I understand this sentiment, but I worry that the people ripping off billionaires aren't exactly giving back to society either.

Sometimes I ponder about business opportunities catering to the upper end market, making things ridiculously expensive just to capture the super rich segment, and using the profits for good in society (somehow).

Most people/businesses don't operate like this I suppose - they just want a yacht of their own, or to infinitely grow their business.

I think the best you're going to do is to start some sort of workers-owned crafting shop that pays well, provides a pension, and has a company culture of doing just absolutely everything possible in house and with minimal automation. Machine the screws that hold the widgets together in house, laminate your own plywood from wood species chosen and grown and milled in house.

The idea is to create a ton of good paying jobs that range from artisans and artists to mindless make-work, while creating a lot of cachet for finely crafted items with just absurd price tags.

I can think of a couple people I know who work in high-end manual work but they both work effectively alone. One does old-school illumination and another makes expensive handmade watches. Both are what would probably qualify as "master craftsmen" both in the sense that they're at the top of their game in their field and that even if they don't necessarily have people working under them (one does, the other doesn't) they at least are both passing on their knowledge (the one who doesn't have employees still teaches a class for others to learn illumination).

I'm not sure this is the sort of thing that lends itself well to vertical integration due to the radically different set of skills required and maybe most critically, low volume of the final product. For example, making high-end ink has entirely different skill and material requirements from making high-end illuminated pages. But someone who makes high-end ink can produce in much higher volume than a single illuminator requires (not to mention it takes more than just ink). Likewise for watchmaking, the manufacturing of most of the parts can be generalized and scaled up while any individual watchmaker only needs so many gears and springs and such.

Fair enough, re: vertical integration and the need for specialized skills that produce in too high a volume.

But the goal isn't really to scale up -- you want to consume as much labor as you can and charge the rich through the nose for it. If you need to employ dozens of spinners who can only spin for four hours a day to avoid repetitive stress injuries to supply a single weaver to make your upholstery fabric for your high end couches, great, charge hundreds (thousands?) of dollars a yard for the material. They'll pay for the privilege of sniffing at the less rich whose furniture is upholstered with fabric spun by a machine.

You’ve basically described Hermes and Loro Piana.

There's a lot of small luxury companies around the world. Watchmakers in Switzerland, champagne houses in France, tailors in England, yacht builders in Finland... Even though the products are expensive, their margins aren't as insane as it might appear because the manual production truly is expensive and the workers are often lifers who are treated very well.

A lot of these businesses do end up being absorbed by the big players like LVMH which grew into the most valuable company in Europe through decades of acquisitions. (The company's official name, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, is itself suggestive of a merger between luxury players in unrelated markets.)

Sure but I'm specifically talking about two examples that've done an incredibly good job of vertical integration.

I can't think of a Swiss watch company that's operating it's own mines and metalworks, for example, or a British Saville Row tailor that also owns the herds and the looms to make the cloth it then turns into clothing. Both Hermes and Loro Piana on the other hand do this (LP is owned by LVMH).

Ah, I see.

Some small luxury brands have local, very long-term supply chain relationships that effectively offer the same benefits. As in, maybe the hypothetical Finnish maker of bespoke sailboats buys all their wood from the same sawmill (ever since 1935 when the founders of the two companies went hunting in the forest where the wood still comes from).

But of course only some materials can be sourced like this. A watchmaker and a mine are not in the same industrial league.

Yeah there are certainly some industries that lend themselves to this more than others.

For example, it makes sense for Loro Piana to own Cashmere goat herds so that they can have the best possible supply of cashmere for their knitwear.

Hermes own cattle farms for the same reason, they can remove things like barbed wire from their fields which can cause damage to the finished product.

Goat and cattle herding aren't yet an industrial process like making certain grades of steel or making glass bottles (for the champagne producer) though, so while it makes sense for vertical integration in some areas, it might not in others.

You might not be able to mine, but you could smelt at a much smaller scale. You could smelt your own alloys from all sorts of fancy recycled materials -- steel from warships, chrome from classic automobiles, etc etc.

The goal is basically to do things that sound impressive to justify absurd prices while employing as many people possible in as good of conditions as possible.

> The goal is basically to do things that sound impressive to justify absurd prices

I wouldn't be quite so cynical about it, ultimately it's about having full control over the quality of the finished product. The material used in a Loro Piana cashmere sweater is on a different level to a fast fashion cashmere sweater, despite them both being "cashmere".

I mean, I think a worker culture centered on quality craftsmanship would be important both to grow an appealing brand, and also to have a healthy work environment where you feel like you're doing something worthwhile, but a little bit of cynicism is warranted. We're brainstorming ideas to get money away from the mega-rich and into the hands of the working class. There are going to be a number of steps where cheaply mass-produced parts are both economical and as good (or better!) than the handmade equivalents, but if you can add more manual labor into the process (without sacrificing quality or making a job that no-one wants to do), it's all the better for the ultimate goal.

Or we could, you know, just tax them and achieve the same thing.

Seems to not be working very well. I already vote socialist, what more can I do?

that sentiment dissipated for me when I was willing to acknowledge how financial services that are more universally respected are not fundamentally different from “billionaires paying too much for paintings”

all markets have the same human behaviors in them, all markets have degrees of opaqueness that get taken advantage of the same way, all markets that have transparency have it in response to the same behaviors, all market participants are subject to a liquidity problem and sustaining a balance that grows faster than the issuance of the currency they use, which brings me to the next point:

billionaires saving is worse for your life than billionaires spending. help people spend and your economy grows. this isn’t a trickle down praise, in fact its the opposite, assume it wont magically trickle down to you as motivation to personally help them spend with a 54% markup

Excluding (super) rich people from society is only going to make things worse for everyone.