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Comment by mason55 | Hacker News Reader

What you’re describing is exactly how brands work. The garbage brands will continue to cycle because there’s no reason to keep the brand name (in fact it’s better to change it so that people who got burned don’t know it’s the same). But the good brands are investing in the brand name and so they will stick around and you’ll start to recognize them.

Look at a company like Anker. They operate in spaces filled with garbage but they have managed to become trustworthy.

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I love Anker. I remember when I discovered them around 2013 and started making purchasing decisions on Amazon by just looking for their brand name, it almost felt like cheating, since I knew I wouldn't need to do an hour of research to make sure, "ok is this charger going to be the kind that explodes." So I just buy Anker and it works like a dream.

The million dollar question is, how do we know which brands are the good ones?

Is there a community which tackles this sort of problem alone? The best I have found so far is to find the community surrounding a type of product, especially on Reddit - there is a community around almost every interest imaginable - and figure out which brands they recommend, via search or just asking.

Often they even have advice in a stickied thread or wiki article.

There was a website here the other day that planned to build a community of people that review products as they age. A review after the first 2 weeks, 2 years then 10 years etc. "Buy for Life" or something like that.

Perhaps buyforlifeproducts.com? See submissions about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buyforlifeproducts.co...

> Look at a company like Anker.

Same with "gl.inet" (weird name, yes).

They operate in the most trashed-up market on earth: cheap internet-connected widgets. But I will buy from them every single time because all their products run a modified OpenWRT and all of them let you replace it with vanilla upstream OpenWRT. And all of their recent products have a physical "unbrick this device" button you hold down to boot to a slick reflash-the-firmware-over-the-network ROM.

I will not hesitate to pay twice as much for a gl.inet widget because of this.

An example for not producing anything themselves (afaik) but only putting their name on actually decent products is Blitzwolf. A brand like that can be built on the most basic due diligence (and thus not significantly higher prices). A bonus would be actually delivering some technical detail on a product, but even "manufacturers" like TaoTronics seem to be having a really hard time doing that.

I'd say Aliexpress is probably a better way to find somewhat established (or trying, which is what matters) brands than Amazon.

This is on point. When I first ordered something from Anker (a USB-C dongle IIRC), I was worried it'd be knock-off trash. Their brand hadn't been established long enough for me to evaluate their reputation. But the quality was high and now I trust it. I was happy to pick up one of their MacBook Pro USB-C hubs on Prime Day, and would happily buy more Anker supplies in the future.

There’s a cycle with these brands. Monster started out not insane and then quickly just became bad stuff with a brand. I also remember when Belkin used to be consistently good and now it varies by product.

I’m afraid for when monoprice stops being an awesome brand and starts coasting.

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