[HN Gopher] Why the American Shoe Disappeared and Why It's So Ha...
___________________________________________________________________
Why the American Shoe Disappeared and Why It's So Hard to Bring It
Back (2019)
Author : nonbirithm
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-09-18 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| intricatedetail wrote:
| So people wanted employment rights etc, but didn't want to pay
| for it and as a result most goods where it is too costly are made
| were those rights don't apply. Monumental hypocrisy and a nuke in
| the foot...
| Aloha wrote:
| Virtually all of my shoes are American made, but they're all
| cowboy boots.
| adrianvincent wrote:
| Kanye West is going to bring Yeezy manufacturing back to the US.
| Here's an interview from 2 years ago that is very insightful:
| https://youtu.be/ihfG8qlhW04?t=760
| seneca wrote:
| The more I look at the effects of globalization, the more I think
| free trade is akin to Reagonomics. Basically a huge scam for
| everyone in a developed country, except the owners of
| megacorporations. It destroys our ability to manufacture,
| destroys our middle class, makes us dependent on a geopolitical
| enemy, destroys any chance of local competition, and in return we
| get cheap garbage goods.
|
| In reality, what is happening is arbitrage of environmental and
| labor protections. More and more I think developed nations need
| to maintain an index that rates every country on these grounds,
| and strictly enforced tariffs based on that index. I'm all for
| other countries being able to specialize and out compete, but
| slave-like working conditions and destroying the environment
| shouldn't be competitive advantages on a global market.
| knubie wrote:
| There is an upside to integrating global economies which is far
| less conflicts are taking place between counties now.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > we get cheap garbage goods
|
| ... along with many of the most high-quality, low-tolerance
| manufactured parts and products ever made.
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, China today makes world class products. I started
| buying Chinese smartphones, they work great, doesn't come
| with much crapware and are super cheap per performance. I
| don't see the point in paying extra for a western company to
| take basically the same phone, put a brand on it and crap in
| it.
| black_13 wrote:
| The hidden cost of maintaining the appearance of a middle class
| is having one slave class in asia to make products and having a
| second one to serve.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| I'm a little bit more mystified why there aren't more niche shoes
| being made in the U.S. where buyers are both willing to pay more
| and where buyers are much more discerning about small
| differences.
|
| For example weightlifting shoes are absolutely dominated by made
| in China shoes, and these are not at a low price point. The only
| made in US weightlifting shoes I know of (Position) are
| apparently quite poor quality and absolutely blown out of the
| water by the others (on the other hand, outside of shoes, there
| is a lot of made in the US weightlifting equipment which is very
| high quality and apparently enjoys healthy sales as a result).
|
| Maybe I'm missing certain niches? But my uninformed impression is
| that this is also true for shoes in other sports such as running,
| and other industries such as construction.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Probably because the people capable of building that necessary
| expertise choose to go into more profitable and easy to access
| ventures, like software as a service, and I don't mean software
| developers.
| les_diabolique wrote:
| I went through a phase of buying Made in US and Canada footwear
| such as Alden and Viberg, and to be honest, I don't think I could
| ever buy a cheap pair of shoes again. I recognize I'm paying for
| the inefficient process, but the construction and quality is
| amazing. Even when it comes to buying sneakers, I prefer Made IN
| US New Balance over a pair of Nikes.
| larrywright wrote:
| Same here. Rancourt is another great one - they make their
| shoes in Maine and even offer custom shoes. I have a pair and
| they are amazing. Not as expensive as you'd think, either.
| aazaa wrote:
| > "We'll post jobs," he said, "and it's very seldom that someone
| under the age of 40 is coming in the door to apply." Among the
| workers who remain, arthritis is a common struggle.
|
| > "A lot of the people have said multiple times that they
| definitely don't want their son or daughter doing this [making
| shoes]," Heselton [of Maine Mountain Moccasin] said. "That's
| tough to hear."
|
| The sense of loss implied in the title makes sense. But
| ultimately, were these good jobs to begin with?
|
| The article doesn't even mention the environmental problems
| associated with curing leather, or making other components. All
| of those costs have been shipped overseas, along with the jobs.
|
| The problem, of course, is that this practice of having China,
| Inc. make everything used in this US is increasing reliance on an
| increasingly problematic country.
