Instant Pot and Pyrex Maker Instant Brands Files for Bankruptcy | Hacker News Reader

Instant Pot and Pyrex Maker Instant Brands Files for Bankruptcy

bloomberg.com

88 pointskamaraju56 comments

Take a well known, respected brand; remove all the things that made it respected, sell shoddy replacements instead (and throw the name at everything else it might stick to); and when you've milked it dry, walk away from the debts.

I wish I could still easily buy real borosillicate glassware.

You can still buy borosilicate Pyrex. PYREX (uppercased) is still made borosilicate, where pyrex(or Pyrex) is not.

thanks for that tip, i have PYREX measuring cups bought over 20 years ago that are still going strong, but this is good to know if i ever need to replace them with the same quality product.

Yup.. If I go search for Pyrex on Amazon Spain, I find the real borosilicate stuff made in France since 1922. They never decided to cheap out on the materials.

I don't think it's this easy for people in America: https://lifehacker.com/that-viral-pyrex-brand-hack-is-horses...

> I wish I could still easily buy real borosillicate glassware.

You can, in NA and ANZ at least. Last I looked “lock & lock” storage containers were still borosillicate instead of soda lime. ISTR that there are a few other similar and easy available options.

North Africa and Anterior New Zealand?

ANZ is often Australia and New Zealand

Are modern instant pots actually shoddy? I haven't looked at the legal documents but maybe the problem is making a product that is durable and doesn't need replacement resulting in no recurring sales.

Edit: I bought my instant pot after the buyout and it seems great and as if it will last another 10 or 20 years

Yeah I think the quality actually increased.

We had an instant pot from before the purchase which stopped working. But Instant Pot replaced it for free some time after the acquisition and the new one works significantly better than the old one and has lasted much longer as well.

They were referring to Pyrex when talking about "shoddy replacements", not Instant Pot (although they didn't specify this in their comment, so confusion is very understandable).

Very much so. NFI what "instant pot" is; i suspect it bears little resemblance to "instant coffee". I miss the "visions" cookware tho.

It's an electric pressure cooker with some additional features. Pretty handy.

> I wish I could still easily buy real borosillicate glassware.

Tons of it on amazon or with a quick google tbh. I buy a lot of Simax glass.

You can. Oxo is borosilicate. They're pretty easy to find online or in store.

What has happened that makes borosilicate glassware hard to get?

There has been a good deal of rumor and fake news about Pyrex and the products they make. Snopes tried to set the record straight in 2009: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/exploding-pyrex/

the complaints about formulation change or difficulty in deliberately purchasing borosilicate aren’t rumor or fake news, the formulation change is half of what snopes lists as the truth, and that’s exactly what is being claimed above.

the fake news part is china,china,china, and the unresolved part is whether or not this formulation change happened to more than coincide with any sale. which snopes won’t touch, because that could sure get messy without receipts. but isn’t that the root of the rumor?

snopes is to fact checking what fox or cnn are to news. any fact checking is coincidental, and not the primary purpose of the site.

I don’t see how they managed to mess this up. The entire world bought an Instant Pot a few years ago when they were all the rage on Reddit, etc. We bought my brother one for a gift.

Modern consumer brands have essentially nothing to do with selling consumer goods. They are financial vehicles for private equity to lever up on.

In a decreasing liquidity environment many of these schemes will blow up. They could have sold 100x more insta pots and it wouldn't have mattered, it's pure financial gambling under the hood

I’d like to read more about this, has it been documented or analyzed in any organized way via books/research, etc. that is available?

This is a good jumping off point.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172179099/how-private-equity...

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/04/27/how-private-equity-cr...

Roughly the things to look up are private equity and their "bust out" strategy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5PLEZiSZV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3_41Whvr1I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10nh86q64Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7VmIy0VXOY

Buy a company with debt (leveraged buy out). Hand that cash back to the "private equity investors". Let the company go bankrupt and the debt magically dissapears.

Basically legalized theft at enormous scale

Agree. One of the most infuriating things we tolerate as a society. The number of good and solid companies adding value to society that have then been raided in order to line the pockets of a few is such a disgrace.

Perhaps everyone who wanted one already bought one, so the demand must have crashed.

We have 2, but the 2nd one has never needed used.

That’s part of the problem with durable or semi-durable businesses. You sell a ton - one to everyone- and then you only sell to people coming of age or to those who have failures. If you want to play with the math look up Bass models or diffusion models. Fascinating but quite sobering. Once a market is saturated it’s very hard to grow.

So from a business sense the best feature of, say, a KitchenAid stand mixer is its accessory port.

As a home user, I agree, that's the best part of the Mixer. God I love it.

Instant Pot was purchased in 2017 by Cornell Capital, a private equity company.

I discovered this just now by when I thought "I bet some private equity company bought them and destroyed them in order to make short term profits" and then googled "instant pot private equity" to see if that was the case. It appears so.

Gotta love those private equity companies. I'm no expert, but this article is a good overview of how they can be incentivized to kill good brands. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/6/21024740/private-equi...

If you look at Google trends, searches for instant pot peaked after the 2017 buyout.

