Brands got worse on purpose
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Brands got worse on purpose
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Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#2This 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.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#3Italicizing every hyperlink makes this strange for the reader as italics are typically used to indicate emphasis.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#4Betteridge's Law of Trademarks: anything called "Authentic Brands Group" is as far away from authentic as possible.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#5I think there's a lot of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it.
Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.
You want a button-up shirt that isn't total shit? Over $100. On clearance.
You "can" dress in cheaper alternatives, but those are so bad that their equivalent in the 1930s effectively didn't exist as a new product. You'd be looking at second- or third-hand good (by modern standards, not necessarily anything remarkable for the time, see again those work shirts) clothes, or some simply-constructed homemade garment.
On the plus(?) side we now have clothes so cheap that even though they develop holes or split seams within months, they're not worth repairing even for fairly-poor people, which is... something.
Dressing yourself in new clothes is a lot cheaper now. Dressing yourself in the same quality of new clothes? Maybe not.
[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare them to. I've learned though my wife buying toys for our kids that modern standard-tier Barbies are trash compared to the ones from the '80s, fewer points of articulation, far worse cloth for the clothes, weaker construction, and fewer pieces of clothing or other accessories included. You have to buy from "fancier" Barbie product lines that are way more expensive, or buy non-Barbie dolls that cost a lot more than a modern entry-level Barbie, to get something that's actually similar to a standard Barbie doll in the '80s. So if you look at just "what did a Barbie cost 40 years ago versus today?" you'll get a misleading idea of how those costs have changed, because the actual comp to a modern standard-tier Barbie is some terrible, cheap Barbie knock-off from the Dollar Tree or wherever, in 1986; the cost to get the same-quality product, regardless of brand, has increased a lot more than whatever the cost difference is between a basic 1986 Barbie and a basic 2026 Barbie]
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#6This 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.
This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#7This 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.
Extracting any useful signal from brands requires keeping up with news about the businesses, and keeping track of various sub-labels and the hieroglyphic knowledge to distinguish them, which is so fucking tedious but is still easier than evaluating every single garment you're interested in in-person (and developing the skills and knowledge to perform that evaluation).
Or you just have enough money to buy only from less-widely-known but actually-good brands and don't worry much about price. The ones that haven't started cashing in on their "high class" branding by moving down-market toward the middle class... yet.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#8This is entirely by design. From a shareholder's perspective, the only thing that matters is number go up, when you take over a struggling company, they will squeeze every last drop of life from it in order to get some profit.
The fact that they are being quite secretive about their outsourcing, or at least not publishing it as a restructuring plan that they lay out to customers, is a little scummy, but makes sense for private equity. Milk as many people as they can while they still trust the brand.
From a shareholder's perspective, it's working as expected. And that's the real issue. If brands took more care of not expanding too fast that they require private equity and give away their ownership of the company slowly, then with patience and customer respect, we see its a good mix. But it seems people just get greedy or something and want it all faster.
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#9I'm glad they had the "Brands That Still Make Their Own Stuff" list, that was my first thought. What other brands are still decent?
Re: Brands got worse on purpose
#10Support brands with values and local manufacturing. For example: American Giant, Origin, Crye Precision, Randolph Engineering, American Optical, and many more.