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.
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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.
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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.