I think the examples of leveraged buyouts destroying brands is exaggerated. If it is a good brand, it will exist. It is just a chance of ownership from a capital firm to a lender.

They made a lot of sales. Why does that have to be the death of the company? Just keep making good products. Everything doesn’t have to go up forever. I know this paints me as naive but growth above all else is eating us alive. How much growth is their bankruptcy?

Because youre at the mercy of the distributors forcing you to lower prices, especially with the monopsony that exists in the US. Because you are at the mercy of your manufacturers increasing prices especially during a supply chain foul up during and after the pandemic which would affect you significantly more considering how big and heavy your product is.

There’s a lot of reasons a company selling a lot of product can still go under in todays market.

Things don't have to have continual growth. It actually is possible for a company to just sustain. However, if you see your rapid growth and then rapid decline, that is a dangerous transition for companies. It's easy to overspend and over commit yourself. Random websites on Google say instapot sales are down 65 percent in the last year. That is tough for any company to handle. WSJ says they had to cancel over 100M in contracts.

That said, bankruptcy doesn't necessarily mean it is the end of the product line. More likely it means some investors will lose some money, which is OK because they are in the business of making bets, and some won't pan out

This article talks about debt likes its free money. Getting a loan means convincing a lender that you are very likely to pay it all back. If PE firms had a history of not paying back debts, why would lenders continue to lend to them? Like, who is this moron losing money on loans every day?

Its not that the underlying firm cannot support the debt load, if the proceeds from that debt were put in to productive uses (expand production, design new products, more marketing, etc). The problem is that the debt is taken on, then the firm pays huge special dividends or “management fees” to the PE firm. PE firm often recoups the initial investment within first year. Then the firm is forced to focus on short term gains to make the numbers look good so PE firm can find another sucker (either another PE firm or IPO).

Mine’s main purpose is dealing with dinner when I forgot to defrost something the night before. Besides that it collects dust. I know it can do more but I view it as a machine that does everything ok and nothing perfect.

It boils eggs perfectly (shells are always easy to pull off)

That's not hard to do, you just have to immediately run the eggs under cold water after boiling.

It’s an excellent pressure cooker.

And if you know how to pressure cook then it easily becomes the #1 tool in your kitchen, which is what it’s become in ours.

Mine makes perfect oatmeal for my family every morning, and makes stews/slow-cooks meat for a few dinners/week during the winter.

I don’t know what we’d do without the InstantPot. We literally have this thing going every night making veggies, beans and lentils, soups, and stews for the family. It really takes a ton of stress out of mealtimes, particularly with a toddler in the house. Even before we had a kid we were using the thing constantly, and telling all of our friends and family to buy one.

Our first Instant Pot unit had a faulty pressure release seal in the lid and so Insta replaced and shipped a brand new lid to us free of charge.

You could buy a fissler pressure cooker if you needed a different pressure cooker. Yes it goes on the stove and doesn’t have variable pressure settings but it gets the job done, is mechanically sound and should last decades with occasional seal replacements

Yes it goes on the stove and doesn’t have variable pressure settings

The whole point of the instant pot is those two features. Being able to tell it what I want to make, turn it on, and then just walk away and forget about it until I need it is the whole point of having an Instant pot

Asia had multi-cookers for a long time, for some reason US audience isn't yet "disrupted" with those.

It's basically the same, but without handing high pressure, which makes them much lighter, simpler, easier (just a simple click-in lid).

High temperature destroys many vitamins and useful nutritions, it's only makes sense when you need to cook something ASAP. Other than that it's healthier to go slower.

Considering how popular instapots and pyrex products are, the company executives must have sucked the company dry. This can be a case study of corporate raiding from within.

"Credit crunch and high interest rates weighed on liquidity" is language usually attributed to extreme risk taking in financing, another sign of fraudulent intent-- short term focus, get what they can while they can, leave a carcass behind.

That's sad. When I last checked, insta pot was the only brand offering stainless steel vessel. Everybody else were offering only non-stick options, which I did not want to use.

Bestbuys store brand Insignia sells a steel one separately

Check out the Breville pressure cookers. They use ceramic coating.

Phillips sell an optional stainless steel additional inner pot, or at least they did 2 years ago when I bought one.

That’s too bad I love my Instant Pot it’s my favorite kitchen accessory behind my cast iron skillet.

Maybe this won't seriously impact the product line. Looks lime they're filing for Chapter 11, not Chapter 7.

It doesn't really matter. Automatic electric pressure/rice cookers will be a product segment forever.

The Instant Pot’s only remarkable feature is the low price.

Korean brand Cukoo preceded Instant Pot, and will exist for a long time still. Their automatic pressure cookers are better in every way.

How so?

https://archive.is/wRT1U

I just bought some extra copies of my 6qt just in case this goes off a cliff pretty soon...

I'm pretty sure I've cooked at least a ton worth of food in my original instant pot from 2015. It is still going strong. I cannot imagine using something else. I don't really care if there's something shinier/faster/whatever. I have a fuckin system now and the instant pot has timings critical to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com