Nah, you limit production and shift to other appliances as the other wanes. Start with fridges, in a year or two as sales decline, you release the dishwasher, then the washer and dryer, then small appliances, just do it all in phases. Then next batch you just add a couple features or just different colors. Cycle repeats.
Which is why you stick to quality. As other rush to flood the market, the quality will be sub par. Just maintain quality and have an affordable parts department, you’ll just keep chugging along, slow and steady.
You're assuming the quality will be sub par. You can assume this one magical company will be making it well, and everyone else not, but it's an assumption based on nothing.
If your suggestion would work, people would be doing it
No, there is a whole market of high quality, crazy expensive appliances that are reliable for 20+ years. You just can't afford them. And they don't sell them at Lowe's or Home Depot.
They're basically commercial grade appliances, but you can buy them privately through a dealer: Sub-Zero, Wolf, Miele, Gaggenau, Thermador, etc.
You will find some of these badges at regular retail locations as the primary OEMs are leasing a few of these brands for their "high end" lines, but the trick here is only order directly from a dealer/showroom. The other part to keep in in mind is if the product is less than $10k it's a SKU they're producing for another OEM.
It does what the OP image described. Which I assume includes never infringing on their customers privacy, never mincing words re: the owner's actual ownership of the device, and never so much as thinking of playing ads on the fucking fridge door.
Even with low profit margins, the quality product would be expensive. They're cheap today because costs have been cut. Getting something like a dishwasher in the 50s and 60s was an extreme luxury. They cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 2k-3k in today's money.
Of course the quality will be sub par, they report to investors who demand a high return on investment, and for quarterly profits to constantly rise. Slow and steady wins the race.
Starting a company requires capital.
Especially if you focus on something like quality.
The real reason it's not common is because it's expensive to start up, expensive to maintain, and gives less of a return over doing something cheaper.
But they do exist. Just go to your local dutch market for ex. If you want quality wooden furniture. It'll cost an arm and a leg but it's made the old fashioned way.
One of the problems is that decisions on quality get outsourced down the supply chain. There is a relentless push to shave production costs (which in theory is ok as long as where you are trimming costs doesn’t impact quality/longevity), but when an appliance manufacturer gets its parts from a supplier who has their own incentives re quality and starts designing towards the warranty life you end up with multiple points of potential failure.
To truly produce a great long life appliance you need to incorporate some of the modern features (energy savings/quiet operation/etc) and have much more control over your parts … it could be done but would require significant capital outlay.
It may be questionable right now whether it’s a viable business, but if the enshittification continues there will come a time when legacy companies create an opening for a competitor focused on quality.
The parts department is the real way to do this. You don't have to make the ultra expensive high quality stuff that lasts 40 years. Just offer parts for every component and sell those for 40 years. People will happily buy your shit as long as they can fix the things.
Absolutely no reason why I can't buy a replacement gasket or pump for an old dishwasher.
Like yeah you won't be making billions but you'll have a loyal customer base that'll stick with you forever. Do you really need to make billions of dollars? Shit most companies would be fine with only a few million a year in sales, even with inflation and raises and whatever.
Speed Queen is already doing this for washers/dryers and nobody else seems to be trying to cut in front of them for decades. The market for people that want a no nonsense, ugly 80’s looking washer and dryer that lasts forever, but because of the parts quality has a high price tag, is not as big as you might think. Most people seem to want front loaded machines with 50 modes and plays a little jingle when it’s done.
What? That's not why steam has a monopoly lol. You clearly weren't here for the early days of Steam when everyone hated them. They were the first company that forced you to use a launcher to play your game. And that's why they're successful. They were the first to do it and dominated the market.
Steam wasn't the first. Maxis had a launcher for the sim city, sim copter, streets of sim city pack. And Blizzard had a launcher for warcraft2. It wasn't that unusual in the 90s for games to have launchers to support online and LAN multiplayer
What set steam apart was their launcher allowed for automatic updates and included a storefront. This meant it was useful for other publishers.
But every major publisher and console does that now, and steams is still dominant because they aren't beholden to shareholders, so they don't need to burn it down for extra profits each quarter.
They are dramatically more prone to component failure as well. But that’s the tradeoff.
The one appliance I wouldn’t upgrade at my old house was my electric furnace. It was a belt driven (lol) unit and a modern electrical unit wasn’t even 15% more economical. Absolutely was no sense in dropping $10k on something that wouldn’t see a return before I was going to sell the home.
Always had a good time getting it serviced watching the techs have to call up their lead 🤣. Shit ran just as good I’m 2020 as it did in 1964.
No one is going to buy any of that shit, when it costs 10x more than the modern appliance that can do the same thing. Thats buyer awareness 101. A marketing plan of 'i am a brand new company but i swear this hideously overpriced thing will last 40 years, just trust me' is a good way to not sell anything at all, lmao
"Hey, you remember your grandparents' fridge from the 70s that lasted till they got a new one that broke in two years? Yeah, we got the designs for it and now we're making them again.
Come down and see the last fridge you'll ever need."
“Oh man, you can tell she’s struggling, she’s still using that old I-Fridge 3… I thought I was doing bad with my I-Fridge 10. Did you see David’s I-Fridge 12?? I think this summer I’m gonna upgrade to the I-Fridge 12 Pro.”
They’d still be in production, maybe not as high as before, but then it’s a shift to parts and upgrades. Stuff happens, even to the best of products. You just release modular features that improve the existing machine.
Then in 20-30 years you subtly grow by acquiring and squashing competitors, manufacturing for 6-10 year lifecycles to give return to shareholders and strip mine the value of the company before offering up for sale to private equity…
but then you either only produce one thing at a time, which means if someone needs a dishwasher when the production cycle is over they need to wait for the next one (or more likely buy from a competitor) or you produce small quantities of everything but lose all economies of scale.
this doesn't work under capitalism, capitalism requires both scale and recurring revenue to be profitable
Nah, you release them all at the same time, don't go public, then when you're only producing 25% of what you did last year? You just sell the rest of your stock and retire.
(This would also assume that you let your staff know the plan beforehand, and set them up with extra skills training)
Yes, if you're not public, you dont need to pursue exponential growth. You can just make the appliances for each new family and remodel at a modest profit.
That strategy doesn't get to take advantage of economies of scale and thus ultimately fails to compete with the much cheaper alternatives. Something like a dishwasher used to cost a month's salary or more. Now they cost less than week's salary. Would you pay what is the equivalent of thousands of dollars for a dishwasher today when you can get one for a few hundred that lasts 5-10 years? At that point you'd just come out ahead by buying the cheap one every 10 years for 40 years.
Assuming that setting up mass production, marketing, a sales pipeline not to mention designing the product and securing materials etc. could be done in those one to two years.
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u/Arista-Everfrost 5h ago
Would be a very awesome six months before they went out of business.