased his price'- Is not very nice if you want to get new customers. Raising prices may actually increase sales. I think some of the problem is a lot of us are seeing this relationship between the tailor and his clients through the lens of software or service providers. For any right thinking business person there is no pride in going into hacker meetup and saying "I just had to upgrade from the 28 dolla…

As patio11 often points out you're wrong about software & suits being in different worlds. Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit. I routinely approve those sort of expenses without spending more then 2 seconds thinking about them.

> Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit.

But I'm not referring to benefits, I'm referring to "bragging rights". Say your company was utilizing a SaaS that offered a "Freelancer" tier and an "Agency" tier (where "Freelancer" costs less and offers less than "Agency"). Now if your company's needs could be serviced by the limits of the "Freelancer" tier would you pay more for the "Agency" tier just for the prestige of saying you pay for the "Agency" tier? No, you wouldn't. However that does happen with suits (or watches or luxury cars or other luxury goods), it's signalling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#182

Post by asr » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 3:53 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #89

asr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this could be really bad advice. Maybe the customers who'd pay 10k for a suit won't go to some guy's living room for fittings. Or maybe the price of top bespoke tailors in town is comparable, because they make better use of lower-paid assistants. Or maybe, to convince a bank to make the loan he needs to move into a nicer place, he needs to show the bank he has a large backlog of orders. Or maybe he's…

Totally not offended by that comment, but I strongly disagree. It is entirely possible that he's found the correct price for a suit: two hours' labor for his core customers. It is entirely possible that the devs who tell me their clients won't pay more than $20 an hour for Rails programming are accurate, and that they're correct in thinking that they're not skilled enough to work for better clients. It is entirely po…

I think the point of the article (which wasn't very clear; maybe Adam Davidson should stick to radio) was that even at a price most of us would consider expensive, this guy doesn't make much money. And the reason is that, as the modern economy makes everything else cheaper, things that depend upon people's labor get relatively more expensive.

So bespoke suits have gone from being a huge part of the suit industry to being a tiny part of it (not non-viable, just not very important). If bespoke tailors want to keep from becoming ever more expensive/niche, Davidson speculates, they will have to adopt at least some labor-saving techniques.

Note your solution--raising prices--is exactly what Davidson is annoyed about. As tailors raise prices, fewer and fewer people can buy bespoke suits. Which is bad. I'd like a custom-built suit, but I definitely won't bet getting one.

You've jumped into this assuming Davidson is writing about a business problem. But I think he's coming at it from a consumer point of view. He doesn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out if the bespoke tailor can raise prices because, well, higher prices reduce consumer surplus, so that doesn't solve the problem he's concerned with.

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#183

Post by tptacek » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 3:55 PM UTC

wolfhumble wrote: post #168

patio11 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally not offended by that comment, but I strongly disagree. It is entirely possible that he's found the correct price for a suit: two hours' labor for his core customers. It is entirely possible that the devs who tell me their clients won't pay more than $20 an hour for Rails programming are accurate, and that they're correct in thinking that they're not skilled enough to work for better clients. It is entirely po…

From the last part of the article I quote the following: "Even the richest customer simply has to wait — sometimes months — before the new suit is finished. No wonder so many pass up a $4,000 bespoke suit for a ready-to-wear Kiton version at twice the price." So customers are clearly willing to pay more, but they are not too keen on waiting two months for the suit. I guess there are clients that buy a given amount of…

Direct benefit of drastically increasing pricing to best fit offering to profit curve: ability to hire skilled labor to accelerate delivery of offering to customers.

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#184

Post by wolfhumble » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:46 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #183

wolfhumble wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the last part of the article I quote the following: "Even the richest customer simply has to wait — sometimes months — before the new suit is finished. No wonder so many pass up a $4,000 bespoke suit for a ready-to-wear Kiton version at twice the price." So customers are clearly willing to pay more, but they are not too keen on waiting two months for the suit. I guess there are clients that buy a given amount of…

Direct benefit of drastically increasing pricing to best fit offering to profit curve: ability to hire skilled labor to accelerate delivery of offering to customers.

Without going to full automation I guess there are basically two process options here: 1) Add more tailors that work with the suit from start to finish, thus duplicating the work of the lone tailer Mr. Peter Frew in the article.

2) Split the process of Mr. Frew's work among different tailors.

One other company mentioned in the article, Greenfield, is implementing option 2): ". . . there are huge efficiency gains when one complex process is broken down into constituent parts and each worker specializes in one thing. At Greenfield, one worker sews pockets all day long, and another focuses entirely on joining front and back jacket pieces."

According to the article their suits sells for $2000.

Without testing it out it is hard to say if process option 1) will necessarily be seen as more valuable than process option 2) from the customers perspective. It is also hard to say if Greenfield's suits are of lower quality compared to those of Mr. Frew.

