>Our Site:1 speakers are lovingly handcrafted. We make them one at a time, to our customer's desired spec, [...] If all goes smoothly, this process takes about six weeks.
>Amazon relentlessly pushed us to accept lead-times that were typically only four days, and sometimes demanded fulfillment of orders in as little as 24 hours--including delivery.
Amazon is not really an appropriate distribution platform for 6-week custom-made-to-order products. Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor but it certainly isn't Amazon (or Walmart).
One way for Princeton Audio to become compatible with Amazon's short lead times is to run some sophisticated projections (e.g. "demand planning") on the most likely customer combinations[1] and build an inventory of those ahead of time. (Sell semi-custom on Amazon with immediate delivery but fully custom on Princeton's own website with 6-week wait.) However, that requires a big capital investment -- and the hassles of managing inventory.
[1] PA's website shows 32 possible combinations (4 woods x 4 metals x 2 batteries) so maybe prebuild and sell only the most popular 3 configurations on Amazon.com
As a customer of Amazon I think Amazon should definitely be an appropriate distribution platform for anything. They have digital downloads, monthly subscripts, extremely large items; I don't think it's unreasonable to allow items with long fulfillment times (especially items handcrafted based on customer request).
I've been very fed up with Amazon's selection, the number of scams and reduced quality on Amazon has seemed (at least anecdotally) to have skyrocketed. I think this article shows that Amazon's quality control issue is at least partially an issue with Amazon themselves, and not just the reseller market. Disallowing high quality products because they can't be made fast enough just smacks of poor planning on Amazon's part. I don't think anybody wants a market with a million crappy items, they want a market with as many quality items as possible, but no more.
I cannot describe how frustrating it is to get a completely counterfeit product off amazon or to have to carefully comb through reviews to make sure a previously great product hasn't been replaced with an inferior one differing from the description and photos - and I doubt I have to, since it happens to everyone who uses amazon regularly now. I too am feeling fed up, and it's getting to the point where it's now convenient enough to just drive to the store since at least that way I know I'm getting what I pay for and not something literally different from what's depicted.
Case in point, I was looking for a motorcycle trickle charger and was pleased to find the same battery tender I remember my father using on Amazon[0]. However, a cursory look at the reviews shows it has been redesigned and is different and less reliable than the product in the photos and descriptions, and is available online for cheaper with the same shipping. The solution? I drove to walmart and bought the trickle charger I remember my dad having because it was on the shelf there.
Wish I could award more points to this comment. After getting a counterfeit power bank recently, I realized that the due diligence I was going to need to do when buying some small additions and replacements to my camping gear was eating so much time it was easier to just go to the store, nvm the hour+ round trip and slightly higher prices.
You very likely could, and I've always had good experience with Amazon in similar situations, but it still takes a good chunk of your time to wait for the item, open it, realize it is not the actual item, contact Amazon for a refund, package it back up again, and drop it off/schedule a pick-up.
I bought a NAS off Amazon a few years ago... one of their 3rd party sellers had the same product for $50 cheaper so I went with that.
Anyway, what happened next was really amusing to me.
I get the product about 8 weeks later... I had tried to cancel because it was so slow, and Amazon wouldn't let me -- they said I had to receive the product and then send it back as a return once I got it in order to get a refund.
I was planning on just sending the box back the same day... but something caught my eye. The box had come from Shenzhen, China. Curious I cut open the outside box.
Immediately I saw that the NAS they sent inside had been opened, and had been re-tapped shut -- and poorly, there was a clear bulge on top of the box. My heart sank a bit... but I figured, "Well, let's see -- maybe it was a return or something... can't hurt to open it again since it's already been opened."
Inside the NAS box, all the manuals are in Chinese... and seem like they are just photocopies of the originals. The NAS was not in the original packaging, but rather elaborate bubble wrap. And there's a China to US power adapter to the cord.
I'm curious if it would even turn on, so I plug in the NAS... It boots! But not in English. I'm thinking, "What did I just buy?!" But I can sort of read some of the messages and it seems like instead of 4x2GB drives, it came with 4x4GB drives. Interesting.
It's late so I leave it initializing the drives (I think that's what it was doing anyway) and go to bed. Next morning I wake up, and it's still initializing the drives. Fuck it... time to call tech support and get my money back. The little light kept blinking yellow, but I couldn't read anything.
I email Amazon to initiate the return process, then go to work. I leave the NAS running -- honestly just sort of forgot about it. Got pulled into a business trip that day, so it was about 4 days until I got back to focus on the project again. When I got home the little yellow light on the NAS was still blinking, and I thought it was weird that I hadn't gotten an email from the seller with return instructions.
I email Amazon to tell them I hadn't heard anything back from the seller, and since I had to wait anyway, decided to call tech support. Cringe.
The thing was, the NAS was still doing something. The drives were still spinning... but after 4 days... I figured it wasn't doing anything good. But I didn't unplug it. I read the serial number to the guy in tech support. Pause... "Can you read me the serial number again?" I do... longer pause. "Can you read me the serial number one more time?" I do... Pause... "Please hold, Sir."
"Sir, where did you get this NAS?" I'd been transferred to someone up the food chain who told me that the device I had wasn't a valid serial number -- that the number I gave was for a model that hadn't been released yet. Super weird conversation, they took all my details, Amazon order number, and told me they would call me back.
