When Keyana Sapp, 31, went shopping for a new backpack, the brands he remembered as a kid were just not the same.
He researched the companies, from North Face to JanSport and Eastpak, and soon realized they were all owned by the VF Corporation after a wave of acquisitions in the 2000s. After a Reddit post he made about his discovery picked up traction, he started looking at other types of consumer goods – cookware, shoes, tools, clothing.
“It seems like that was a story that just repeated in every industry,” Sapp told the Guardian.
Yeah their criteria for what’s good or bad seems to be very subjective. Some brands are bad because the product is diminished while others are bad not because of the product but because of a corporate structure or supply chain decisions.
For example Pyrex is avoid because in the US it’s no loner borosilicate just tempered soda glass—this is understandable, the product is objectively worse.
Hoka is also avoid not because the product is bad but because they don’t own their factories and don’t have long term manufacturing agreements.
This site seems more of a purity test for their vision of how companies should operate as opposed to an actual products are worse list. I think we all agree that private equity is generally bad but this site is basically just bashing any company they disagree with how they’re ran. Let the quality of the products dictate the rankings not subjective shifting criteria based on corporate structures.
Perhaps, but consider that your observation is only possible because they’re being transparent about their product, in contrast with the manufacturers they’re profiling.
I’d think any criteria they came up with would seem subjective to someone.
Speaking of Hoka, there is a blog post about the shoe situation in particular, which points out that shoes are a special case and why the strange manufacturing system behind them matters:
If you don’t have factories or long term agreements your QA is stressed and there’s no guarantee what you’re getting as a buyer. From some subcomponent being inferior to quality differences between factory and b to all of this and worse…
While it’s not a guarantee of bad, it’s a risk, and it’s the company saying the build and outcome doesn’t matter.
This is one way enshitification works.