A acquaintance of mine recently told me he was going to start his own rock climbing clothes brand.
Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.
No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.
I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.
It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It works both ways. If I know that a company is basically selling Chinese t-shirts with their logo and their markup price, might as well just buy directly from China and skip the middleman.
> It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.
It's an even better lesson on how business is "taught" vs. how business is done. Everyone on HN, at business school, or wherever will tell you that you should start a business to "solve problems" or "fill a gap in the market".
The majority of the people actually starting businesses are doing so to make a buck. That's it. if you're starting out, you'll learn more about selling from starting a business providing a me-too substitute good in a crowded market than you will trying to build a completely new product segment with no market validation and no established price points.
Naively, I though he was trying to make well designed clothes for rock climbers. As a geek, I though he was trying to solve a problem.
No. He just bought Chinese low quality t-shirts, and sticked logos on that and spent all his energy developing the brand itself: communication, aesthetic, mentality, target, etc.
I couldn't see the value of doing such thing, since we have enough of this crap. But it worked: friends around me started to wear the damn thing.
It makes me so uneasy, but it's a good lesson on how humans work.