Really late, like 2 AM that night, I got an email from the seller. It just said, "What wrong?"
So I write back, and my phone signature had my cell phone number on it. I get a call. At like 3 AM. The guy is polite, but his English isn't great. He tells me to just unplug the NAS, and plug it back in again -- then walks me through how to install the English interface. We're chatting for like 2 hours. He's crazy knowledgeable. We get everything set up, but I have no idea what all I just put on the device... most of the links he had been emailing me throughout the process were just IP addresses and paths. But they seem legit... and there wasn't anything on the NAS yet so I didn't mind running strange updates on it.
He says the yellow light will blink for 4 hours 24 minutes. (I don't remember the exact number, but the point was it was an exact number.) He says to email him, not Amazon -- he's very clear about that -- if I need help after. He's a friendly guy, I liked how helpful he was.
I go back to sleep for a few hours, do some yard work when I wake up, forget about the NAS, but when I checked later... some point after 4 hours 24 minutes... it's all green and working fine. And it's got twice the space than I paid for. And it's all in English. Only thing was... when I hit the "check for updates" option it just spun and nothing happened. But everything else seemed perfect.
So I'm on the fence... I have this clearly not authentic NAS from some random guy in China... that the manufacturer says it's not supposed to exist... but it's 100% bigger than what I thought I paid for...
That night I got an email from the seller, and you can tell he's sad. "I tried to help you, why did you tell Amazon it was a fake? It not a fake." I wrote back that I think that was from before he and I spoke, I had called the manufacturer's tech support to get the issue fixed and they told me the serial number wasn't real, but that it's working fine for me now.
He was writing back instantly, "It not a fake, you want a refund? I give you refund, but please don't complain to Amazon about me, I sell good stuff." Right away I see an email from Amazon telling me that the seller had given me a 100% refund. He even refunded shipping costs.
I felt awful. Here's this guy who spent 2 hours on the phone with me, probably spent a lot on an international call, and the manufacturer contacted Amazon about the order and came down on him for selling counterfeits. Probably scared him or told him he wouldn't be able to sell on Amazon any more if it was a fake... who knows.
I write back, "Thanks for the refund, where do I send the NAS? I will pay for shipping. I didn't mean to get you in trouble."
He writes back, "I'm sorry. It's not a fake. Please don't be mad at me."
The case was marked as resolved at Amazon, the guy told me I didn't have to return the NAS, and I never heard back from the manufacturer. Free NAS! But a little guilt because I didn't pay this guy for it, or for his time... and he stopped responding to my emails after that. I offered to send it back to him two more times.
About a year later I logged in to the interface, realized the auto-update feature was working fine. Updated the bios and firmware. I think that was 5-6 years ago now -- it's been running great.
I had raved about the quality of the NAS to a friend, who bought the same model about 6 months after I did... but his died a few months ago... when we took it apart to switch out the drives we realized it had totally different drives and cables, and even the logic board seemed different from the one that mine had. Sure hardware changes, but... his seemed more legit and polished inside than mine. Mine has a few spots inside that just look glue-gunned in place. (=
Anyway yeah, probably 7 years on... my little free (and probably semi-counterfeit) NAS is still running great.
That call at 3 AM was by far the most knowledgeable of any seller or tech support person I've ever spoken with.
Man, I'd buy that guy's stuff if he branded it, sounds well put together with great support. It's really sad he couldn't get the eye-balls on his own products on Amazon, he had to make it a knockoff of a bigger brand.
At some point I really do want to visit the black markets in China -- that video of the guy building his own iPhone as so cool. Everything we get comes all plastic wrapped and obfuscated, it's cool to remember it's all still just circuit boards and recognizable components -- just much smaller than we were used to snapping together in the 80s and 90s.
That almost makes me wonder if some engineer at the company sold a development prototype on the side, or something. Maybe you were talking to one of the engineers that actually helped build the thing?
The guy knew the product inside and out. He knew network tech inside and out. Like... he'd say, "Go to the ABCD button..." And I'd be like, "Oh where's that?" And he'd be like, "You see the XYZ field at the top? Put your cursor there and it 9 tab button away from that." And I didn't hear him typing or doing anything on his side... it felt like he had it all memorized. Just 0 hesitation, total confidence in his suggestions. And they all worked perfectly.
At one point I was like, "Hey can you give me a minute so I can figure out how to set my router to use a static IP for the NAS?" And he was like, "Sure I walk you through it, what kind of router do you have?" Different brand... he handled it without skipping a beat. Actually I think that was the first time I heard about DD-WRT -- he was like, "We set this up now, but you setup DD-WRT later. It better."
He doesn't sell on Amazon any more -- at least not under the name I bought from. I hope he's in business somewhere else... even if all of his shit was custom built, I'd gladly buy it for the level of support I got.
The scams and reduced quality are entirely Amazon's fault.
They've done very little to cut down on them. But I don't think they have an appropriate system in place for any sort of custom device like this.
Maybe they should but they don't today. The gist I got from this blog post wasn't that Amazon is unreasonable but that they expect their small business partners to match their own turn-arounds because that's part of their brand.
I think that's entirely reasonable of Amazon since they do not currently have custom product support.
