Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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Totally not offended by that comment, but I strongly disagree.

It is entirely possible that he's found the correct price for a suit: two hours' labor for his core customers. It is entirely possible that the devs who tell me their clients won't pay more than $20 an hour for Rails programming are accurate, and that they're correct in thinking that they're not skilled enough to work for better clients. It is entirely possible that the Rampaging Monster of Doubt actually understands how banks do loan underwriting better than e.g. the banker who you could confirm or reject that hypothesis in a five minute phone call.

But that is not the way I will bet. We're pathologically bad at this. Hiya, freelancer on HN: to a first approximation, you don't charge enough. Seriously. No information required to make that call. (This is said from a place of love. I don't charge nearly enough, either.) This guy, who produces things which rich people love and try to shove money at him for, so much so that he cannot afford to even talk to the rich people to take their money because he is so busy? This guy has our problem, too.

Starving artists who are starving because they produce something nobody wants to pay for are one problem. Starving artists who are starving because they think that they are a precious snowflake immune to Microeconomics 101 are an entirely different problem. They just need business sense.

The point of the article is to cry a bit about how the market economy is making true craftsmanship economically non-viable. (It practically tries to club you over the head with that conclusion.) The article is wrong. It has identified a problem to which there exists a trivial solution that will work.

From the last part of the article I quote the following: "Even the richest customer simply has to wait — sometimes months — before the new suit is finished. No wonder so many pass up a $4,000 bespoke suit for a ready-to-wear Kiton version at twice the price."

So customers are clearly willing to pay more, but they are not too keen on waiting two months for the suit.

I guess there are clients that buy a given amount of suits every year and have time to wait, but there are other clients that buy a suit when they need one and do not think 2+++ months up front.

The question is if the former group is large enough to sustain his business, and if they are willing to pay more than $4,000. The latter group have clearly the dough, but don't want to wait, so they are really not a segment he can focus on.

So while hiking the price might work, it might be that the real problem here is time to market.

Edit: Spelling

Direct benefit of drastically increasing pricing to best fit offering to profit curve: ability to hire skilled labor to accelerate delivery of offering to customers.

Without going to full automation I guess there are basically two process options here: 1) Add more tailors that work with the suit from start to finish, thus duplicating the work of the lone tailer Mr. Peter Frew in the article.

2) Split the process of Mr. Frew's work among different tailors.

One other company mentioned in the article, Greenfield, is implementing option 2): ". . . there are huge efficiency gains when one complex process is broken down into constituent parts and each worker specializes in one thing. At Greenfield, one worker sews pockets all day long, and another focuses entirely on joining front and back jacket pieces."

According to the article their suits sells for $2000.

Without testing it out it is hard to say if process option 1) will necessarily be seen as more valuable than process option 2) from the customers perspective. It is also hard to say if Greenfield's suits are of lower quality compared to those of Mr. Frew.

At the end of day the story the tailor(s) can create about their workmanship are as important as the prices and processes they put into action. Price is just one element in the marketing mix and can't been seen as separate from the rest, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix

I think the point of the article (which wasn't very clear; maybe Adam Davidson should stick to radio) was that even at a price most of us would consider expensive, this guy doesn't make much money. And the reason is that, as the modern economy makes everything else cheaper, things that depend upon people's labor get relatively more expensive.

So bespoke suits have gone from being a huge part of the suit industry to being a tiny part of it (not non-viable, just not very important). If bespoke tailors want to keep from becoming ever more expensive/niche, Davidson speculates, they will have to adopt at least some labor-saving techniques.

Note your solution--raising prices--is exactly what Davidson is annoyed about. As tailors raise prices, fewer and fewer people can buy bespoke suits. Which is bad. I'd like a custom-built suit, but I definitely won't bet getting one.

You've jumped into this assuming Davidson is writing about a business problem. But I think he's coming at it from a consumer point of view. He doesn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out if the bespoke tailor can raise prices because, well, higher prices reduce consumer surplus, so that doesn't solve the problem he's concerned with.

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