[larrys]

"She told me she did sell a wool sweater to somebody who went home and washed in hot, it shrank, and then heard no ends of complaints about it, so she resolved to never sell wool sweaters unless they are specially commissioned."

n=1 there then, right? Perhaps she was a bit to hasty based on that single data point?

One of the things luxury brands do is bake into their costs margin to account for customers like this. Or to account for unreasonable people.

[PaulHoule]

I think I'm also unusually snobbish about materials.

If you go to a crafts store they usually have a big section of wall devoted to acrylic yarn. You might find one or two kinds of wool yarn and maybe a blend, but it's pretty clear that grandmothers who knit stuff for their grandkids value 20 hours of their time less than the $10 or so difference in the price of the materials.

[Domenic_S]

Look at it the other way: maybe acrylic yarn serves a pain point. Maybe grandmothers spent 20 hours knitting a beautiful little hat or coat or something, only to have it ruined in the wash by a young, sleep-deprived parent, inexperienced in caring for quality hand-crafted goods.

Grandma figures out she can just use acrylic and now her work doesn't get ruined by washing & drying, and as a bonus the moths don't eat it because who has a cedar chest anymore?

[stan_rogers]

Acrylics don't cause itching (unless you let them get filthy, at which point the filth may cause itching) and can be cleansed of the latest plague the kids brings home from school/day care. Wool, not so much. And it sure sounds like the value of the gift is in the work rather than the materials to me.

[larrys]

To the point of wool vs. acrylic with respect to knitting:

http://www.knittinghelp.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86186

[pseut]

Or they price discriminate, by selling the wool sweater at a high markup to customers who self identify as especially interested in handmade wool sweaters while advertising the cheaper acrylic sweater to everyone else.

[larrys]

I'll give you an example of this.

We offer a service which we charge $10 for. When we first started offering the service we didn't really commit to a time period for completion but generally did it as fast as possible, perhaps it took maybe 4 to 8 hours but sometimes it might be done in an hour or two.

We then changed the pricing as follows:

12 to 24 hours service ($10) 8 to 12 hours service $12 2 to 8 hour service $15

Many people pay the extra fee happily. Instant revenue.

We have something else which is higher priced, say $120. We offer expedited service on that as well charging $25 for "rush". Same thing. Many people choose to pay the rush fee for the better service.

I guess the only thing that is really different from what we do with this and what Fedex does is the fact that it doesn't cost us anymore to offer the service faster at all. We are just allowing people to self identify and feel better by having some kind of guarantee. (Although we don't really guarantee anything we just guarantee we will attempt to get it done faster if we don't they pay at the rate that they would have paid for the "default" service.

(Disclaimer: Figures approximate but accurate enough for the point I am making).

[Evbn]

Exactly. Wool for a textilephiles, gold cables for the audiophiles.. selling to snobs is good business.