At the end of day the story the tailor(s) can create about their workmanship are as important as the prices and processes they put into action. Price is just one element in the marketing mix and can't been seen as separate from the rest, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#185

Post by thenomad » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:55 PM UTC

jbigelow76 wrote: post #181

harryh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As patio11 often points out you're wrong about software & suits being in different worlds. Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit. I routinely approve those sort of expenses without spending more then 2 seconds thinking about them.

> Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit. But I'm not referring to benefits, I'm referring to "bragging rights". Say your company was utilizing a SaaS that offered a "Freelancer" tier and an "Agency" tier (where "Freelancer" costs less and offers less than "Agency"). Now if your company's needs could be serviced by the limits of the "F…

FWIW: I was reading an article from Patrick / Patio11 just the other day when he talks about having experience with large companies upgrading their SaaS package just because the upgraded name sounded better on an expense report.

So it sounds like some SaaS upgrades may, in fact, be linked to the name of the package and nothing more!

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#186

Post by fusiongyro » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:54 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #176

fusiongyro wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just you, but it's also not everyone else. It's a regionalism.

Maybe the weather has something to do with that as well? I live in a very temperate part of the Northeast.

It might. But out here in the Southwest, we don't dress like Saudis even though their garb is better suited to the climate. For a lot less than $4000 New Englanders could wear mountaineering suits and that would probably retain heat and repel the elements better than a suit, but I doubt that one's coming around either.

Ultimately it's just a cultural difference, and searching for rationality behind it isn't going to bear fruit.

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#187

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 7:15 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #137

dredmorbius wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some people, there's a risk on the outside as well. Pacemakers. Less so these days, but still. My understanding is that there's a possibility of creating induced current in the pacemaker. Which is to say, the non-ionizing radiation has an effect at a distance, albeit in a manufactured artifact, not (in this case) organic tissue.

It is not the 2.4Ghz radiation that causes the trouble with pacemakers. Its the plain old magnetic field generated by the inductive inrush from the giant coils that convert the power to feed to the magnetron tube in the microwave. Any large inductive load poses the same risk.

I'm getting slightly different information. The best "how do Microwaves interfere with pacemakers" info I could find was from The Straight Dope, which indicated that it was actually microwave leakage, not the coils themselves, which induced the current. And I'm aware that among the reasons you don't nuke metallic objects is because of the charges induced. Another source showing effects of various EMR frequencies indicated that induced currents were among the effects of microwave and other longer-wave radiation.

That said, other risks for pacemakers include store anti-theft devices, most of which are also inductive coils so far as I understand.

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#188

Post by shrughes » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 10:13 PM UTC

noahc wrote: post #173

yummyfajitas wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need only one axiom to get a demand curve: The universe of potential purchasers consists of a set of agents (i=1...N) and each agent has a reserve price R[i]. If a good is priced R[i], Agent[i] will not.

I'm not sure this is correct. I remember in one episode of Mixergy, Andrew Warner said something to the effect of "X was the most expensive, so I bought it thinking they'd be the best and they sucked! Don't buy x." Had X been cheaper, he wouldn't have bought it. What am I missing?

You're missing the fact that nobody is denying that economic principles are a bit noisy in reality, and nobody's denying that demand curves are shaped by marketing and that the price itself is part of this.

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#189

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 10:39 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #108

pfedor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the suit is dead? Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits. Since the only function of a suit is status signaling, it seems just a matter of time until everyone else catches up and suits will be replaced by bike jerseys or whatever.

I know it may not seem that way sometimes, but NoCal is not the entire world - nor does the entire world take their cultural cues from NoCal. The suit is very much alive in NY, in London, the entire legal world, and in many other places. That's just during the day. For formal events / outings it is SF that is the extreme outlier. In the rest of the country if you are going to a fancy restaurant, a wedding, an awards…

[deleted]

Re: What's a $4000 Suit Worth?

#190

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 10:39 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #108

pfedor wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the suit is dead? Don't know about other places, but at least in NoCal high status people don't wear suits. Since the only function of a suit is status signaling, it seems just a matter of time until everyone else catches up and suits will be replaced by bike jerseys or whatever.

I know it may not seem that way sometimes, but NoCal is not the entire world - nor does the entire world take their cultural cues from NoCal. The suit is very much alive in NY, in London, the entire legal world, and in many other places. That's just during the day. For formal events / outings it is SF that is the extreme outlier. In the rest of the country if you are going to a fancy restaurant, a wedding, an awards…

Norcal is a nice place to live, but it is not a fashion mecca.

In Southern California though the suit is totally impractical, unless you like to be drenched is sweat. Most of the world is the same at I'd go so far to say the suit is a minor cause of global warming ... all those high rises with no windows running AC all day. Mostly unnecessary.