What you’re describing is exactly how brands work. The garbage brands will continue to cycle because there’s no reason to keep the brand name (in fact it’s better to change it so that people who got burned don’t know it’s the same). But the good brands are investing in the brand name and so they will stick around and you’ll start to recognize them.

Look at a company like Anker. They operate in spaces filled with garbage but they have managed to become trustworthy.

I love Anker. I remember when I discovered them around 2013 and started making purchasing decisions on Amazon by just looking for their brand name, it almost felt like cheating, since I knew I wouldn't need to do an hour of research to make sure, "ok is this charger going to be the kind that explodes." So I just buy Anker and it works like a dream.

The million dollar question is, how do we know which brands are the good ones?

Is there a community which tackles this sort of problem alone? The best I have found so far is to find the community surrounding a type of product, especially on Reddit - there is a community around almost every interest imaginable - and figure out which brands they recommend, via search or just asking.

Often they even have advice in a stickied thread or wiki article.

There was a website here the other day that planned to build a community of people that review products as they age. A review after the first 2 weeks, 2 years then 10 years etc. "Buy for Life" or something like that.

Perhaps buyforlifeproducts.com? See submissions about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buyforlifeproducts.co...

> Look at a company like Anker.

Same with "gl.inet" (weird name, yes).

They operate in the most trashed-up market on earth: cheap internet-connected widgets. But I will buy from them every single time because all their products run a modified OpenWRT and all of them let you replace it with vanilla upstream OpenWRT. And all of their recent products have a physical "unbrick this device" button you hold down to boot to a slick reflash-the-firmware-over-the-network ROM.

I will not hesitate to pay twice as much for a gl.inet widget because of this.

An example for not producing anything themselves (afaik) but only putting their name on actually decent products is Blitzwolf. A brand like that can be built on the most basic due diligence (and thus not significantly higher prices). A bonus would be actually delivering some technical detail on a product, but even "manufacturers" like TaoTronics seem to be having a really hard time doing that.

I'd say Aliexpress is probably a better way to find somewhat established (or trying, which is what matters) brands than Amazon.

This is on point. When I first ordered something from Anker (a USB-C dongle IIRC), I was worried it'd be knock-off trash. Their brand hadn't been established long enough for me to evaluate their reputation. But the quality was high and now I trust it. I was happy to pick up one of their MacBook Pro USB-C hubs on Prime Day, and would happily buy more Anker supplies in the future.

There’s a cycle with these brands. Monster started out not insane and then quickly just became bad stuff with a brand. I also remember when Belkin used to be consistently good and now it varies by product.

I’m afraid for when monoprice stops being an awesome brand and starts coasting.

> recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter

Not for long. How many dependable long-lived brands have been mopped up by hedge funds and private equity and subsequently slapped on the cheapest crap you can make? Remember when Craftsman tools used to be top notch?

Right. Also the regular "optimization" (i.e. of costs, not value). For example, Miele was a decent brand of white-label goods, but I've read numerous commenters here claiming that they're succumbing to plasticpartisis and their products aren't as reliable as before. I also vaguely recall hearing that Anker isn't what it used to be.

(Then there are brands spanning great many product categories - like Phillips. I'm having trouble keeping track which product categories they do well, and which they don't.)

I mean, once you get brand recognition and a market foothold, that's when you start optimizing on the cost quality tradeoffs. That seems to be the normal course of business in the US. Smart brands recognize there's a limit to gaming the margins before they lose trustworthiness and cut quality slowly and only to a certain point so as not to eliminate brand loyalty and recognition.

If that margin gaming process gets too greedy, the cycle kicks back and people start looking for other brands. The real strategy is to ride just above the stable point of adoption and keep an eye out for competitors that are offering better value, then gobble them up before they unseat your nice comfortable market position.

The end result is you get a bunch of medicore products and services in the marketplace as well as terrible products/services. The high quality stuff tends to die quickly, undercut by those dominant in the market through anticompetitive forces while the poor quality stuff survives because their brand will be short-lived anyways. Few seem to be able to hold onto the ideals of putting and maintaining high quality first over increasing profit margins, that just isn't the goal.

This is exactly how it works, and a good counterexample of how the 'free market' does not work in consumer's favor (in some situations, at least).

I disagree on Miele. They still produce their products in Germany. That's not something you do if you want to sell plastic knockoffs. Sure, quality may vary, but this is literally their brand identity. So I seriously doubt there is a calculated attempt to be less reliable.

It gets more difficult. Tefal produces great pans in France, and really terrible pans in China and they are almost the same product and have the same price.

What I try to do is to buy D2C if possible, from brands where I know what is produced where. That's only a small subset of needed things, and its expensive, but it usually works out for me. I now know household, electronics and clothing brands that genuinely produce here in this country, for example, and the quality is simply better. I also know that no child labour was involved. So, I feel good about supporting such efforts.

