[decimalenough]

Creating a single basketball shoe from an existing template takes three hours. Coming up with that design and all the associated expenses (marketing etc) plus the tooling needed to produce the shoe consumes much more labor and accounts for the vast majority of the shoe's cost.

Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.

[realo]

Silk hand-woven rugs need no marketing at all in order to fetch absurdly large amounts of coins.

[toast0]

And yet, Steppenwolf was singing their praises in 1968. Bullfrog put out an well know advergame in 1994. Plenty of marketting of the properties of silk rugs through portrayals in popular media.

[deadbabe]

“Silk” is the marketing.

[Groxx]

Plus nearly 2,000 years of accumulated marketing spend via the Silk Road and everything around it.

[IAmBroom]

Even if hand-woven rugs were made on a pattern, they would take hundreds of hours to make.

The innovation in the design is almost icing to the cake, in terms of labor overhead.