Yup, I make that mistake all the time; thanks for catching it. I'll admit my previous post was a bit of a knee jerk, I've been trying to find an alternative to Amazon for a long time now, after being burned by scammers on their site.
I agree with a lot of other points people have made (yes, the original post smacks of a marketing, yes Amazon as it stands isn't a good distribution channel for them). But I wish Amazon were a good distribution channel for them. I'd prefer one of these companies on Amazon over a dozen knock off brands.
>Amazon is not really an appropriate distribution platform for 6-week custom-made-to-order products. Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor but it certainly isn't Amazon (or Walmart).
But there is Amazon Handmade (which is supposed to be the Amazon Etsy):
>...so it looks like Amazon has their hands in other areas besides distribution of mass manufactured parts.
For your 3 examples, I clicked on "Explore the store" and of the dozen or so random items I clicked on, it was 1 to 3 days delivery. I also found a wooden cutting board that you could personalize with a customer name (laser etching) and that was 3 to 6 business days.
I didn't see any item that said 6 weeks for delivery like Etsy has.
The Princeton Audio article didn't specify but I'm guessing[1] he's using one of these 2 Amazon partner programs:
This gets you a special Amazon products page with the cachet of "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" which is more valuable than "Fulfilled by Amazon." Those programs are not appropriate for 2 month lead times.
Exactly. If they had chosen instead to use FBA, ALL of the frustrations Princeton documented would disappear. Of course they would be replaced with a different set of frustrations associated with FBA, but they would be able to set their own price, their own priorities, etc.
I have a friend who works for a company that is a supplier for Amazon and Home Depot. He says they are both equally demanding and inflexible. I think that's just the game when being a supplier for big box inc. And obviously Princeton is not a big box product.
> Amazon is not really an appropriate distribution platform for 6-week custom-made-to-order products. Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor but it certainly isn't Amazon (or Walmart).
Perhaps Etsy would be a better platform for that product?
And the risk of keeping inventory value that you're never going to sell. Amazon takes their speakers, but will never send the unsold units back. Making expensive speakers according to MRP projections with no reliable demand is a time-bomb for a small company like this one. Especially if they're already unsatisfied with Amazon's performance, why would they risk thousands of dollars worth of product for no reason? It doesn't seem like they're trying to scale-up to be Bose. They seem to just want to hang out, make money, and make diesel speakers.
This applies to sellers, not suppliers (when a product "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com"). The Amazon supplier terms and conditions are atrocious, they squeeze you like a lemon.
As of this time I can't actually find their listing on Amazon, but it's likely that they're "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" as the traditional retailer, and not using FBA with their own webstore.
But that would also be true if they were selling their speakers through Walmart, Best Buy, Sharper Image. This is a laundry list of complaints that boils down to "Amazon is a retailer." And who didn't know that? If you want to sell at retail you need inventory.
I think what you said about keeping some popular, prebuilt configurations on Amazon makes perfect sense. I am not sure why they decided to entirely cut off Amazon.
I have ordered products from Amazon that haven taken over a month to arrive. I am not sure why Amazon rush these folks. I think Amazon is fucking up here by trying to appear as a faster delivery solution over a quality of product solution.
I think combining both, allowing for sale of pre-made, popular products, as well as allowing longer windows for custom built speakers is a solution that will work for both parties.
> Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor but it certainly isn't Amazon (or Walmart).
Massdrop is a possible alternative. They have a thriving audio enthusiast community and long fulfillment times for custom/semi-custom orders are not uncommon.
This is a just an ad or marketing stunt for the company.
As most of you pointed out, they picked the wrong distributor for their business model. Now they are mad and severing relationships.
However, 75% of the article is about their company and their handcrafted products. Then they offer a discount at the bottom tells you everything you need to know what this is really about.
I mean, let's not delude ourselves here. Most corporate things are intended to feed into the bottom line in some fashion. That's business. It's not dishonest of the company to be working to improve their image and provide buzz.
Our Site:1 speakers are lovingly handcrafted. We make them one at a time, to our customer's desired spec, using their preferred tonewoods, choice of hardware, as well as other unique customizations.
...
The only way to meet their demands would have been to mass-produce huge volumes of speakers featuring no customizations.
How is Amazon even possibly a good place to sell this kind of an item? People overwhelmingly go to Amazon for the cheapest items that are the types of products that are sold at massive scale.
So if you can't by virtue of your business model sell 100,000 SKUs delivered two day prime, then it seems like Amazon would be a terrible place to try and sell.
I mean it looks like they make a fantastic product for a specific subset of audiophiles: ones that don't want a system to dominate their home. However they don't need Amazon's market to get to the scale they claim to want to reach.
>How is Amazon even possibly a good place to sell this kind of an item?
Because the vendor making that mistake only focuses on Amazon's very desirable millions of customers. The vendor then thinks it's more reasonable for Amazon to accommodate the vendor's very long lead times -- instead of the vendor having to adjust to Amazon's baseline of typical customer expectations.
The part that's missing from the vendor's thinking is that Amazon accumulated "millions of customers" in the first place by not catering to vendors that took 6 weeks to deliver books and CDs.
Can you do a breakdown for a MacBook Pro for me. I paid over 3k for the latest one. I'd love to know how much all the parts cost sans casing and integration.
