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Comment by lazylizard | Hacker News Reader

but apple is not the only large luxury goods manufacturer, right? how does louis vuitton do their thing? or leica? or rolex? if anything, aren't lv and rolex the orginals at mass producing/marketing luxury goods?

separately, i imagine not just leica, but the entire optics industry has answered the question of precision/quality at scale before?

and finally, there're more , right? like mercedes-benz, bmw, lexus, porsche, medical instruments, the aerospace industry... don't all of them have to solve 'quality at scale' problems?

and at smaller scales..parker pens? zippo lighters? swiss army knives?

and then..something like http://www.muji.us/store/ could be good enough as far as the perception of quality goes?

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Rolex is similar to Apple in that they control most, or almost all, of their manufacturing and parts process. Rolex is one of the very few watch companies that produces their own movements instead of outsourcing them, or slightly modifying/customizing an OEM movement. Rolex has proprietary metallurgy for metals. They make their own stainless steal and gold for all their watches. The watch case is milled from a single piece of material, much like a unibody MacBook.

I don't know as much about Leica, but Canon grinds and polishes their own glass for their lenses (the higher-end ones at least, not sure about EF-S lenses). Other companies create lenses with OEM's elements.

Yea, none of those companies are startups.

As for volume, they aren't shipping millions upon millions of their devices in a month either.

I think the idea is that most of those companies are large (compared to a 10 person startup) and have manufacturing expertise, which most start-ups may not have.

Even companies like Parker Pens are part of large companies -- (e.g. Parker is part of Newell Rubbermaid with 19,000 employees and almost $6 billion in revenue).

actually parker was founded in 1888 and was independent until 1993 when gillette bought it. i imagine they didn't need gillette's help to scale their manufacturing..

i think there're plenty of small firms, from furniture makers to knive makers to bicycle makers to audio equipment makers, that do quality at low volumes. i'd imagine a startup is exactly that - low volume. and they could probably figure out how to scale when they need to? its a good problem to have, right?

i'm thinking of a car analogy.. its like.. i can't imagine that porsche, when they first launched the 911, were thinking about how to make 100000 of them a year.. or for that matter, a more recent example like koenigsegg or even tesla..they didn't exactly start with a 100000/year plant either..

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