Make lemonade.

Nia commented today on THIS old post and I thought I would throw it out there for comment.


The implied premise here is that if you aren't willing to spend $700, you won't get a quality product. I don't buy that.


Price isn't always an indication of quality; sometimes it's merely an measure of arbitrary mark-up... or economies of scale (or lack of). If you want something custom, or if you're buying bench-made shoes, one component of price in the shoe example might be the creation of the last. You need to make & sell a certain number of shoes from it before you can cover the cost of your capital expense. This is probably the same with lighting. There's this initial cost to get the item into production and then you have the benefit of economies of scale, right?

But when this topic comes up, no one can actually explain to me WHY the light at Veritables is better quality than a knock-off at Restoration. I am not interested here in discussion why one should or should not buy a knock-off. What I am interested in discussing is, on what basis could someone look at a $700 light from Circa and tell me with this much certainty that a $400 light wouldn't be just as good in terms of quality and function?