As an audio enthusiast who spends far too much money on speakers and other gear:
This isn't the same. The actual transducers and gear in these things is very low-end.
Their gimmick seems to be the "tonewoods", which when you take into account the level of electronics in these is just silly. It's nearly cable riser levels of snake oil. Couple that with the fact that this is streamed over bluetooth (They mention using aptX, but not what variant, and even the aptx 'lossless' variant is still lossy in many circumstances... and iPhones and many android phones don't support aptX at all) where you are using lossy compression over what is already likely a lossy compressed file, and your audio quality is going to be pretty terrible, all things considered.
You better be buying these things for the looks, because they're certainly not worth the price for the level of performance. You might claim you're paying a premium on an MBP for looks and such, but there's genuinely good hardware inside a MBP. This is a $30 wireless speaker with $270+ being spent on a gimmick.
Just wondering, how much more would they have to spend to provide electronics worthy of their designs and money spent on wood and skilled US labor? I'm guessing it's currently <20% of their costs.
Of course, in the audio industry style trumps substance almost every time. Why bother if most of your consumers can't tell the difference?
Let's be honest here. These are mostly going to play bluetooth-transmitted audio from a modern low-fi turntable.
I suspect they're pretty good at that. And they look nice.
This is hilariously bad. An "audiophile" speaker manufacturer lovingly handcrafts genuine wooden cabinets, then proceeds to fill them with the cheapest possible components acquired from AliExpress...
With those kind of margins, they can probably afford to flood Amazon FCs with thousands of these things and still make a profit, despite carrying excess inventory.
Amazon actually does sell some low-volume, high-dollar speakers. Google for "amazon premium home audio" to find it.
As an extreme example, you can even buy a $32,000 pair of KEF Blade speakers there. They have "Only 1 left in stock", but it has free Prime 2-day shipping! (They also have lots of much less extreme stuff in the $500 to $5000 price range.)
I'm not sure how they're managing it. They may have special arrangements going with the manufacturers (so that there are no penalties). Or it may be that Amazon initiated things to build out a special section of their store. Or it may just be that these items are high-end but aren't _custom_, so the manufacturer can stay ahead and keep enough stock on hand even though that's only a handful of units.
Well, it's really tempting and financially desirable to try and get on Amazon anyway. There are lots of consumers on Amazon with both an appetite for that kind of an artisan item and the purchasing power to go for it despite the higher lead time. So the demand side is usually a given.
Don't forget that, from the manufacturer's perspective, Amazon is not only the logistical facilitator, but also a sales channel where huge numbers of potential customers are introduced to companies they wouldn't naturally be exposed to.
From the words they're using, I don't think they were selling on Amazon as a 3rd party seller, it sounds more like Amazon was buying from them on wholesale terms, and then selling to end users as sold and shipped by Amazon.
Yes, must be. Which really makes no sense as a seller when you can just sell your product FBA. Especially when you are the manufacturer and can control who you sell to.
It seems that all their troubles would be solved by just selling themselves on Amazon as a 3p seller.
That's exactly what I was thinking. As a 3rd party, merchant fulfilled (not Amazon fulfilled) seller, it seems like Princeton could have complete control over their inventory, lead times, etc. However, this is all an assumption. Anyone know for certain how that all works?
>I'll repeat that: Amazon.com, a reseller, told us that we were not allowed to raise the price of our own product for any reason.
Yeah, I gave up when I read that.
The seller is not selling via FBA.
In fact, the seller is not selling his items on Amazon! Amazon is selling his items on Amazon.
Amazon's behavior is not any different from any other large retailer. Amazon should control what price they charge the customers, just as you would have control if you set up your own store.
Amazon doesn't allow companies to sell their product for a higher price on Amazon than on their own site (or elsewhere). This is what I assume they're referring to.
Obviously Amazon wants to push sales on Amazon, but it kind of sucks as a company when you feel like you have to sell your product on Amazon to get the exposure of your competition... but then doing so generally means a cut in your profits because you can't actually incentivize _not_ using Amazon, which in many cases can be better for the consumer and the producer.
>Amazon doesn't allow companies to sell their product for a >higher price on Amazon than on their own site (or elsewhere).
Well, yeah. They don't want you upping the Amazon price to balance out their revshare cut while simultaneously using Amazon as an advertising platform/traffic funnel.
Perhaps you can get returned stock back to see if there's something wrong with it, but not unsold stock? It seems strange to me as well, but I've also seen plenty of Amazon items that are obviously effectively about to be out of stock forever, lingering on those last one or two items still in some warehouse somewhere.
They could have used Amazon Custom (which is a new service that's mostly focused on apparel, but still) or Amazon Handmade (Amazon's Etsy clone) instead of using the typical system for selling manufactured products. They were setting themselves up for failure by selling an artisan product on a marketplace designed for factory produced goods.
It makes no sense to criticize Amazon for being what it is, which is mostly a platform to buy standardized, affordable, manufactured stuff.
They went into the Amazon Vendor program not really understanding what it entailed. A lot of big companies that also participate in the Vendor program have similar complaints about it to this guy (especially in regards to price inflexibility) but there are similar problems when you sell to any big retailer. There are also plenty of problems and headaches with, say, selling to Best Buy or Wal-Mart, that you don't have when you sell to Amazon.
