[bkolko]

That comment wasn't originally about breast pumps, so I can't speak to that specific market. But the comment about sales force costs was about selling products like ultrasound into emerging markets. And if you have products that require lots of training and servicing, and lots of high-touch sales to get to acceptability -- yup, that's gonna cost you! And regardless of the price point of the product, you still have the associated overhead with reaching those markets. There are things you can change about that 'associated overhead' but that's a totally different story.

My gut instinct is that I don't think sales costs are really a huge driver of how companies have been approaching innovation in the breast pump space. There is indeed consumer psychology around how to price products, but the thing that really came across during the hackathon was the frustration people felt about the design and engineering of the pumps -- not the price point.