| ativzzz wrote:
| > The problem, of course, is that this practice of having
| China, Inc. make everything used in this US is increasing
| reliance on an increasingly problematic country.
|
| The article mentions factories moving to other Asian countries
| as it's cheaper there.
| js2 wrote:
| See also, _The Last American Baseball Glove Factory_ :
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706295355/the-last-american-b...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/704503206/a-small-town-in-tex...
|
| (It's Nocona, in Nocona, TX.)
| cjohansson wrote:
| 'Made by America' could be a marketing thing to try in the US.
| Sweden does it with Volvo cars and most people still believe
| Volvo cars are made in Sweden, the text is so similar you hardly
| notice the difference
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| Many companies absolutely lean into Made in America.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > most people still believe Volvo cars are made in Sweden
|
| But they are made in Sweden?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Volvo_Car_production_p...
| lazyjones wrote:
| Forcing merchants to clearly display country of origin and having
| filters for it would quickly improve the situation. But there are
| worse product categories in this regard - try children's toys...
| tfehring wrote:
| > _For a shoe-factory job paying $12 an hour, the actual cost of
| shoemaking -- when adding benefits -- grows to $16 an hour,
| compared with about $3 an hour in China, said Mike Jeppesen, head
| of global operations at Wolverine Worldwide, which owns brands
| like Merrell, Sperry and Keds. And that cost quadruples after
| wholesale and retail markups, he said, ballooning into a $50
| price difference between a pair made in the U.S. versus in
| China._
|
| This strikes me as a naive way to think about pricing (though
| it's probably consistent with the way finance people think about
| it). The only reason to charge that same ~4x markup on the
| additional labor cost is to keep gross margins (as a percentage)
| unchanged, but that would actually _increase_ profit (as a dollar
| amount). If you just want to keep the same profit you 'd get from
| offshoring, you can probably increase the price by much less -
| $13 if demand were perfectly inelastic, somewhat more in
| practice.
|
| Also, that sentence shifts from cost per hour to cost per pair
| without an explanation. Is 1 pair/worker/hour a realistic
| estimate? That seems way lower than I'd expect. Surprisingly I
| couldn't find a good answer to this in 30 seconds of searching.
|
| After learning how many manufacturers essentially use slave labor
| for their products, I've stopped buying clothes manufactured
| outside the US and EU. I'm sure there are better ways to do this,
| but that's the simplest reliable one - even e.g. Patagonia, which
| seems to be trying its best to maintain an ethical supply chain
| in developing countries, has had its share of issues. The price
| difference hurts a little bit when I actually make a purchase,
| but clothes are cheap enough to begin with that the difference
| ends up being a pretty negligible piece of my overall spending,
| probably something like $100/year on average.
| csours wrote:
| How many person hours do you think it takes to assemble an
| automobile? By my estimate it's something like 20 person hours
| for a reasonably complex product. I used to work in an
| automotive assembly plant, but if you want real numbers you can
| buy or find a Harbour Report.
|
| Note this does NOT include indirect labor (skilled trades),
| salaried employees, or the time taken to make the parts
| installed at the assembly plant (engines, transmissions, bolts,
| glass, etc)
| coliveira wrote:
| The issue with manufacturing has nothing to do with labor
| prices as they try to say in the media. For example, Germany
| has higher labor costs than the US, and it continues to produce
| way more than other nations.
|
| The true reason has to do with use of capital. The US has
| perfected a system where capital is highly rewarded for pure
| financial operations: stock market, futures speculation,
| banking, real state lending.
|
| Manufacturing requires a lot of capital that US players don't
| want to tie to a lower reward structure. Germany and Chinese
| capitalists are completely Ok with employing their capital for
| manufacturing for political/structural reasons.
|
| That's why American economists will make thousands of excuses
| that really make no sense when it comes to the fact that they
| want to invest as little as possible in manufacturing.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Great points. With decent sneakers selling for $90 to $150,
| I'm baffled by business people who focus on wringing the last
| $10/hr out of their manufacturing staffs.
| tfehring wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. The cost of capital is _lower_ in the
| US than in developing countries because of the generally
| lower risk of investing in the US. For example, long-term AAA
| corporate bond yields seem to be about 150 bps higher in
| China than the US; estimating the cost of equity rigorously
| is much harder but most estimates would suggest an even wider
| gap.
