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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#221

Post by mbravorus »

intended wrote: post #161
JimDabell wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think lifestyle businesses are great, but if you are building a lifestyle business and meeting with VC firms then you are wasting their time. They can’t invest in you. Their business model is designed to take a large number of risky bets to try to catch a unicorn. If you have a less risky business that isn’t going to take off like a rocket, it might be a great idea and a massive success for you, but it isn’t compat…

That said - VCs / PE are effectively in the business of outcompeting Lifestyle businesses.

Outcompeting? Hell no. Eliminating - sure.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#222

Post by reliablereason »

nakedneuron wrote: post #207

Has anybody made the same observation? : Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot. I'm compiling a list of examples I encountered where in a philosophical (sometimes not philosophical) context someone brings up the table (rarer so the chair) as an instance of a physical thing. I started compiling this list when I was convinced this is a thing. Further examples (book citations, links) greatly encouraged i…

Personally I have always attributed my tendency of that to the fact that I sit on chairs or at a table when I talk about these types of things. So they are convenient examples to use in the moment, examples of objects that people have a good understanding of (or so they think).

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#223

Post by lovemenot »

nakedneuron wrote: post #212
coldtea wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have an idea of why this is. Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple too? One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables it wont).

While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows. Also there are things that have a lot less variables than a table. I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)

I will bite. How do these multi-thousand-year furniture lobbyists continue to conspire to successfully frame our contemporary ideas toward their agenda?

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#224

Post by wruza »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #151
wruza wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor costs don’t rise tenfold with proper wood though. It’s the same wooden board they have to cut and mount. US wood-based markets are notoriously ridiculous.

No, but perhaps labor drops tenfold with switching from proper wood to glue mixed with toilet paper. You throw sheets of that pulp on a machine that laminates them, then throw that on a CNC cutter, add a bag with some screws and glue, a sheet with instructions, and ship the complete flat-pack piece of furniture to customer. Not much human labor involved, and it scales well.

Yeah, but you can do exactly that with proper wood too. As far as I understand, there's no reasonably priced option like this in US. Feels like this either-or extremity is a learned coping strategy for something going wrong with wood at US end. And with matresses, and table tops. That something's going wrong at the other ends is well-known, but it doesn't have to correlate 100% with the problem.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#225

Post by hansvm »

photon_lines wrote: post #218
beowulfey wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently. Small "lifestyle" businesses do not operate under this principle and encourage reuse and renewal. They represent opposing philosophies. Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that i…

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fac…

The problem isn't just short-term thinking. You alluded to another point yourself:

> Looks great on the outside

Consumers aren't often equipped to evaluate quality, partly due to skill issues, partly because the corners are cut in places which are hard to spot before purchase. Price doesn't work as a discriminating factor (except to filter out a portion of the worst inventory) because of the number of brands explicitly trying to pass off junk as high-quality luxuries.

If you really can't tell which one is better, and you're as likely to get scammed buying something expensive, why not put less money on the line for something that has a chance of being good enough?

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#226

Post by photon_lines »

borski wrote: post #219
photon_lines wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fac…

The problem is that sofas haven’t come down significantly in price. These shittier products aren’t actually much cheaper than, for example, a custom made sofa. I know this because I just bought a custom made sofa. But the quality is incomparable.

Yes but this is once again where the free-markets and economics come in: if the mass-produced ones match the custom-made ones in price, consumers will start switching to custom-made sofas. The mass-production suppliers will either have to 1) lower the price of their sofas or 2) increase the quality of production to match the quality of the custom-made ones. Both 1 and 2 are great for consumers and this is why competition is so great :). Notice that all of this is driven by the choices the CONSUMER (me and you) make.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#227

Post by bthallplz »

parpfish wrote: post #136

I always thought “lifestyle business” meant something else. In this article it means “small business that supports the lifestyle of its owner/employees” I thought it meant that it was a business that provided a non-essential usually-trendy “lifestyle goods/accessories” for its customers.

Ooh, the term is indeed used differently depending on what it's being discussed in relation to: as in the article, the business's structure itself and its relation to its owner's hopes/expectations for it; or as you pointed to, the industry/market/product or service category of the business's product or service.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#228

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2562 wrote: post #85
verisimi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In conversation with venture capitalists, you hear the phrase “lifestyle business”, meaning one that is doing nicely and rewarding the people who run it and which isn’t planning for unbounded growth. The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt. This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it t…

The contemptuous phrase ‘lifestyle business’ is just VCs saying the quiet part out loud. You want to run a company that feeds your family and provides some decent stable jobs, indefinitely? You must be a clown, they think. The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster was: “Who gets fired?” by which the guy meant, whose jobs are on the line if you bui…

[deleted]

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#229

Post by jannyfer »

parpfish wrote: post #136

I always thought “lifestyle business” meant something else. In this article it means “small business that supports the lifestyle of its owner/employees” I thought it meant that it was a business that provided a non-essential usually-trendy “lifestyle goods/accessories” for its customers.

Same here, but maybe I was thinking of “lifestyle brand” and I’d never actually heard “lifestyle business”.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#230

Post by alerighi »

Micoloth wrote: post #110

Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big brands exist? Small business (or “lifestyle business”) vs big brand is often framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in practice it often is. But in theory the two things are completely unrelated. Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it. Small business vs big brand…

> Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it.

They could but they won't. Because they realized (and probably all agreed) that it's far more profitable to sell the customer a new product, rather than fixing the old one. And since they are the big brands, and they have practically a monopoly (think about big tech companies) they make the rules. They even have the power to sue the crap to which small business tries to fix their products, like Apple did multiple times.

The repair culture is not something sustainable for a big business, that to stay in the market has to increase year after year their sales, and the only way to do so is... making consumers buy new products, even if they don't need them. How to do so? Decrease the quality of the products, make them impossible to repair. No big business would stay alive if they sold you a couch that lasts a century.

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