They could have also just focused on eBay and taken advantage of the more lenient return policies. Or just focused on their own website. I understand why all of this would be confusing and frustrating if they are primarily a small niche manufacturer accustomed to selling direct to high-end consumers on their own website.
But that would have just been successful for them and not have made a good viral marketing blog post that hooks into a ready mass of resentful people who are looking for something to be mad on the internet about.
TBH they would make more money by figuring out how to reach audiophiles who want high end custom speakers on Amazon than just trying to gin up outrage with a coupon attached to it. Some people would rather be mad than just quietly successful. The overlap between people who get outraged against big corporations on the internet and people who want to buy $335 desktop speakers is very limited. Better off finding those rich and picky audiophiles and appealing directly to them.
I am a huge amazon customer and fan. Thank you for mentioning Amazon Handmade ... I had no idea it existed. How odd is that? I don't think I've seen an email from them about it and it never shows in product searches.
When I read sentences like this:
"We steadfastly refuse to be purveyors of cheap, plastic, mass-produced, craptastic speakers made on an assembly line in China that contribute nothing of value to the lives of our customers or the town we call home."
I'm always amazed how much subtle racism seems to be acceptable when it comes to talking about China.
This sentence contains so many hidden assumptions, e.g. "product from china == crap" and "person in our home town earning money == good, person in china earning money == bad".
Many Chinese goods traditionally have had a reputation of low quality. Maybe that reputation is outdated or perhaps it was never quite accurate (?), but either way I don't think it's reasonable to label a reference to that reputation as racist. Nor is wanting to build businesses that benefit your local community racist or particularly wrong.
Almost every object in my house has some sort of component made in China. The fact that I haven't had to replace any of them in years AND that it didn't cost an arm and a leg compared to being manufactured here in my local country should be testament to the output of that country.
It's like we're completely spoiled by how absurdly cheap and mostly reliable things that we use on a day to day basis.
To me, it's akin to the stereotypes of foreign professional athletes such as European basketball players or Russian hockey players. When we find the examples that validate it, it reinforces the stereotype. But then, we completely ignore the countless examples that counter it, both in terms of high quality performers from the foreign country as well as poorly performing examples produced from ones own country.
There's nothing that implicitly makes something made in Canada, or USA, or Germany that much better than if it were made in China.
>There's nothing that implicitly makes something made in Canada, or USA, or Germany that much better than if it were made in China.
I'd say that there is, sort of. Much of the manufacturing that remains in the USA is for industrial applications, with specific requirements for performance and reliability. We basically exported the consumer product manufacturing category, and with it went the majority of the low quality market.
It's like the legendary status of "American made tools". When my grandfather passed away, I got some of his American tools from the 40s - 70s. They're junkier than most tools you'll find at Walmart or Harbor Freight today. Why? Because he was relatively poor and bought cheap, domestic tools built for the hobbiest market.
The one exception I've read is that China isn't producing raw steel that's as high quality as US and German steel. I was looking into tubing benders awhile back and read several accounts of even high-grade Chinese steel kinking at the same wall thickness where American and German steel continued to bend smoothly.
I'm not who you asked, but I would say that yes, this is true, but it's also much better quality than similarly priced items from the US. Much better.
So it's actually true that we're flooded with cheap crap from China and that the production quality of those items is better than from elsewhere. (For the same price range.)
Many Chinese goods traditionally have had a reputation of low quality. Maybe that reputation is outdated or perhaps it was never quite accurate (?), but either way I don't think it's reasonable to label a reference to that reputation as racist.
African-Americans traditionally have had a reputation of enjoying watermelon and fried chicken. Is it "reasonable" to label casual and/or backhanded references to that reputation as racist?
Hint: Yes. Yes it is.
It would have been perfectly easy to write a story like this, decrying the modern marketplace full of cheaply made, disposable, plastic, ghost-shift junk products, counterfeits, and fly-by-night non-brand brands, without naming the most common country of origin. We all know the stuff largely comes from China; pointing it out explicitly doesn't add information, only sentiment.
Yet so many stories bring up China specifically. There's an impulse there the author(s) aren't examining in themselves. The author(s) may not have explicitly racist intent, but the result is absolutely a racist pattern.
In the 1900s, Germany was known for mass-producing cheap pieces of cr-p. In the 1960s, Japan was known for mass-producing cheap pieces of cr-p. In the 2000s, China was known for mass-producing pieces of cr-p. Do you see the pattern?
Also, what parts of these speakers are Princeton actually making themselves? When I go to their site, they have pages upon pages about "tonewoods," but the only hardware customization they offer is changing the look of the knob and grille. I'll bet dollars to donuts that every part of this that actually makes sound is made on an assembly line in somewhere in Asia, maybe even China.
There's also the idiotic presumption that only their "lovingly handcrafted" speakers could ever provide value. Consider that their speakers are priced beyond what most people would pay and are of presumptuously higher quality than what most people would even care for. It's profoundly egotistical and makes me think that they don't quite understand the space they work in.
There's nothing racist about recognizing that a lot of cheap crap products are made in China, nor about caring more about your own community than other communities.
