The trick is that you first get popular among actual surfers. That's a tiny population, the population doesn't like to spend money, it takes expensive R&D, expensive materials, difficult manual assembly for the abusive and difficult environment: not a lot of profit or market cap there.
But the dark pattern that the 'surf industry' have discovered and exploited, is that you then silently pivot to the market of people who wished they looked cool like surfers. That's a much bigger population, they have more money, and they don't care about the materials or performance of the gear.
Starting out as an actual surf business is optional, but encouraged, as it will help you market the story that you make cool surf gear. Skip that step if people will come into your department store anyways, just make the logo look similar to a prominent manufacturer. Similar tactics can be employed effectively in selling just about anything: SUVs and sports cars, ski gear, health food, artistic furniture...
It just seems like a perfectly normal way that clothing trends evolve. Are you a poser if you wear Northface or Patagonia gear in the city, since it's made for roughing it in the outdoors?
Once I worked in an office that was absurdly cold but North Face gear kept me warm and comfortable. Many people, cool or otherwise, find Apple devices to be usable and reliable for very ordinary activities like sending email, writing documents, or making phone calls.
no, you are a banker or tech bro
I don't like to be cold or wet, I go to a store to buy a jacket, I find one that I like and looks good. Why do you believe your personal opinion and feelings towards brands and need to gatekeep should influence my choice?
It’s OK if there is no overlap but in practice that doesn’t really happen. When North Face switched to being a fashion brand it dragged other, previously genuine, manufacturers with it, because they couldn’t leave the money on the table. Basically, hipsters ruin everything.
Furthermore, it makes it difficult for genuine participants to cut through the marketing BS. Want to buy a lightweight backpack for some day hikes? Go to Walmart and you'll see rows on rows of "rugged" bags with 'biner accessory clips, "super-strong" zippers and "comfort straps". But don't try to take those up a mountain, you'll end up with gear on the ground.
Informed consumers make capitalism work efficiently. This pattern abuses consumer trust for a temporarily profitable scheme. That's what I'd call a dark pattern.
"But the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes! And yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they're better than Reebok’s air soles.
What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about."
not actually replying to this comment - was just trying to figure out a way to get in touch with you!
I just moved to Durham from NYC for work, and was looking through HN to see if there were any ongoing meetups, etc. in the area. Saw your post about an RTP meetup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754755), any luck getting this started?
Even if not, would love any tips you might have for meeting new people / getting involved in the tech community around here. Or even meeting up in person just to chat!
Thank you - hope you have a wonderful weekend
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
This is more the classic “brand X is now bloated and failing because it forgot its roots when going mainstream” argument. Nothing to do with capitalism (author was a bit confused there, or clutching at straws), everything to do with losing view of your core values and value proposition.
I'm not sure I'd say nothing to do with capitalism. Underneath many of these "bloated" brands you find the same pattern. A niche or well-respected brand purchased by a private equity firm. They proceed to hollow out the brand (move production, cut warranties and customer support, etc.) while simultaneously playing financial tricks to extract money (saddle the company with debt/management fees).
This pattern may or may not be one unique to capitalism, but it's surely one which occurs frequently in the US implementation.
By the 1980s the line was better suited to arduous treks across a muddy quad to the campus coffeehouse, though outerwear garments from that era may remain serviceable. Today any modest muscular development simply exceeds the tailoring tolerances of upper or lower-body garments.
The "brand" still trades, or tries to, off its century-old origin story. That is an absolute lie.
Further, stability is not necessarily an overriding goal. A 50% shot at 100m is generally preferred over a 100k/year lifestyle business.
PS: I don’t think this is even a downside of capitalism. More people enjoy a Micdonads hamburger in a day than eat at a given 5 star restaurant in a year.
Massive companies also have low average profits, but it’s not low quality driving down profits so much as growing to the edge of unprofitability because high profit margins are not inherently as useful as total profits. If say Budweiser increased their price by say 10c a can their overall profit would decrease even if their profit margin would increase.
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That's not neccesarily the case. The ideal price point for maximum profits is ever-changing.
Would Budseiser's profits increase if they lowered the price by $0.10?
The answer is the same: it depends.
Revenue and Profit are intimately intertwined, with their cousin Cost riding shotgun.
So, after 1 week you have 20k in gas and 100 - 19 = 81k in cash. You need to spend 80k of that on more gas for text week resulting in a net profit of 1k or a 1% profit margin.
But, repeat that for one year and you bought 80k x 52 weeks of gas = 4.16 million even though you only had 500k in capital. Further your profit margin might be low but your ROI was 52/500 or 10.4% which is not bad.
But that's not the scenario at all. The scenario is about sales, not capital investment. The point is that its very unlikely (for retail at least) that you need to invest $X of capital in order to sell $X of merchandise. The question about returns here is not about returns on capital investment, but profit margins on sales.
You make the 20% with the 100k, and hopefully find similar opportunities with your other 9 stacks of 100k's.
Profit is the only driving force in the market.
The comparison is not about investing $X and making $Y profit. It's about selling $X with a given profit margin.
The actual capital requirements to sell $X are assumed to be roughly the same for both scenarios.
Yeah, that never happens with capitalism...
Trying to scapegoat a particular economic or political system as inherently corrupt is naive at best, and disingenuous or dishonest at worst.
And there's never been (and never will be) a 100% capitalist society, so even if they could be corruption free it doesn't help much.
Brainstorming a range of negative interpretations of my words then providing appropriate insults for each, isn't my idea of responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of my words. For that matter, if you can't imagine anything that isn't insult-worthy, you might simply ask me what I mean. The answer would be that I was arguing capitalism has a relatively unusual feature of actually channeling greed rather than trying to stamp it out. If "the new soviet man" makes a decision for personal profit versus that of society they are corrupting their communist system. Whereas a capitalist can do so completely within their capitalist system. It has nothing to do with name-calling or about who is and isn't "corrupt" as some inherent human or systemic flaw. Do you still not get my point?
Most of the things that the big Surf brands make are not useful for the actual act of Surfing. Even boardshorts from the major boardshort companies, about half their range can't be worn surfing. They're made from non-stretch fabric and intended to be worn around on the street.
Google up a "surf shop" in a big coastal town, pick the biggest, most obvious one, and chances are you wouldn't be able to equip yourself to go surfing with the things you can buy there. It'll be wall to wall boardshorts and hoodies, with a hundred pairs of sunglasses along the wall and maybe half a dozen shiny new boards stood up in a corner for decorative purposes. Observe the looks the staff will give each other if you try to ring one of those up.
If you want to go surfing, you need to find the little hole-in-the wall shop off the beach a ways, which will be stuffed full of wetsuits and boards, to the point where you can hardly walk around without knocking half the store down. They'll also have a few hundred pairs of boardshorts there, but surprisingly these ones will all have stretchy fabric and crotches that don't tear apart if you sink to your knees.
The Big Surf Brands know that most of their business comes from selling sunglasses and flip flops to people who want to look like surfers. And they're doing fine.