| lowercased wrote:
| Most of the players in the chain in terms of percentages. "We
| need to make x% profit" and "we have to sell at x% markup",
| etc. If I buy something wholesale for $27, I want to retail it
| for $54 (or more)... because... ? Rather than "I need to make
| at least $10 per item to be profitable", it's percentages. At
| least... that's the little I've seen.
| [deleted]
| fsckboy wrote:
| > a naive way to think about pricing (though it's probably
| consistent with the way finance people think about it)
|
| you don't understand finance, and why it has to work the way it
| does, hence your naive thinking :)
|
| when a manufacturer sells a product to a distributor, the mfr
| ships the goods but they don't get paid right away, they get
| paid later. Invoices are marked "net 10" or "net 30" or "net
| 60", where the numbers refer to how many days the buyer gets to
| pay the bill after receipt of the goods. (length depends on
| your credit worthiness and potentially the goods in question,
| dairy for example is perishable)
|
| And the same goes for the distributor selling those same goods
| to the retail merchants. (and, with credit cards, the same goes
| for the consumer buying the item)
|
| but let's go back to the mfer above: they've sold the goods,
| but they haven't been paid... and they still need to
| manufacture more goods to have on hand for the next order that
| comes in, and they need to keep paying rent on the factory, and
| they can't just lay off all the workers till the money comes in
| and then rehire them, and they don't want to tell new customers
| to wait for their orders.
|
| So the manufacturer has to buy more raw materials and keep the
| lines operating. So they go to the raw materials suppliers and
| say "hey send us more stuff, so we can manufacture more, we
| promise we'll pay you later" and the raw materials supplier
| said "you said that with the last order and you haven't paid it
| yet" and the manufacturer says "well we didn't get paid yet..."
|
| so, as you can see, already there is debt ("financing") at
| every stage of the supply chain. Now consider that the
| manufacturer has introduced a product that's growing in
| popularity, and growth is the goal if you want to make more
| money and or spread your costs. In this instance the
| manufacturer is asking his suppliers for a double or triple
| order of supplies, because the retails and the distributor are
| clamoring to double or triple their orders over the previous
| orders... that they haven't paid for yet.
|
| To smooth this process out, these different entities go to
| their banks and say "hey, I can sell triple my previous orders
| if I can just borrow some money short term, demand is so good
| that I can pay you interest". And the bank says "yes, borrow
| the money, it's the same interest rate, but borrowing triple at
| the same rate is triple the interest you have to pay, right?"
|
| or the bank might say "that's waaaayyy too much money to
| borrow, look someplace else" and the manufacturer might instead
| be forced to sell stock on a stock exchange, giving partial
| ownership to investors in exchange for the cash they need for
| expansion.
|
| This is why banks exist; this is why the stock market exists;
| and this is why it is not naive but incredibly sophisticated
| how finance works.
|
| Most people on HN love to hate on MBAs, but this is just what
| they teach you in the first couple weeks of your first
| accounting class, a tiny piece of the curriculum.
|
| For anybody who really wants to grok thinking this way, I'd
| highly recommend a book titled "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt.
| It's written as a novel, it's a breezy and fun read with some
| deep ideas in it.
|
| EDIT: addressing the complaint about something I susposedly
| left out: When you want to start a company, you need some seed
| money for a computer, a chair, a desk and a place to sit. If
| you are going to manufacture, you need equipment; if you are
| going to sell, you need space to store and display.
|
| This entails money which you get from somebody else who will
| want interest, with higher interest for higher risk; or which
| you fund yourself from your savings but you were making money
| on your savings which you need to forego (cost of capital) so
| that's essentially the same thing. And when you are successful
| and expand, at some point you run out and need to go outside to
| finance anyway.
|
| It has nothing to do with fixed percentages of profit on goods
| or services. Instead look only at the flow of money and what
| you are required to pay your financiers. You can tell your
| financiers "I'm willing to make less profit, so charge me less
| interest" but they will say back "you're making less profit?
| you just got riskier, we need to increase your interest rate"
|
| if less profit is charged at any stage in the chain, that stage
| will have less money to reinvest in the next round of growth,
| and will need to borrow more. Sellers are not choosing their
| own profit margins, these numbers come from market bid-ask
| norms.
