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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Those “exclusive pieces” are typically not designed for a given brand, but are designed on spec by various ID houses, perhaps with a brand or set of brands in mind as target, and are then pitched and sold, or pulled in by buyers. This has been the way for at least the past several decades, and fashion and furnishings have lead the trend which is now ubiquitous. Crate & Barrel I know do this, as I’ve worked with Otto on some of their other brands, and they consolidated much of their buying years ago - big part of their efficiency.

There are still some retailers who retain some in-house design talent, but they’re few and far between, as it provides little differentiation in the eye of the consumer, who typically can’t tell an in-house from an acquired design - so in-house design is typically an idiosyncratic choice now, as it doesn’t provide a competitive edge over those who claim in-house design.

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"ID houses" in this context is interior design, right? How does manufacturing work -- interior designers are typically not manufacturers? This is super interesting to me, so if you have any links or further info about this process, I'd love to know more.

Industrial design. Whole point is that there’s usually complete vertical integration from conception to manufacturing to logistics, so they can crank out stuff that they can make without a headache with existing toolchains and ship it cheap.

Ah that makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarifying.

Does it achieve the same outcome, at least on the quality side of things? Instead of a brand sending specs aligned to what their brand should represent, the seller creates spec to match what it expects target brands to look for.

Typically, yeah - it does mean that if you work long enough in the market you start seeing the repetition, and you can start to see individual design houses behind selections at brands, but quality is generally unimpeded as it’s a competitive market, and the economies of scale for both cost and quality achievable by an outsourced designer/manufacturer with low labour costs aren’t insignificant.

Of course, it’s possible to choose the wrong supplier, or have mismatched expectations - a clothing retailer I worked with sent an entire range to be shredded because it arrived with appalling quality (like, seams that hadn’t even been stitched) and they weren’t prepared to even put it in outlets - which is where a lot of the misfires end up - it isn’t “oh no our factory had a booboo” or “whoops we made too much”, it’s a calculated “X% of the stock we bought last year was crap, therefore we have Y stock to support our outlet presence”. Some brands deliberately foster relationships with lower quality stock shops in order to maintain stock at outlet, but this is generally waning in popularity as retailers have realised that they don’t actually work very well as feeders, and have to stand alone.

Buying in bulk direct from manufacturers you typically get designs and then quality options. So you can essentially have the exact same product with a wide range of qualities. Things like material density, connector construction and all types of finishing touches from a variety of options. The manufacturer will have a huge assortment of stock products.

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