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Brands got worse on purpose

worseonpurpose.com

61–70 of 179 posts

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#61
In the business of apparel, I think this is a natural consequence of high-end buyers turning their noses up at long-lived brands, and working to differentiate themselves from mainstream middle-class buyers. It's a revolt against modernism making more and more goods accessible to people outside the economic and cultural elite.

If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than? For one, you stigmatize mass production and elevate artisanal handmade goods. Those are inherently impossible to democratize. Another thing you can do is replace the appreciation of quality with the act of discovery as proof of elevated taste. Make taste a moving target, so the dirty unwashed masses are always a step behind.

Brands like Brooks Brothers or Eddie Bauer have no place in this system. The best the masses can do to imitate the elites is buy cheap fast fashion from brands that go viral and don't live long enough for anyone to know their quality before they're gone.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#62
post #12

I hate to be the guy to say it, but this is just capitalism working as intended.

If capitalism is about meeting market demands apart from any objective sense of quality, then yes. It's basically curve fitting.

The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.

It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.

The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#64

Get this: the byline, Keyana Sapp? A Palantir employee in AI strategy. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keyanasapp/ They're iterating AI-written consumer populist blog posts and using us as guinea pigs, until we stop noticing they're AI. Their last one was "Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose", which we did great on. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209 , flagged off main page) Don't let them get away with this,…

Can we have something like this blog that's not AI slop? Please!

This is an illustration of why AI is terrible: it just destroys trust. Is the blog good or bad? It's really hard to tell without putting in more work than it'd take to write a similar article.

At least in the pre-AI days, if you saw polished writing, it meant someone at least put some effort into it.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shout out to American Giant. I have like 15 t-shirts from them, some are ten years old and they look new. Buying good stuff saves money in the long run!

Same here.. i bulk buy tons of AG (American Giant) t-shirts (Premium Slub Crew Tee is awesome) and tons of their jeans too.

Interesting. Hadn't heard of American Giant. I buy AG Jeans and Robert Barakett shirts, and this is my usual outfit. However, AG Jeans (https://www.agjeans.com/) is distinct from American Giant jeans (https://www.american-giant.com/collections/mens-bottoms).

I also struggle to identify quality brands. Generally just shop at Nordstorm.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#66

Funny baader-meinhof moment for me reading this. My wife recently bought me some Brooks Brothers polo shirts that essentially dissolved the first time they were washed. I had never seen a shirt that was such poor quality. We were both flabbergasted, and the employees apparently gave her a bit of a hard time when she tried to return them. I suppose I now know why. What this company is doing is taking advantage of, and…

Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discounts, and replaced that with pretending to do that but actually selling terrible trash with a "nice" brand label on it. "Factory" and "overstock" stores are basically a complete lie that the FTC hasn't seen fit to do anything about because the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes. They exist solely to trick you into over-paying for Walmart tier crap.

BB's main-line stuff has also been declining in quality, so that's no guarantee either, unfortunately. I think Covid ended most or all of their remaining US production, which was already on the way out.

Some sub-labels like 1818 are still OK. On sale. Even Brooks' best stuff hasn't been worth full price since... IDK, the '90s probably.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#67
one thing to note (I didn't see it in the article or the comments as of this moment) but a thing that happened a lot with eg LL Bean was, people were buying old Bean stuff from yard sales and so on, then returning it for a new one, under the lifetime warranty. The implicit "customer for life" cycle was thus broken, and they were giving all-but-free stuff to people who had little intention of ever buying new.

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#68
post #2

This is an excellent analysis. It's also why I stopped considering a brand as an indicator of quality (in either direction) a long time ago. That something is a recognizable brand doesn't really mean much.

Have you ever thought "I won't use Google products because they keep killing them?" or "nobody got fired for buying Intel?"

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#69

Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime. Of course not super applicable to every aspect of fashion, but I’ve been doing this for all kinds of products for years and was never disappointed. For fashion I would recommend to hit up small designers, ideally someone you kn…

> Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime.

Eh, I'm not sure that's such good advice. IIRC, I remember stumbling across tacticool "military grade" USB thumb drives, for instance. I doubt those are any better than your typical name-brand drive. "Professional" seems to be an often used marketing keyword to indicate quality or power (e.g. "Mac Pro").

Some keywords that may work better are "industrial" and "commercial," they don't have the same ring to them as "professional" and "military grade."

Re: Brands got worse on purpose

#70

Is there a review platform that focuses on brands, rather than on stores? For instance, if I look for Brooks Brothers reviews, I get reviews of individual stores, of their website, and a couple articles talking about the business. It seems like a good way to combat the information asymmetry being exploited here would be a trustworthy (I know, good luck) review platform that focuses on overall brands, rather than spec…

Author here. The Ledger is designed to cover both sides. 59 Approved brands right now, 31 on Watchlist, plus the Avoid list and Former Great. It's meant to answer "what's still worth buying" just as much as "what's not."

It's a living document and has just been released - will be expanded quickly

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