Any brand I see on Amazon I assume to be one more variation of the same rebranded product. If I buy it, I buy it under the assumption that it could break the next day.

I also check whether the established brand name has been bought up, which happens a lot. Most of the eminent electronic brands are merely licensed labels nowadays.

Miele still produces in Germany, but quality has gone way down nonetheless. Repairability is also getting poorer, you no longer get parts you one used to get for 20 years after the sale.

For washing appliances there is Miele Professional. But entry was about 5000 to 6000EUR when I last looked. It may depend. From time to time I use them in washing saloons when I have larger batches of dirty (sports) clothing or blankets, bed linen(other "sports", don't ask).

Anyways, very easy to use, fast, and looking indestructible, while the washing drums look space age from the inside(materials wise, and the shape/structuring of it).

GE used to be a marker for reasonable quality but over the past couple of decades they've licensed their name for all kinds of crappy consumer products.

The GE consumer product business was sold to a Chinese company quite a while ago, and I believe the brand was put on a lot of poor quality and poorly designed products, but I have the impression they have substantially turned around the quality, based on consumer reports and other hearsay. I got a GE washer and dryer based on this belief (and they were the only ones that would fit) and so far, so good, after about a year.

That would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier , which has an interesting history, but are now into that connected smart home stuff which I abhor.

The popularity of drop shopping has probably played some part in the spread of low quality no-name products on Amazon.

YouTube is stuffed with videos on drop shipping. Many drop-shippers have no interest in the product they are selling or it's quality. They're only interested in whether they have picked a profitable niche. When that niche gets too crowded, they move to another product space before the wider drop shopping crowd swarm to the same product. And so the cycle continues. Rinse and repeat.

That may be true. Between brand DDoS and dropshipper spam, I no longer buy anything of consequence on any e-commerce platform - I only order from the sites of local chain stores (electroncis, pharmacies, comestics) or directly from manufacturer. I probably pay slightly more because of it, but I avoid dealing with fraudlent sellers and fraudlent products.

> For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art.

But you could still build up a brand the old-fashioned way, by buying advertising (including forms that can't be targeted, like billboards) to create broad name recognition. It's hard to do and it takes lots of capital, but that's the same as it has always been.

And then any white-label product you sell is a reflection of the brand you've built up, so it's in your interest to only sell high-quality stuff.

Brands still arise out of that. I buy Spigen cases. Anker cables. If I want a low-cost but workable set of headphones for the kids, "MPOW" devices fit the bill. I know that Amazon Basics keyboards and mice will be satisfactory given the price.

These do emerge.

Yeah, that. My son has an MPow fightstick and it's a solid product. MPow is doing a good job establishing themselves as a reputable new brand for electronics.

Similarly, Anker, Choetech, and a few others to a certain extent.

Some of them come from the ashes of Alibaba rebrands, but a few start making decent products and are at least at what I'd consider "Belkin-level" but at a better price point.

Even Belkin is now a Foxconn brand at this point, but at least I have owned plenty of products built by Foxconn that haven’t burned my house down.

What you describe is a digital version of white van speaker scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam while person you are replying to means old established brands, like Sony or Philips. You can pick up cheapest Philips hair trimmer and be sure of decent quality, but picking even something looking upmarket, but coming from one of the made up Amazon brands is almost a guarantee in chinesium shock. $300 Panasonic/$400 Moulinex bread maker might look identical to Silvercrest(lidl)/Medion/Sencor/Hamilton Beach $50 branded one, but difference in manufacturing quality and used materials are quite dramatic.

TIL Chinesium Shock. A good entry into a new year full of cyberskun...err punk :-)

Btw. Moulinex isn't what it once was anymore. Just sayin'.

What makes you think the old, established brands are what they once were? Many of them are just a label put onto something entirely different, meanwhile being bought by another entity, produced in less quality/durability.

Maybe not as extreme as the "Chinesium Shockers" which I learned about in this thread, but the tendency is there.

Lets not forget the brands get bought and the new owners lower the quality until the brand name loses its influence, e.g. Pyrex glass.

I haven't done a comparison of old vs. new Pyrex. In what way did they lower the quality?

It used to be borosilicate glass, and now it's soda-lime glass. Apparently the latter has higher thermal expansion and therefore more likely to shatter when subjected to very rapid temperature changes. There are some conspiracy theories that the material was changed to make it less suitable for meth labs. It seems more likely that it was changed because it's slightly cheaper.

Thanks, I'd never heard this before. Do you know of any sources for vintage Pyrex?

EDIT: I just found out that one of the ways to distinguish the earlier, borosilicate Pyrex is that the earlier versions are labeled in all-caps: PYREX.

The new stuff is also noticeably greener (e.g., look down the side of a measuring cup so you are looking through as much glass as possible).