| tfehring wrote:
| The reason I don't think of myself as a finance person isn't
| that I don't understand finance. I've worked in the finance
| industry for six years; I haven't worked on the supply chain
| or logistics side, but I'm well aware of how invoicing and
| accounts receivable work.
|
| I understand that lowering the gross margin would increase
| both the cost of financing and the amount to be financed
| (both in absolute terms and as a proportion of revenue). That
| does further increase the price you need to charge in order
| to break even with offshore manufacturing, but again, the
| idea that you need to get back to the same gross margin
| irrespective of demand elasticity to break even with offshore
| manufacturing is silly.
| seneca wrote:
| Nothing you said in this post addresses why margins need to
| be a relative percentage instead of an absolute amount, which
| what the post you're responding to brings up. You seem to be
| talking about the general concept of credit. I understand
| that there's an unstated "every dollar you spend costs you X
| in financing", but that's not clear from your post.
|
| I'd also strongly suggest Goldratt's lectures, titled "Beyond
| the Goal" over the Goal itself, as the novel is pretty thin
| on useful information comparatively.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| All industry has been outsourced to Asia.
|
| The hilarious thing is that in the Victorian age English
| factories made clothes for the Empire. That's how European
| countries made their money: force their colonies to buy European
| products. Trade at gunpoint.
| robocat wrote:
| The Indian Salt Hedge was a customs barrier built by the
| British across India to prevent Indian people from smuggling
| salt from coastal regions, in order to avoid the substantial
| salt tax.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Customs_Line
| ncphil wrote:
| Over 30 years ago, when still in my mid-20s, periodic visits to a
| local shoemaker shop (now long ago gone into retirement) for re-
| soling were part of my young urban professional routine. When one
| pair was finally too far gone for repair, they hand crafted me a
| new pair (proudly showing me to the back of the shop to see them
| make the finishing touches). Best shoes I ever owned. They cost
| about $50 in 1980s dollars, so not cheap, but also not as
| expensive as some department store brands. The US didn't just
| lose manufacturing enterprise in the decades since then, we also
| lost our small crafts shops.
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| You'll find them here or there. There's two or three shoe guys
| in a nearby affluent suburb, I'm sure in the city center
| there's several more. There's a pretty active Reddit sub,
| GoodYearWelt about high quality resolable footwear.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| The parent is not saying whether you can find them or not.
| The _relative_ abudance of such shops have drastically
| reduced compared to 1980 's.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| People often talk about millennials not repairing anything, but
| where could we go to do it? There is nowhere you can go to get
| shoes repaired in a way that doesn't look terrible--and even if
| you could, shoes aren't built to be repaired. No extra material
| to sew anything back up after a tear, hollow soles that are
| glued on with the cheapest possible glue, fake leather,
| synthetic fibers that tear easily... What are we to do?
| jolux wrote:
| You can still buy quality footwear made of quality materials,
| it just costs more. And I'm not sure athletic footwear has
| ever been easily repairable, for one thing. Optimizing for
| weight cancels out many of the affordances you mention.
| hguant wrote:
| I think the key take away from the article is this line:
|
| >...higher-level innovation? Ironically, factory owners said
| that's happening where the industry is -- overseas.
|
| I don't think there's anything ironic about this. Innovation
| happens close to the product, where you can get a true
| understanding of what you're doing and what the process is. We
| see this in projects gone awry all the time - until you're
| sitting at your desk working on the project, you don't know what
| the problem space actually is.
|
| In addition to all the obvious problems with the dismantling of
| America's manufacturing capacity, I think this is one of the
| real, critical, and silent issues - for a country that keeps
| touting innovation, not a lot of that happens here... apart from
| industries where there still is a strong manufacturing core in
| the country. The mercantilist rhetoric about buy American is
| stupid, but so is the blind faith that global capitalism won't
| destroy the ground it's built on.
| jollybean wrote:
| This is not electronics though. Nike et. al. are fundamentally
| and intimately aware and involved with all technical aspects of
| the design. The factories in Vietnam are not hiring long
| distance runners and putting up tracks, hiring PhDs to measure
| gate, develop new materials.
