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Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#61
post #4

This assumes there's no advancement in clothing manufacturing and design. Could you buy a 20 year old computer today and use it with a modern OS? I believe the engineers and artisians who make the clothes you wear are also pushing the boundaries of fabric, patterns and cuts to feed an ever-famished audience looking for the 'next thing'. Besides, they read the room - you no longer fit in those same sizes anymore!

Using a T-shirt as an example, I propose an API where there is an immutable part -- the T-shirt body. It is about the properties of the fabric, color, and style. These parameters are standardized and do not change. And there are engineering solutions that change, and this is where there is progress and novelty. It is about logistics and production. I assume that the next stage of development is cotton printing. Is this solution technologically new? Absolutely. Can we make it so that a T-shirt buyer does not feel the difference? I assume yes, and this is the task and philosophy of the project.

My project is not about an audience that is looking for "the next new thing". I am researching if there are people who care about preserving a choice they already made and not spending their resources on searching for a replacement.

About sizes I agree. A person changes with age. I think this can be considered in the size range. After some time a customer takes another size, but the item remains the same in material, color, and style.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#62

I'd probably pay a premium for a few "boring" items if I knew they'd still be available 10 years from now.

Yes, I think this is the key point of the whole discussion. And thank you for this thought. The value is not only in the quality of the item, but also in preserving the choice already made by a person. You find something that fits you once and you don't spend your time and energy searching for a replacement anymore. No "we discontinued the item", "we changed the material", as people write here about Levi's jeans.

I want to test this idea with a T-shirt.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#63
I have the T shirt problem myself. My solution is quite simple. I have bought 500 of the shirt I like the most. My style is grayscale, so I bought greys and blacks. I’ve been wearing the same shirt style for over a decade and have only utilized about 30-40 shirts.

I do this with deodorant, soap, and shaving supplies too.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#64

I have the T shirt problem myself. My solution is quite simple. I have bought 500 of the shirt I like the most. My style is grayscale, so I bought greys and blacks. I’ve been wearing the same shirt style for over a decade and have only utilized about 30-40 shirts. I do this with deodorant, soap, and shaving supplies too.

Great solution! It completely solves the problem of favorite things disappearing.

I don't have the money to buy 500 T-shirts. And I don't have the space for them either. So I started thinking: what if we made T-shirts where the important thing is to keep them exactly the same, never change them, and never discontinue them? I'm talking specifically about T-shirts. If you knew such an option existed, would it have affected your decision about the T-shirts?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#65

I have the T shirt problem myself. My solution is quite simple. I have bought 500 of the shirt I like the most. My style is grayscale, so I bought greys and blacks. I’ve been wearing the same shirt style for over a decade and have only utilized about 30-40 shirts. I do this with deodorant, soap, and shaving supplies too.

Great solution! It completely solves the problem of favorite things disappearing. I don't have the money to buy 500 T-shirts. And I don't have the space for them either. So I started thinking: what if we made T-shirts where the important thing is to keep them exactly the same, never change them, and never discontinue them? I'm talking specifically about T-shirts. If you knew such an option existed, would it have affe…

I mean, I thought that was already the case. Places like The Gap has something called the essential tee. Have had it for decades. It changes all the time. It seems like every time they run a batch or move manufacturing it changes a bit. The Hanes brand of shirts is supposed to be a staple.

I’ve been burned too many times and it would take you many years to earn my trust as a new company. You also still have to hit the style, size, material, fit exactly right for me to want to even call it my forever shirt. I’m pretty particular which is why after having my favorite styles rug pulled many times and suffering for this problem for years I did the bulk order thing.

If you don’t have the money for 500 t shirts I don’t think you have the money to start this business either tbh.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take for example the Sony Walkman, even if you want one really badly the actual factories that make the specialized parts have gone, been repurposed. Or a specific color yellow that only came from overfeeding cows at the turn of the century in India. Things that utilize that incredibly bright yellow color are going to have to use a replacement, and will never be exactly the same. Anyway, thinking of these ~fringe exa…

I like that we moved from things to philosophy. That's exactly what the project I'm building is about. I see that the pain I described here is shared by all of us. It doesn't matter what the item is, where we live, or what language we speak. And at this point I understand that I can't solve the whole problem. But I can solve it using one specific item as an example. I want to make a T-shirt that won't change after 1,…

Not only does the molecular composition of something matter, but also the geography, climate, terrain, terroir, season, temperature, and more, amounting to "where" it was sourced from. Take, for tangible example, water. Water from a volcanic island like anything in the Pacific Ocean, Japan for example, has a particular deliciousness making it exceptionally suitable for green tea. The water itself is imbued with minerals and elements. On the molecular or atomic level we might call it water, h2o, but when we look at the varying strata of composition, we find that it does not just have one unique thumbprint/fingerprint for composition at the atomic level, like h2o, it also has many layers at different scales that affect its flavor and effects on the body. Similar to how cotton candy is made, by swirling all the surrounding elements into one substance, naturally occurring resources and fruits/crops are a seamless and edgeless amalgam of their surrounding "context" - constituted by temperature, air density, exposure-to-sun, rock-contents,, the thing itself is woven/weaved from the surrounding space/matter/properties and yields a very specific outcome-fruit.

