>They're more expensive than that, but subsidised by VC capital

They're being subsidized? How do you explain their fat margins, $15.4B of profits on $54.0 of revenue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinduoduo

Maybe there's some loss leader going on, but comparing it to "VC capital" (venture capital... capital?) doesn't make much sense, any more than calling costco's rotisserie chicken and hotdogs "subsidised by VC capital" doesn't make much sense.

I'm not 100% sure but I also heard China subsidizes shipping of packages, to boost their economy.

I worked as a mailman a while back, most days there would be more packages in grey plastic wrap (from China) than actual mail. And you could tell that the stuff that was inside usually cost less than the shipping would have cost if you paid full price.

> TEMU doesn't sell those things.

Oh? https://imgur.com/a/tjAdSQL

Temu built out some local distribution after it had already reached a pretty high level of popularity, but Temu was enabled by regulatory and political indifference that allowed China, with an enormous GDP, to get extremely subsidized postage rates. Also, lax enforcement of import duties (do you think the declared values were accurate?), and effectively zero enforcement of any safety standards, etc., on the products sold.

So, it was less of them following a path Amazon had trod and was maintaining, and more like sneaking in a back door and trying to sell you a counterfeit purse.

But if the US and EU had been on their game, it'd of either not happened or would've at least happened much more slowly.

> From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post.

Given there's zero barrier to substitution + the TAM for fans and lightbulbs is huge as sibling comment mentioned, there's no reason for the LTV to meaningfully exceed 1 puchase and the value of that free marketing could be higher than the EV of purchase N+1

E.g., if my name-brand turd wears out unreasonably, I don't replace it with the same name-brand turd; instead I replace it with an ephemeral Chinese brand turd which is just as likely to have similar build quality and features.

Seems to me that the TAM for a fan is basically infinite for any single company, therefore making a product that is too high quality or long lasting could still get you growing yoy sales for a long time and stay in business. But you’re probably right that vs competition lowering prices (and quality) they’d lose.

There’s probably an optimum for maximizing sales/growth that doesn’t land on highest quality products in the real world, with non rational consumers, imperfect information etc… sadly.

Next to the price tag, it should include the warranty. Similar to how calories are listed next to the price tag for food. Just a thought, not sure if it would work.

I also have an abused Vornado and it's holding up just fine. Fans are a weird product though, I know most people would just throw them out as soon as they gunk up and stop spinning, but maintenance/repair is really simple compared to other product categories. IMO the business itself has a hard ceiling too, they can't be delusional enough to think they can keep scaling fan sales YOY, so it's one of those deals I imagine would simply be a stable, predictable brand in a portfolio of businesses that somebody (or some company) owns and operates across many niches.

Doc Martens, however, are a good example of a brand/business where LTV might literally be 1, 2, maybe 5 purchases if your feet have stopped growing and you buy their Made in England boots (higher quality, but a price point that isn't LVMH territory) and want different colors -- or maybe a lot more if you buy the shitty ones (vegan leather, plastic-coated leathers) and they fall apart after 9 months and you replace them.

Regardless, a higher quality pair bought in 1994 and beat to hell and back still are very wearable in 2026, while at the same time there are junk options available too if you're so inclined for whatever reason.

I don't personally understand businesses that treat their products as disposable if the product itself isn't intended to literally be disposable by design. I get "make as much money as possible before the spigot shuts off", "endless growth is the goal", etc, but it also seems like it would create all kinds of headaches and byproducts that make operating a brand or business hell on earth (staffing otherwise-unnecessary customer service, dealing with frequent returns and liquidations, constant rebrand/brand management to deal with or paper over negative public perceptions, endless battle with knockoff competitors because your product has no differentiation in quality or value, on and on).

Temu/Shein/etc on the other hand have a distinct advantage in that they're marketplaces and aggregators of invisible brands; they shield "ghost kitchen" product producers from any kind of liability, blowback, negative attention. They're giants in a foreign land that operate with different rules, goals and incentives.

I don't really have a salient point, just thinking out loud. Ultimately, the article is probably correct in that the default, mainstream firehose of digital detritus will settle somewhere near "ultra-processed content", and that will be just fine for the average consumer. Not much we can really do about it with society and economies structured the way they are today. The knock-on effects of this on culture would be borderline impossible to unwind though, which is sad.