Correct, giving preference to your own community compared to others is commonly associated with terms such as nationalism, protectionism or cronyism. Racism can and often does happen among members of the same (local) community.
Why is creating an environment where my neighbor is suffering a good thing? We've built this fragile global supply chain for things that benefit the large scale producers and distributors and deliver low value to the consumer. Amazon is the great middleman and ultimately raises costs for the market.
I was in Georgia last year at the heart of peach harvest season. The local supermarket sold Peaches shipped in from California that cost 100% more than the fresh produce sold by small purveyors and were an inferior product in every dimension.
Note that this is the very upper end of factory worker conditions in China. For the local market, this is genuinely considered good. Knowing that conditions for "cheap" stuff produced in China are as bad as those documented in the article or (a lot) worse, it is almost immoral to buy that stuff.
If you buy cheap stuff from China or almost anywhere in Asia or Africa, you are inflicting a small amount of harm on every employee that has better conditions than that, and harm on humanity as a whole.
I know. So many things are made in China which are not crap, like iPhones. Also sad is how entitled people slag poor assembly line workers in China and yet have a higher quality of life due to the money they save on inexpensive goods.
Yes this assumption has been applied to many "developing" countries no fully developed. This includes Japan, but also Korea (remember the reputation that Kia and Hyundai used to have? very similar to the reputations that Nissan, Honda, and Toyota used to have) and Taiwan.
People forgot, but post WW2 this also applied to German engineering!
Also to the Italians. Maybe there's a pattern where a country can achieve eventual prosperity by going Fascist (Germany, Italy, Japan) ending up defeated on the wrong side of a war, then reform itself into an economy that emphasizes high value-add high-quality manufacturing?
"Make America Great Again!" Maybe Trump is onto something! </jk>
US companies didn't start massively outsourcing their entire product manufacturing to Japan. Japanese companies just made didn't just make cheaper products they were often better and more reliable. Japanese manufacturing was more innovative, not just cheap.
If it were Chinese companies that were making their own products I wouldn't mind so much. I happily buy from Lenovo because I think they make good quality laptops and treat their workers better than other laptop manufacturers.
But it isn't, it's just big corporations that want cheaper labour.
In addition to all the other great responses you have received, I would add that many consumers identify with a "person in our home town earning money" since they live in a town and need to earn money. Or end up like Detroit.
Racism blinds people. So does anti-racism.
By providing a simple derogatory label one avoids the need to think and instead imposes their prejudice upon the world - ultimately doing the very thing they are decrying. Ironic. Both ignorant bullies lacking self-awareness, compassion, and empathy, but on opposite sides. If only they realized how much they have in common.
This is one of those posts that would be more impactful with the Amazon emails embedded in the post. When you can have the bad guy in the piece playing their own part it really resonates, if you're reading PA consider just putting in their responses to your questions.
The only nit on this is this bit: "The only way to meet their demands would have been to mass-produce huge volumes of speakers featuring no customizations. And the only way to make that economically feasible would have been to sacrifice our high standards of quality across the board. Needless to say, we're not going to do that."
I find I can't help but react when someone presents a problem as unsolvable (it triggers my 'hey solve this!' button). And so when they state that this is "impossible" my first question is, "How have you tried to solve it?", "What do you consider as constraints? How do you verify those constraints?"
I agree completely with the idea that being craftsmanship to bespoke products is an excellent goal, and if we can come up with ways to do that effectively we can enable a manufacturing renaissance in places like the US. As a result I see calling this problem 'unsolvable' as a challenge (it may be unsolvable but if it truly is, then it may mean that bringing back this sort of work to the US will never be economically feasible and I am not ready to accept that yet)
In terms of worthwhile startup projects to pursue, I consider this one of the big ones. Creating the tools and infrastructure around craftspeople to enable them to economically apply their craft at scale.
If you think down this path, that craftmanship needs a very fast route to market, and it's going to be a very big industry - with the capitalistic logic, you end up with solutions like drone transport, automated machines that create custom things fast, and robots/ai to test products.
And you probably also end up with manufacturing clusters doing most of the work - and not in small towns spread around, but maybe still in the US, maybe. But designers could stay local and not necessarily near factories.
I don't know about the speed. I do know that craftsmanship needs a big market (because the number of people who are willing to pay the extra cost are a subset of the whole market). I'm more interested in understanding three things;
1) A market maker that can create the visibility / confidence that allows a high touch bespoke market to exist (sort of eBay or Amazon or Alibaba for craft people. I thought this might be Tindie at one point but that doesn't seem to be their focus at this stage.)
2) An infrastructure/raw materials market for the craft people. I've seen this with people who do this sort of custom work that finding suppliers is a huge issue and qualifying them and working with them.
3) Tooling and engineering services, where each craftsperson requires a specific set of tools which are by definition low volume but also high tolerance precision kit. My Dad's engraving setup for example was put together with "the" engraving vice, and "the" compressor, and "the" engraving tool and bits. The company that makes all of the tooling is facilitated by an engravers guild which has a large number of members which provides an economical place for the tool manufacturer to serve, but is it possible to create a business that can make bespoke tools at a price that allows the person purchasing them to recover the costs in a reasonable amount of time?
