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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”

I desperately want to spend more money on a product that will stand the test of time but it’s so hard to find them at times.

Sure there will always be a majority of shoppers who want the cheapest thing as fast as they can get it and they won’t mind if they have to buy 3 of them every year, but I think the market is going to start supporting a more artisanal approach for consumer goods as the pendulum swings the other way over the next decade (although current global finance which I won’t pretend to understand might make this a little trickier…)

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“ I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality”

Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.

Oh… you want to buy a high quality leather [whatever], better start learning about leather grades, leather tanneries, stitching thread, stitching types… so it doesn’t blow out in a year.

Except we can’t all become experts in all products, and many companies are perfectly happy to build a brand on quality and then slowly erode that quality to increase margins.

> Often those products do exist, but you need to become an “expert in X” to find them.

Or you rely on media and, in countries where that's available, stuff like the government-backed, independent "Stiftung Warentest" in Germany ("foundation for testing products").

Trying to find a quality laptop battery for an older machine is the ultimate exercise in futility.

And there are many companies that _start_ making high quality products until they have a reputation for it, and then later dial it down to improve profit margin. Even experts may have outdated information.

Oh, with leather I consider it great luck that I started learning from someone that have a lot of years of experience. I'm an amateur and sew only for myself and family/friends.

Want really good and consistent quality vegetable tanned leather made in Poland? Then she said that there is basically one place (they produce it from over 110 years, and they are quite low in Google searches). Want chrome tanned leather with a lot of colors that are consistent and ALWAYS the same as on sampler? Also only one place.

I was later learning normal sewing with her mother. When asked about good quality cotton (or other natural) materials in small quantities she basically say: "well, it will be quite hard and when I want really good materials I order them straight from Italy, available only in wholesale quantities from few manufacturers that I veted over last 40 years". She later said that in textile industry you can't really trust anybody, because they can send you few batches of great quality and then suddenly lower quality and will be telling straight to your face that "quality was always like that"...

> I’ve got a take: I think the current gap in the market for a lot of product areas is “more expensive but high quality.”

Misleading, dishonest marketing and bribed reviewers make it impossible for a consumer to know that a high quality product is indeed high quality without trying it before (which is often impractical)

Whatever you do to differentiate yourself will be copied by 728934712 Chinese brands which will flood the search results of whatever marketplace you're selling on, at all price points (even though they're the same product for the most part).

Faced with no reliable way to find the high quality needle in the haystack people just opt to buy the cheapest one, that way even if you know you're getting trash, at least it's cheap trash.

The only way that used to work to sell quality products was to create a brand and slowly build up trust by consistently selling high quality stuff but in the current "value extraction above anything else" climate, apparently that isn't profitable enough anymore, so pointy haired MBA types will happily destroy that quality for a few bucks.

Depending on what you're buying, I think you can rely on third-party reviews like Consumer Reports in the United States - no one accused them of being bribed.

There’s still quality brands out there. My general approach is to stick with brands until their quality declines and then ask friends and family for a reasonable option. Generally this results in companies that simply don’t advertise much because they don’t need to advertise.

Sure there’s probably a better options out there, but avoiding junk is more important than getting the absolute best product at the absolutely cheapest price.

I definitely agree there is a market for that, but the increasing problem is how consumers discover your product and sort through the trash heap of cheap alternatives. Google is useless these days for finding product reviews, Amazon largely just shows you keyboard-smash Chinese brands unless you already know what brand you're looking for, and legitimate review sites like Wirecutter have a hard time keeping up or covering all the products (also you can't find them unless you already know they exist).

I actually wonder if this will drive at least higher end consumers more towards the pre-Internet shopping word or mouth or personal experience approach to finding good products. For a while there the Internet allowed you to more easily discover and sort through new products and brands with a reasonable level of confidence so your horizons could broaden beyond products your friends and family recommended. Now the zone is so flooded with crap that the Internet seems less useful than it was 10 years ago for that task, which may lead to a reversion to more pre-Internet approaches to products, even if you might still buy it online.

The real untapped market could be a curated version of Amazon, with reviews you could trust and a high proportion of the products being legitimate brands you could rely on.

YouTube used to be a decent place to get product reviews but then the company took away the Dislike count for ideological reasons, making automated scrape-and-publish trash impossible to filter out of search results.

Usually I spend time searching and reading comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/buyitforlife/

Till now it worked really nice for me.

Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11.

When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.

Try specialty forums and subreddits for the thing you are looking for. Need a scooter? /r/escooters on reddit would be where I would start hitting the search box. Cabinets? Search for a woodworking forum. You get the idea. There is almost always a group of incredibly experienced and knowledgeable people on the particular thing you need that have found a place to hang out with each other. Find them and ignore the rest of the noise.

> keyboard-smash Chinese brands

I’m stealing that!

Transparency of Galaxus/Digitec in Switzerland is pretty good with historic price charts, returns rating for suppliers etc. It does look like simple raw transparency is the key to all of that crap.

Some years from now (probably less than more) people will realise and start using cryptographic identities and cryptographic attestations for all internet comms - provable purchase, provable delivery by mailing service, provable single person identity etc. - (zero knowledge!) provable everything.

I mean why nobody wrote a blog post about it yet - it has "AI" and "Blockchain" in the title and for once it actually does make sense.

You can bundle up "fake news solution" into it as well if needed.

Sadly this is a very unstable position. No economies of scale. No consumer reach, extreme incentive to sell out once/if your product does get popular, knockoffs, etc...

Buy from places with a robust service program. You can ask the vendor if they provide this. You don't need to overthink it.

Fully agree. I'd pay extra for a dumb TV, but nobody is selling them.

You can buy commercial displays.

Most things marketed to businesses are still high quality. But you do lose features or design elements.

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