If other companies come along to fill the niche then how is it that the likes of Eastpak and whatnot have not died?

They are - the article finishes with them being for sale because they no longer generate money. They are not dead yet, but they are clearly out.

I give a more complete followup at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779948 .

The article hints that they are dying - the holding company is looking to offload them because profits are down.

I did not explain myself well enough.

The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."

That's a long time.

That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."

And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.

On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.

It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?

So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.

The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".

Consumers are lazy and greedy.

The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.

I don't disagree in principle. But, as a consumer, this makes purchasing a bit more complicated. BITD, I could just buy an EastPak or JanSport and be fairly sure it was a good bag. Not much thought or analysis required. Today, I have to dig through 100s of brands I've never heard, with most of their ad budget spent on influencers who maybe can't be trusted. It's not a recipe for a healthy market.

If you feel like spending several hundred dollars on a backpack (big if, I know), I can personally vouch for https://www.seventeenthirtythree.com/. It's more or less a one man show, and the guy is very obsessive about sourcing materials & assembly. Advertising is all word-of-mouth as far as I know. I at times feel anxious about his long term prospects for the exact reasons mentioned in the OP article - I have a backpack from this shop that's about a decade old and has zero visible wear. I think, in order to make this business model work, it's pretty much impossible to scale.

The issue is it reduces information availability to customers: if a customer finds a brand that produces high quality products that they know from experience they can trust, that trust can't propagate forward in time because the incentive it to abuse it for short-term profit, which is a net negative overall because the customer needs to find the new high quality product on the market, something that costs time and comes with risks itself. It's a market inefficiency.

Why would you be ok with that?

These brands earned the consumers' esteem because decades ago their products pushed the envelope in the respective markets. By having their product quality severely degraded, this also lowers the bar for the niche brands. They no longer need to push the envelop to get a competitive advantage. They just need to replicate what was already possible. I.e. no real innovation is happening any more.

Also, for every 2 niche brands that are trying to get it right, you will get 1 that is sketchy: send designs to the cheapest manufactury in China, hire a few influencers to post on instagram, and you're done. Basically capitalizing on the misperception that "niche == better".

So, we are left as consumers to have to dilligently research every purchase, just to get the quality that was the standard a few years back. There's nothing to enjoy here.

Not to mention that at the bottom, this is just another manifestation of "fast fashion" and "planned obsolescence".

That's idiotic. As a consumer I'd prefer the same company to keep making the same good products forever. I don't have time to research which of the new brands is just as good.

I have a pair of Mountainsmith Lumbar packs, both either over or pushing 30 years old (I have two because I misplaced and replaced my first, but later found it).

It's an excellent pack, cinches up tight, mount it front or back, strap it to something else, you can pack the straps and use it as a simple satchel, or use the shoulder strap.

Very high quality materials and zippers.

It's for I'd consider "urban travel", great as a carry-on. Paperback books, tickets, meds, passports, journal, snacks. They've been in "the wild" but I don't drag them on rocks or things like that.

They're over $100 today, so not cheap, but at a glance on the website, they look pretty much identical to what I have (and I know my second has slight differences in design from my first).

Were I in the market, I wouldn't hesitate to drag and drop one into a cart and get another. I've not used their larger packs, and over time they've expanded their lumbar line. But I would completely expect their other products to be similar quality as the ones that I have.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html