Fundamentally, I am asking whether it is possible to build a "factory" that is not so specialized that it could supply the needs of a variety of users in different activities. Could we build such a facility in a 'small town' and be able to staff it? Or put another way, what is the smallest unit of economic self sufficiency given a global shipping market.
I'm having a hard time expressing this clearly but consider the following analogy/question. Let's say you have a town, SmallVille, that has a functional economy because there is a car parts factory that employs 1/3 of the working aged people. Their salaries go, in part, to shopping for groceries, haircuts, meals out, movies, etc, which employs a second third of the working aged people, and those businesses and the local governance employs the remaining third. Its a nice small town, everyone has a job, and life is good.
Now historically, we've seen that car parts factory close because car parts could be made cheaper elsewhere and the entire economy of the town collapses as you get 1/3 of the population out of work and so competeing with the remaining 2/3rds for their jobs, and without that money coming in the number of services businesses that are needed goes down so there are actually fewer of the remaining jobs available, which further crushes the life out of the town.
Basically without that parts plant feeding money into the town in exchange for car parts the town fails. So can we replace that car parts factory with a factory that can reasonably serve a much wider variety of needs? Can we create a nexus of production which is dynamically assignable to what ever is needed?
My thesis is that if you can crack that nut, and create such a facility, then you can create a 'fractal' economy, one which is geographically distributed and yet nimble in the face of changing economic output needs. Can a car company publish a 'spec' to any of these universal factories and say "I need 600,000 door knobs like this." and get various amounts from 1k to perhaps 100K from a number of factories with good quality control that would depend only on scheduling factory time. And yes, I know this hasn't been accomplished before (hence the 'it may be impossible') and yes I've dealt with trying to get two manufacturers building the same part such that you couldn't tell which factory made the part when you were assembling systems (in that case it was front panels for NetApp filers but I'm sure there are similar stories from anyone who has built product) it is really really hard and maybe not possible. The reward though would be tremendous, a 'factory on demand' of arbitrary size would be to goods production what AWS was to information technology company production.
I can imagine a versatile manufacturing technology that has 0 setup costs(maybe 3d printing), and in the digital world it should be possible to create the same things from different people.
But even with those technologies, centralization/clustering has some advantage: buying in bulk, cheaper labor, closeness to distribution, access to talent - and especially access to better technology.
But what are the advantages of the SmallVille entrepreneur ? why should he invest in that business ? and how could he survive long term ?
I think for it to work we have to assume that Smallville's factory can dump output onto an efficient delivery system and pick up raw materials (perhaps subassemblies) from that same system. Whether it is rail, or dirigibles, or automated trucks.
As for "Why Smallville's factory?", if I understand your question you are asking why anyone would contract with the Smallville plant for their parts over say Central City's factory? My assumption is that if all capacity is nearly equivalent (like machines are nearly equivalent in AWS) that factory choices would be based on available capacity and perhaps some risk avoidance (not have all your factories in the midwest in tornado season for example).
> But it was also born as a reaction against the cheap, mass-produced audio products that litter the marketplace today.
We are entering a world where the cheapest mass-produced items are just about as good as the high end versions. Products are plateauing in many ways which means the cheap versions catch up. Say on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is the worst product ever, and 10 is the best you could ever imagine. Over the last decades we were jumping from 1, to 2, to 3... etc. Now we are at the end of the spectrum in many ways. So instead of jumping entire digits, products increment by .003 for example, and demanding higher prices. To the normal consumer, that fraction of an incremental advancement isn't worth the price.
What Princeton Audio is feeling is the sting of competition as they catch them in quality.
> We steadfastly refuse to be purveyors of cheap, plastic, mass-produced, craptastic speakers made on an assembly line in China that contribute nothing of value to the lives of our customers or the town we call home.
That "cheap, plastic, mass-produced, craptastic" Chinese made stuff, if you go back 100 years, has given most of us a life of unimaginable luxury.
Yeah I find it annoying when high end producers complain about cheap alternatives.
I'd be willing to bet the average person probably couldn't tell the difference in audio quality between a pair of sub $50 Logitech speakers and these speakers which cost $335.00 each. Or at least, it wouldn't be worth the extra $620 for most people.
I'm not suggesting there isn't a difference (I've bought higher end headphones and speakers myself), but rather, when the difference is marginal for the average person, most people are content with a cheaper alternative that fulfills the need. We see the same with furniture and clothing.
As a designer, I can certainly appreciate the craft, care, and detail that goes into creating objects. But I also appreciate companies that produce well-designed, fully functional objects that almost everyone can afford. Like, when I was recently shopping for a desk, I was floored to find companies selling desks that were 10 to 20 times more expensive than my old IKEA desk that had zero scratches after a decade of use.
Doesn't this apply to literally everything? Cheap programmers v/s expensive programmers, cheap photographers v/s expensive photographers, etc.
When it's their own field, people suddenly become very attached to the nuances and about the additional value they can provide which the cheap counterpart does not.
Our Site:1 speakers are lovingly handcrafted. We make them one at a time, to our customer's desired spec, using their preferred tonewoods, choice of hardware, as well as other unique customizations.
This doesn't sound like a good match for selling on Amazon -- Amazon seems more suited for products where you can ramp up production easily to meet demand. And I probably wouldn't buy a $450 handcrafted wood bluetooth speaker on Amazon, assuming that it's some cheap mass produced mess where the wood will delaminate in a year.
