
Can you charge double and still keep your customers coming back? - pbowyer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34290597
======
m52go
Wow, I wish more companies had this mindset.

When I'm shopping for anything, particularly a big-ticket item, I'll gladly
trade a few 'cutting-edge' features for solid build & longevity...and pay a
lot more for it.

Although to be fair, I'm not sure "arguments are a very rare occurrence indeed
at Miele" is a sign of a healthy company.

~~~
Silhouette
_When I 'm shopping for anything, particularly a big-ticket item, I'll gladly
trade a few 'cutting-edge' features for solid build & longevity...and pay a
lot more for it._

I strongly agree. The trend for ever-cheaper, ever-nastier goods is
understandable given the recent economic conditions, but very disappointing
all the same.

Personally, I will gladly pay a premium for things like good build quality and
longevity. Sometimes that means I have to save up for something I want and
can't just make an impulse purchase, but that's life.

I suspect buying cheap and nasty is often a false economy in the long term
anyway. If you pay twice as much for your washing machine but it lasts 20
years where the cheaper one would have made it to 5...

~~~
pierrebai
The problem is that 'buying quality' is very hard to prove.

For important purchases, like a car, there may exist guides that give you good
record of past performances, but for most thing, its mostly hearsay. "Oh, I've
been buying from X for years and they never break."

The race to the bottom has the property that paying less is an easily provable
fact. You can measure it. Quality is too hard to measure.

There is also the possibility, for some classes of goods, to purchase the
cheap ones and fix the bad bits. Like purchasing a cheap laptop and replacing
the HD with a SSD.

~~~
Silhouette
All true, but I'm still going to buy my expensive kitchen equipment or my new
computer or my new car from a brand with a track record of consistently good
reviews and reliable customer service. In the age of the Internet and modern
consumer advocacy groups, it's not hard to know who those are.

Of course, any business can have an anomalous bad product from time to time.
But even if you're the unlucky one, I reckon you're probably still better off
with a business that values its customers and its brand anyway. At least
you're likely to get some genuine efforts made to put things right, maybe even
a free upgrade to a better product from the range if there really was a design
flaw in a new model or some similar hard-to-fix issue.

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to3m
See also?
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
devit
This one doesn't seem very submarine...

Unless the ones behind all this are not Mieli.

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chkuendig
There's plenty of companies selling on build quality (I just bought a
secondhand Jura Coffee Machine and love it, same for the Peugeot pepper
grinder).

Interestingly more of these companies seem to come from Europe than the U.S.
(very few from Asia, but that's not surprising since the manufacturing base
traditional used to compete on price)

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drewg123
Now, if only my Miele dishwasher didn't break every two years like
clockwork...

~~~
thrownaway2424
Exactly! They are expensive and they work well, are quiet, and all that but
they aren't reliable and Miele doesn't stand behind them with a warranty
that's any longer than anyone else offers. They offer a 1-year warranty just
like any third-rate brand. I finally replaced mine with a Bosch that offers a
limited 5-year warranty and a lifetime warranty on the tub, and it was cheaper
to buy the whole Bosch than to get the Miele fixed once.

------
mmmBacon
Germany manufactures a lot of things. I read an article once that said 30% of
the BOM cost of iPhone went to Germany. It bothers me that we cannot replicate
their success here in the US. Surely we are just as capable.

~~~
msandford
Technically just as capable. Culturally? Not really. It's management that
keeps the US from competing with Germany in that way, not engineering. How do
you change the culture? I don't know.

~~~
meatysnapper
The US has almost no precision machinists. Those guys are in Germany,
Swizterland and Japan.

There are all sorts of things you can't build over here or in China because we
don't have the people who can do it precisely enough.

~~~
mmmBacon
I agree here. I recently worked on a project that required very tiny and
optically precise injection molding and coating. Chinese and Taiwanese
manufacturers couldn't get close to making what we needed. There was a US
manufacturer that could make the part but was very difficult to work with and
they could not do all the process steps we needed. In the end, we went with a
German company because they could do the precision machining required to meet
our tolerances as well as the other process steps.

Additionally, I often need to find precision materials or really high
performance components and many times these are from German companies.

Take the humble LED as an example, perhaps the most industry leading company
in GaN LEDs is in Germany.

Japanese can often offer the precision needed too but their companies are a
lot less accessible and it takes a lot of time to build a relationship with
them if you don't have one already. What they are really great at is that once
you've built that relationship, they are usually very aggressive at supporting
your needs.

In Germany, I think some of it has to do with the fact that they have these
government supported institutes for industrial research like HHI (Heinrich
Hertz Institute). This allows them to find markets for new and risky
technology and then transfer those innovations to industry.

~~~
meatysnapper
Yeah, the electronics slipped my mind. I was chatting with a sensor guy the
other day, and he said by far and away the best stuff for a particular
application he had was Bosch. Nothing from out east or the US could touch it.

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olau
Interesting that they once made bicycles. Does anyone know who would be the
Miele of bicycles?

~~~
pinkrooftop
If there's one thing a search of the internet does offer, its the entire set
of known opinions on bicycles.

To answer directly, probably Miele
[http://www.mielebicycles.com](http://www.mielebicycles.com)

~~~
justinator
I used to own a few Miele mountain bikes, made sometime in the late 80's early
90's. They were hand me downs from my Brother and Brother in Law. Canadian
bikes. The company folded a while ago.

Like many such companies, the name was bought from a Taiwan/Chinese company,
to slap on whatever bikes that come out of the bike factory - the same factory
other more known name brands come out. Frames from these companies are the
same/very similar to those same brands; the components can be a bit dodgey.
For more,

[http://www.bikesdirect.com/‎](http://www.bikesdirect.com/‎)

(not that I recommend anything on there)

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johnnydoebk
>> Can you charge double and still keep your customers coming back?

I can charge 4000% and still keep my customers coming back.

Sincerely yours, Martin Shkreli.

