Whenever I buy clothes they always end up getting holes quickly, I burn through socks fast, my bags keep breaking, my phones magically shit themselves and my chargers melt. I’m sick of everything being a wear part and I’m wondering where people get things that last.
I’m not the best to explain this, but, small businesses are hard. They’re limited to more traditional business types (resturaunts, grocery stores, niche services). Modern economies heavily prefer stuff at scale. There’s a reason why Framework has two laptops but dell makes two dozen new ones each year.
I’m also definitely a bad choice to explain this. Clothing is also hard. Since the 00s clothing technology has skyrocketed. Just today I was wearing an eight year old shirt that had never torn, faded, or lost a button. Pants are better at hiding erections. Bras are just better in general. Loose threads dont happen as oftrn, amd theyre less destructive.
Large scale manufacturing of clothing can create good products now, often better than handmade stuff. It can also be really bad. It’s hard to tell, and fast fashion is abhorrent for the market. There isn’t something that’s cheap and good, though.
I’ll say that clothing is not hard. Let’s not talk about cheap for a second. There is enough accumulated knowledge that it should be possible to make long lasting high quality clothing at an enormous scale. The problem in this is the cost and profit margins. It is much more profitable for clothing brands to sell ephemeral stuff that you have to buy over and over again rather than something they sell to you once in a decade owing to the longevity. It is not a problem of scale why fast fashion and generally available clothing is terrible. It’s a problem of economic motives.
Talking about cheap vs. expensive, I would say that it was true about a decade ago that you could reliably expect expensive stuff from good brands to last long. But as time has gone by this has begun to be less and less true. Luxury brands are looking to expand their customer base and profits because that’s what their shareholders demand. As such, they are also adopting techniques from fast fashion to produce lower quality clothing at a cheaper price to boost their profit margin. So you could buy an expensive item these days and it would be a dice roll for it to turn out long lived.
There is also the option of niche brands producing good stuff. Like Darn Tough Socks making indestructible socks. But sometimes these brands end up being acquired by venture capital bros who then run them in the ground.
There are a ton of economic factors that churn out terrible products. Large scale manufacturing is not important IMO.
People also don’t seem to know that things like expensive clothes are sold at like a 50% markup, which is fucking wild. In my work it’s considered a great job if you make 10% profit
Yes that’s what I said.
Yep
Make sure to account for survivorship bias and your own luck and perception. Are you basing this off the fact you have stuff in your closet from that time? If so, make sure to understand there is probably a lot of stuff that broke from that time too.
And it’s hard to do that because of economies to scale. Their name implies they only sell socks.
It’s not large scale manufacturing. I didn’t say that I said “stuff”. It’s vertical integration, large scale distribution, established brands, logistics, customer support, brand optics, etc. The sock company in your comment has “socks” in their name.