Wait, you were selling custom items on Amazon and were shocked when they wanted delivery immediately? There are legitimate complaints to make against a company like Amazon, but you not understanding the nature of your chosen distribution channel is not one of them.
So that was 8 paragraphs about how amazing you are before getting to the issues with Amazon. And the issue was basically that Amazon isn't Etsy or Kickstarter.
Enough has been said about the fact that an online retailer is not a good fit for a custom made-to-order shop, these are the opposite in so many ways.
I wanted to share my opinion that Studio monitors like Yamaha HS80 is practically the best sound quality I've been able to attain, with the price much less than custom 'tonewood' and 'hand crafted' speakers. By having the best possible range and accuracy on the output, after sound proofing the environment as wanted, I can apply any EQ and filtering I want for pleasure or mixing, and if desired I could also record/recreate impulse response of other speakers. Good monitors are less than 1k, and I'm seeing people spend thousands on cargo cult nonsense. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't become one of those people, give monitors a try if you want good sound.
I even got some ~$300 monitors for my parents TV, and they say that it sounds better any other setups they've tried. In fact, they have now started listening to music through TV a lot.
Amazon, a platform optimized to deliver mass-produced goods quickly and cheaply, is not up to the needs of a company that ships custom artisanal speakers handcrafted using centuries-old speaker-making techniques from a Piedmontese village. Color me surprised. Maybe try Etsy?
Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the Internet (Wal-Mart wants to be the Wal-Mart of the Internet but it hasn't been going so well). It's not the place to be selling custom made stuff with a 6 week lead time, nor would Wal-Mart.
Nice products but this is simply a mismatch of product and venue. Spare the drama.
Would the following model work for this company and selling on Amazon?: Sell gift cards for speakers on Amazon. Fulfillment of customized speakers is handled directly by the manufacturer/seller. Returns and issues with the speakers are handled directly by the manufacturer/seller.
I don't fault either side here. Amazon in principle is doing the right thing - pressuring their suppliers to lower prices and improve shipment times. In this case they went too far and this company got fed up and left.
> I'll repeat that: Amazon.com, a reseller, told us that we were not allowed to raise the price of our own product for any reason. It was not open for discussion. In fact, the one and only time that anyone at Princeton Audio ever spoke in person to anyone from Amazon.com was the day we ended our relationship with them over the phone. Prior to that, our Amazon buyer had refused to ever reply to any of our questions or requests for support. Like I said, nice folks, huh?
Sounds like Amazon needs to change their practices on dealing with manufacturer and let go of some people.
There seems to be a lot of negativity about this. They Site-1 product they make looks beautiful and is made in the US. I really applaud them for doing this and I wish more companies would. Making beautiful long lasting products.
If you've got a beautiful casing to the speakers you can upgrade internal components and that looks like one of the things they offer.
If nothing else then hopefully this post will prevent other's with custom products that don't suit Amazon from going down that route.
The negativity is born of knowing something about speaker design. Their product is massively overpriced for what it is. "Tonewoods" are the literaly opposite of what you want in a material for speaker cabinets. For as much time as they spend bashing on cheap speakers from china, if you did a side by side comparison of their product vs other options at the same price point, you'll quickly discover the limitations of a crappy 3" full range and a dirt cheap IC amp from TI.
> I assume you're talking about products in the same price range that were made in China?
Doesn't have to be China, any reasonably competent product will utterly embarrass PA's speakers. There's no avoiding physics, and a 3" full range cannot be more than it is, even if you charge $300+ for it.
If you like small single driver speakers check out Mark Audio. They're an example of the sort of driver PA should be using if they actually gave a crap about sound quality.
> You're trading quality of components for quality of workmanship
There is no meaningful workmanship involved. My grandfather was a luthier. I've designed and built speakers. This is a massively overpriced product being marketed via rhetoric that is directly opposed to everything we know from actual, formal, research.
If Amazon had let you control their retail pricing wouldn't that be price fixing? You can set a recommended price, but once you've accepted the wholesale price, you live with it. If the retailer decides to dump your product at a loss, that's their choice no?
Princeton aren't complaining about Amazon dumping their product, they're complaining that Amazon wouldn't accept them trying to raise the price they sell to Amazon for - hence them terminating the relationship. There's no attempt at price fixing on either side, just a mismatch of business models.
>Amazon relentlessly pushed us to accept lead-times that were typically only four days, and sometimes demanded fulfillment of orders in as little as 24 hours--including delivery.
Amazon is not really an appropriate distribution platform for 6-week custom-made-to-order products. Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor but it certainly isn't Amazon (or Walmart).
One way for Princeton Audio to become compatible with Amazon's short lead times is to run some sophisticated projections (e.g. "demand planning") on the most likely customer combinations[1] and build an inventory of those ahead of time. (Sell semi-custom on Amazon with immediate delivery but fully custom on Princeton's own website with 6-week wait.) However, that requires a big capital investment -- and the hassles of managing inventory.
[1] PA's website shows 32 possible combinations (4 woods x 4 metals x 2 batteries) so maybe prebuild and sell only the most popular 3 configurations on Amazon.com
https://store.princeton-audio.com/products/site1-bluetooth-s...