So when you cover yourself with a blanket your parents bought you when you were a child, you are covering yourself with cotton that grew in a specific climate, in a specific place, with soil and sunshine and water and temperature that baked that cotton plant and made it exactly what it is/was. Growing the same seed elsewhere will not have identical outcomes. If you grow it in a cold place, you will get a different fabric texture than if you grow it in a hot place, or a moist place, or a dry place. And beyond the suitable range for growing, it simply will not bear fruit. We label different crops and resources by the same label and call them "varieties" of one another, but in reality we are simply being lazy with our specificity and our categorization. A plant grown in a hot climate has a tendency to transmit the heat it was gestated/incubated in, and a plant grown in a cold climate has a tendency to transmit and transfer the coolness it was gestated in. These are subtle truths not noticed by the masses - the system of conditions is imbued, is etched, into the summary product.

Consider how certain varieties of wine or lemons or drink are famous specifically because of the origin climate/temperature/soil. Sicilian lemons cannot be grown anywhere, just in Sicily. Champagne is named after the region from which it bears its eponymous name. And it is no secret that two "identical" dishes prepared in two completely different countries will taste very different and have different effects on the body, because the ingredients are sourced locally, and in the sourcing is the makeup, not on the exacting-chemical/chemistry level, but on layers that are subtle -- in the folds between the atom and aspect-of-the-naked-eye, true layers and strata that are largely invisible and untracked, knowable only by the environment which bore/gave-birth-to them.

In certain mystical traditions there is the concept of the "mandala" which is not only the presence in the center, it is the surroundings. Every fruit comes not only from its own inherent properties as encoded in the seed, but also in the soil , the water, the metaphorical sunshine it receives, the steady state temperature of the spot. All these factors constitute what we call the "material."

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#67
post #54

The only viable solution is to reduce dependencies where possible and deal with it. Nobody in the commercial space is going to follow step 4. It inhibits growth and innovation and increasing profit margins. LTS support would cost a lot of money and my guess is that would not gain enough traction to make it profitable for them. Otherwise, they'd already be doing all of this. I mean, it's talked about constantly in com…

"Otherwise, they'd already be doing all of this. I mean, it's talked about constantly in commercial circles." Do you have any links or examples where I can read about this? This is the first time I've heard about it. Thank you.

When I say "it's talked about constantly in commercial circles" this comes from personal experience, so no.

Put another way, don't you think companies have considered this? It's a rather obvious idea. So, assuming it's been considered, why don't they do it?

Spoiler: it's probably not economically viable based on the current consumer client, which is "buy cheap, throw away when broken, repeat". It's pretty sad how quickly the US has gone from repairable to throw-away products all while proclaiming concern for the environment.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else tired of brands discontinuing your favorite everyday items?

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that we moved from things to philosophy. That's exactly what the project I'm building is about. I see that the pain I described here is shared by all of us. It doesn't matter what the item is, where we live, or what language we speak. And at this point I understand that I can't solve the whole problem. But I can solve it using one specific item as an example. I want to make a T-shirt that won't change after 1,…

Not only does the molecular composition of something matter, but also the geography, climate, terrain, terroir, season, temperature, and more, amounting to "where" it was sourced from. Take, for tangible example, water. Water from a volcanic island like anything in the Pacific Ocean, Japan for example, has a particular deliciousness making it exceptionally suitable for green tea. The water itself is imbued with miner…

I completely agree with you. And I like the depth you have gone into. The same variety of cotton grown in Portugal, Poland, Italy and Turkey will be different. Moreover, the same variety of cotton grown in the same place, but at different times will be different. Because the year can be hot and dry, or cold and rainy. All this will affect the cotton. And it will be different.

I have been thinking about this problem of heterogeneity. And I am grateful that you showed this complexity. I have a solution.

The name of this solution is -- arithmetic mean or in terms of material -- a mixture. I don't bet on one variety of cotton. Because it is different and we have already seen and discussed this. I make a mix of different varieties of cotton that meet the required parameters. And then I get a stable average, independent of the year or geography.

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