|
| More obviously, Vietnamese factories cannot afford to hire
| Michael Jordan et. al. and the world's top Ad Agencies who
| actually drive sales.
|
| Of all of the sectors that we should be concerned about, this
| one is not it.
|
| 1) Shoes are odd and there's no way we're going to make robots
| anytime soon to do all these nimble things that require hands.
|
| 2) Overseas makers don't have any technical leverage - and
| definitely not brand power - so it's unlikely they'll usurp the
| system.
|
| 3) It's not a strategic sector.
|
| I don't think there's much we can do here.
|
| I'd be more interested in high end robots to make cars and
| electronics cheaper.
|
| Electronics is one area that we could endeavour to 'bring jobs
| back'. Shoes, not so much.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That is too bad, but it ain't just shoes.
|
| For what it's worth, these are the shoes I like to wear[0], but
| they ain't cheap.
|
| They are very comfortable.
|
| [0] https://sasnola.com/collections/all-mens/products/jv-mesh-
| bl...
| zekrioca wrote:
| A little ugly I have to say.. But if you are looking for
| comfort, yes :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah. They are definitely not for style.
|
| I get sick of shoes that _look_ comfortable, but aren 't (I'm
| looking at you, Sketchers).
|
| I'm on my feet, all day (standing desk). Comfortable shoes
| are a must.
| throwaway7542io wrote:
| throwaway... but I just wanted to mention Thorogood shoes. I've
| owned two pairs of their (quite reasonably priced) American
| learher shoes. The first one lasted 6yrs and I'm still wearing
| the second pair. I tried their foreign made "waterproof" and they
| are alright, but kind of stink literally after a long day
| lvl100 wrote:
| Quoddy's of Maine. One of the best shoes made right here in
| America.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| > And that cost quadruples after wholesale and retail markups, he
| said, ballooning into a $50 price difference between a pair made
| in the U.S. versus in China.
|
| This is the part that the child part of my brain always has
| trouble dealing with. This always seems ridiculous in my brain. I
| can intellectually understand why businesses want to scale their
| margins with costs, but it just seems so self-destructive (from a
| systemic standpoint) for something like shoes.
|
| I don't know how this could really be different, but I hate it.
| randallsquared wrote:
| The cost of inventory is a gamble that you'll be able to sell
| it. If that cost grows but the upside doesn't, you literally
| cannot afford to take the risk of buying inventory that you
| hope to sell.
| torstenvl wrote:
| JIT supply lines, sales tracking and inventory software
| integration, and the sophisticated sales forecasting that
| enables, change the risk calculation. But parasitic margins
| seem just as bad now as ever. I'm not convinced by this
| argument.
| nradov wrote:
| That doesn't actually work very well for shoes and apparel.
| Demand is hard to forecast due to changing consumer tastes,
| and lead times are too long to adjust orders up or down
| quickly.
| randallsquared wrote:
| All those can help for some types of business. But as we've
| seen from the supply-chain disruptions since the start of
| the pandemic, there's also a cost of cutting things close.
| You can choose whether to typically err on the side of too
| much or too little, and you can do things that lower the
| likely size and probability of the error, but you can't
| just decide not to ever get it wrong, and getting it wrong
| will cost money.
| ralfd wrote:
| Sure, but why does the cost quadruple? If a china shoe costs
| 15 dollar less to make, why doesn't it stay 15 dollars at the
| price the consumer sees?
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It costs money to sell shoes. You have duties, warehousing,
| distribution, employee salary, marketing costs, rent,
| insurance, expensive photo shoots. And if you're
| manufacturing original designs, you also have a year-long
| lead process, manufacturing obligations and scheduling,
| sample management, maybe even material procurement.
|
| The cost of the shoe ends up only being a third of overall
| costs. I'm also not going to sell everything, but I still
| need to keep buying inventory to keep the machine going.
|
| If I don't sell the product at least 3x what I paid for it,
| there's no way I can maintain sufficient capital to keep a
| business running and hedge against risks.
| briandear wrote:
| Is shipping free?
| clairity wrote:
| you're thinking cost-plus in a value-based pricing world,
| which means you're essentially viewing this backwards. it's
| not so much why aren't the chinese shoes cheaper, but how
| is the excess value created by the lower cost being
| exploited in the supply chain?
