this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
Weirdly enough, the washing machines I've seen here in China aren't that cheap, like 800-1500 USD price range, and they tend to be much smaller than the US ones.
Stuff made in China for domestic use bears little to no resemblance to the stuff that Chinese factories are contracted to make for export.
So much so that two doors down from my work is a place that does a booming business whose sole purpose is to allow people in China to purchase made-in-China stuff that's only sold in the US that they can't get at home and ship it back to China. It sounds absolutely asinine but there's a huge market for it and those guys are busy all day long packing stuff up and cramming into shipping containers to send right back to where it was made... but can't be bought.
Incredibly clever, businessfolk & manufacturers in China. Some will tell you “hoverboards” were essentially invented in the bars of Shenzhen.*
Are external factors preventing them from selling directly to the audience you’re describing?
Edit: *source
Bizarre. I wonder why they go all the way to the US instead of Vietnam or Taiwan.
This was unironically Maytag, they enshitified with the rest. The Maytag man was a real thing.
Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.
Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.
It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque ~brush~ cleaner
There are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods