Selling Lemons

20 years ago, existing as a brand required an effort and resources threshold. Even to have a logo took some level of commitment and skill. Minimum production runs on trivial things like the box insert meant there were stakes to bringing a product to market.

With those barriers gone, we have more brands than ever, and they mean relatively little.

I've found the emergence of these anti-brands to be fascinating, if also annoying. They are not really brands at all. The purpose of a brand is to signal something about who made the product, but these brands deliberately signal nothing.

What's interesting, though, is that these brands typically sell things for which we, in the pre-internet days, would not really have cared much about the brand. If you were looking for a sleep mask, you would likely go to a department store or a store at the mall. That store would have at most one or two different brands of sleep mask to choose from. What would you, the shopper know about these brands? Probably nothing. It was the store's brand that you would trust. The store would do the curation, and if customers got a lot of lemons from the store, they would choose to shop somewhere else.

With Amazon's "everything store", this entire pattern has been distrupted. For a while, their ratings could be trusted, but they eventually eroded. Then you could trust "Amazon's Choice" for a while, but I've started seeing "Amazon's Choice" on brands like "MIEWWO" now. So what to do?

The answer is to go back to shopping at stores you can trust to curate what they sell, or for specialty products, buy direct from some known brand's website. (e.g. something like Leatherman tools or Spyderco knives)

Last summer I had to prep for an outdoors trip, and needed to buy a bunch of gear and clothing. Almost everything I bought I could have gotten from Amazon or a similar marketplace online, but instead I bought from REI and local sporting/camping shops, either buying online and picking up in store, or just going to the store and shopping, and it really felt worth it to get the quality I wanted.

Solution: make millions of brand names and write them on the product.

It's slightly more annoying and expensive for everyone involved, but it circumvents Amazon's policy.

In many fields of human endeavor, there’s the passionate or early adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality producers and pride themselves on that.

But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn’t have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio on their toilet paper in a similar way.

Most people don’t actually care that much about the thread count on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.

They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of the time.

I don’t see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything was still in the real world.

The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most people want “as cheap and low effort as possible.” I think the author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in the areas he cares about.