|
| the price of the shoes will always be set by the (retail)
| market, and that market seems to be saying (roughly) that
| the price of shoes (idealized for the sake of argument) is
| $50, whether made in china or the US. the chinese shoes,
| being $15 to make, allows more value to be captured and
| distributed along the value chain, providing crucial
| flexibility and resilience for operations, distribution,
| and marketing. the american shoes costing $30 to make means
| it has less value to capture and less supply chain
| flexibility. the chinese shoe distributor has more margin
| to work with to outcompete the domestic shoe through the 4
| P's of marketing (price, product, place, promotion).
|
| (this is the kind of stuff you learn in an mba program,
| specifically, marketing & strategy classes)
| smhost wrote:
| Why is it so inefficient?
| randallsquared wrote:
| Maybe it only looks inefficient because we're comparing
| against a fantasy economy where nothing bad happens and no
| losses have to be recouped. :)
| wizardforhire wrote:
| This and also once an industry declines the infrastructure to
| support that industry disappears so a cottage industry has to
| increase their margins to compensate to even have a chance to
| break even. Given the risk to reboot its natural to want to
| recoup as much as possible with scale. Add to this increased
| wages, inflation etc etc and the breakeven threshold is
| sufficiently high to be prohibitive save for the overly
| optimistic, ambitious and well funded. Business is hard
| sometimes.
|
| However business is not a zero sum game and everyone wins when
| there are wins. Especially when those wins create new secondary
| industries Adding to the overall infrastructure that make
| possible and lower the barrier to entry for everyone else.
| coliveira wrote:
| The true reason is not the costs involved in manufacturing, but
| the fact that American capitalists can get better returns just
| using speculative instruments.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| There's a trade-off between specialization and vertical
| integration (doing everything in house).
|
| By specializing in just one thing (e.g. making shoes), and
| letting someone else package them, transport them, market them,
| help customers try them on a store, etc., you can get really
| damn good at just making shoes. The shoes you make will almost
| assuredly be cheaper and of higher quality than the guy that
| tries to do all the other stuff himself (in addition to making
| shoes).
|
| In America, for physical goods, specialization almost always
| wins out despite the profit taking at each step, because labor
| is so much cheaper in other nations. Tesla and Trader Joe's
| wine are two great counter examples of vertical integration
| winning out big in industries that had become over-specialized
| over time.
| deycallmeajay wrote:
| I actually would appreciate if someone could explain what this
| is.
| logifail wrote:
| > "it's very hard to envision a scenario where we'd make the
| types of products that we make, at the prices that we make them,
| in $PlaceWhereWeSellThem"
|
| Doesn't this sound like "our business model is working just fine,
| _please_ don 't disrupt it"?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| If you can make shoes more cheaply, I am sure they are happy to
| manufacture with you instead.
|
| However, making shoes more cheaply almost assuredly means
| finding a way to get rid of the human labour.
| colpabar wrote:
| another way to say that would be
|
| >"it's very hard to envision a scenario where we'd make the
| types of products that we make, at the effectively slave labor
| prices we pay people to make them, in a place that would
| require us to pay them more."
| da_chicken wrote:
| Sure, but it also sounds like, "Capital is global, labor is
| local."
| geon wrote:
| No?
|
| Isn't the problem the high manufacturing cost? How would you
| "disrupt" that?
| dd36 wrote:
| Robots. Environmental trade law.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| No one had figured out how to automate the sewing yet, and
| not for lack of trying.
| deckard1 wrote:
| The business was already disrupted. That's why they are in
| Asia. How are you going to disrupt that? By lowering the costs
| even further with... an Uber-meets-X app? Slavery-as-a-Service?
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| It's very hard to disrupt their business model. You can't make
| shoes cheaper than they are.
|
| You could try to attack a different market segment, like more
| expensive shoes, but that isn't disruption.
|
| You could try a marketing gimmick, like "buy these more
| expensive shoes and we will send you replacements for life."
| But it wouldn't be sustainable, and the competition could just
| offer the same thing and there goes your disruption. You could
| probably get a couple of years of press, just long enough to
| sell the company and make the founders a mint (if anyone's dumb
| enough to buy it).
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