Instant Pot has become a cultural icon, everyone has one. How does such an iconic brand go under so quickly? Just bad management? I'm not buying the excuses of "its the macroeconomic climate blah blah"
When those loans come up for renewal and they have to pay 7% corporate bond rates, of course they're going to collapse.
> The company's meteoric growth trajectory has slowed down in recent years. According to S&P, sales declined by almost 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the seventh consecutive quarterly contraction.
We got one for the house ~4 years ago. It's still working fine, and we don't need to upgrade to one with Bluetooth connectivity or anything like that.
I'm guessing they found the size of their market wasn't infinite.
Also, I don't think the market for this stuff is ever truly saturated: every day, plenty of people get their first apartment and need to buy appliances. Instant Pot seems similar to other things like microwaves and toasters, which we don't think of as a dead end due to market saturation.
I think the "bought by private equity and wrung dry" explanation makes more sense. Or if not that, perhaps just a poorly run business.
> Also, I don't think the market for this stuff is ever truly saturated: every day, plenty of people get their first apartment and need to buy appliances. Instant Pot seems similar to other things like microwaves and toasters, which we don't think of as a dead end due to market saturation.
The market for microwaves isn't, because people use them. Outside of that craze, I don't know of anyone who uses their instant pot anymore. It was a fad, PE came in and gutted it. but the fact is, it probably wasn't going to be this huge performer either way.
Did they take out a ton of loans to expand their manufacturing capabilities with out of touch sales projections or something?
Somehow I doubt the current incarnation of these companies has much at all to do with their origin.
The origin of Pyrex is Corning, the Gorilla Glass maker. They divested Pyrex because they've got tired of dealing with the consumer market and wanted to focus on B2B sales.
The US market was acquired by (as shown) eager to make a quick buck on brand recognition. The European market was acquired by a different company which still manufactures borosilicate cookware to this day (and are not affected by this bankruptcy).
Then Corning somehow decided that it was the name of a _brand_, and they could use whatever inferior material they wanted, and if you put it in those same situations it would explode and cover your kitchen/lab in glass shards.
How that was even legal, I will never understand.
Aspirin is still a trademark of Bayer in Canada; if they want to switch to ibuprofen instead of aspirin as the active ingredient, and sell it as Aspirin, they could. Similarly, if Kimberley-Clark decides to start selling sandpaper and call them Kleenex, they could.
If a trademark becomes fully generic it can be ruled so by a court, at which point the trademark protection is lost. Aspirin is like that in the US. But that is pretty rare these days.
Selling soda-lime glass as "pyrex" has gotten plenty of people injured, but evidently none severely enough to sue Corning's pants off.
I remember reading the Amazon reviews and the amount of 1 star stories about how a plate landed them in the ER was concerning.
I bought some vintage Corelle at a private sale and it seems different to me at least but maybe I am buying the wrong contemporary stuff.
I think they're all (even the vintage ones) subject to risk of shattering into pointy shards if they break, though. They're not magic. :)
For me, they're 100% shatterproof until they're not. You can drop them over and over again, and never notice any visible change. But then when they finally do shatter, it's almost like an explosion.
I think this is because they're built from a pressurized metal/glass layered composite. Very sturdy until enough internal damage builds up.
That’s pretty funny (and awesome)
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/tempered-vs-borosili...
Even consumer reports is gamed; they test toilets by flushing golfballs and whatnot and if you talk to plumbers, they recommend different brands.
They still handle all temperatures a home chef will ever need, but a drug operation will reach the limits and the glass breaks.
Then, a few years ago, they seemed to switch essentially the same SKUs to a third glass (whitish looking into the edge) in slightly different glass forms, and slightly different lid fit). (I don't think they were counterfeit.)
Also, they don't fully replace more traditional cooking apparatus, like a pressure cooker, a crock pot, or rice cooker. We have all 4, and what the Instant Pot got a lot of use initially we found that the for purpose cooking pots worked better and got better results. So the Instant Pot slowly fell out of favor.
About the only place the Instant Pot falls down a bit as a pressure cooker is when you need the full 15psi, like the Modernist Cuisine recipe that pressure-cooks squash with a bit of baking soda to kick in the Maillard reaction. The recipe works great in a stovetop pressure cooker that hits 15psi but fails in an Instant pot that only hits around 12.5psi or so - you can always taste the baking soda when it is done cooking. The pressure difference might also impact making stock but I haven't tried a side by side (though the Instant Pot is non-venting so I'd expect it's stock to at least have superiour clarity).
If I could only pick one out of the four, it would be the IP. No question.
I used to have a Cuckoo pressure rice cooker that made the best rice, fast, but it eventually started leaking even after replacing the seals, and professional repair would have been prohibitively expensive in Canada
Or by pressure cooker do you mean a "on the stove double boiler-like" setup?
(1) An electric pot that can be used like a regular stovetop pot,
(2) A pressure cooker, and
(3) A slow cooker (and a few other things that are typically specialized single-use devices but are really slight variations on those 3 things)
More advanced models are also:
(4) immersion circulator (“sous vide" cooker), and
(5) air fryer.
In many of these roles it is often seen as sonewhat less good than a dedicated device, though even people who feel that way may see it as useful as a multitasker and because it can more conveniently do dishes that require more than one function without changing pots.
Every consumer brand that expands quickly will keep expanding to the point that they saturate their market (GoPro, Doc Martens was a recent IPO in the UK that has self-destructed, it happens over and over). What is unusual about this case is that, afaik, they didn't IPO. Usually the IPO is the prelude to saturation and then bankruptcy because the incentives get totally skewed (and because companies will usually fiddle with supply before the IPO to boost the sale price).
Btw, the bonus pool for the PE owners for the DOC IPO was sizeable. Iirc, it was £400m, there were junior bankers taking home multiple millions on one transaction (Permira has an eat what you kill approach, so the bonus pool was shared with junior staff...it was so large that I don't think senior staff could have taken all of it anyway). You had people in their mid-20s making 10x the value of their parent's house in a few years, it is one of the best PE deals of the last few decades (the bonus pool was actually larger than the purchase price).
Consumers significantly under-estimate how easy it is to get them to buy shit. There are PE funds who specialise in just these kind of deals: buy old brand, pump it up with hot air, IPO to clueless retail investors or sell to a bigger company...it works.
I don't know where you get that from. In the 90's they were so popular you could go into literally any shoe store and buy them used because everyone wanted a pair, and shoe stores knew it. You weren't a real rebel if you weren't wearing a pair of Docs. In the 90's, rebels were a dime a dozen. Docs were everywhere.
Your conclusion nails it though.