edition.cnn.com - Luxury fashion quality issue

The article chronicles people who buy $2,000 sweaters whose buttons fall off and so on. For those who buy sweaters for two grand this is a trauma - but for the rest of us, it is also an object lesson. Over the years, many (most?) premium consumer brands (Tumi, North Face, Hartman, Henkel, Cole Haan shoes and so on) have joined in the fight for the bottom consumer tranche with nearly indistinguishable product from "the pack", but sold at higher prices presumably because their brand indicates their quality.

When I buy a product, I try to ignore the brand and look at the quality of material the product is made from, its suitability to the task and its quality of manufacturing. Over the years, while some of the manufacturers of products I've bought over the years are still on my "go to" list, some are not and some unknowns I've bought at "fire-sale" price have turned out to have been every bit as good as the best in their class. This has been especially obvious in cooking pots. Basically a pot tends to be a metal vessel with a handle of some sort. The heat transfer properties of any particular metal thickness and composition won't care whose name is on the bottom of the pot. Under those circumstances, more has to do with the handle and how it is attached, the deburring of edges, the non-stick finish properties, and features like a pouring pout, interior measuring markers and their ilk than anything else.

This has led to purchases of a number 0of brands of clothing, at deep discounts, who were unsuccessful when they tried to break into the US market (Rab, Mont-Bell and Royal Robbins come to mind) and my German kitchen knives are in a drawer somewhere and have been replaced by an accumulation of Japanese blades (selected for their particular steels) of indeterminate manufacturers.

Each to their own.

Jeff