Brooks has their "factory outlet" crap that is also what you're likely to see at "overstock" stores like Nordstrom Rack (or TJ Max, though I'm not sure they get Brooks-branded stuff; NR does). That entire market is basically one big decentralized fraud operation, they took a model that used to involve selling brands' real goods that had, for whatever reason, not sold well or had minor quality defects, at steep discounts, and replaced that with pretending to do that but actually selling terrible trash with a "nice" brand label on it. "Factory" and "overstock" stores are basically a complete lie that the FTC hasn't seen fit to do anything about because the government is captured by rich crime-loving assholes. They exist solely to trick you into over-paying for Walmart tier crap.

BB's main-line stuff has also been declining in quality, so that's no guarantee either, unfortunately. I think Covid ended most or all of their remaining US production, which was already on the way out.

Some sub-labels like 1818 are still OK. On sale. Even Brooks' best stuff hasn't been worth full price since... IDK, the '90s probably.

Definitely feels like fraud to me too. Kind of reminds me of Amazon listings where some seller has some decent quality product, collects a lot of high reviews, then uses the same listing and does a complete switcharoo to a much shittier more profitable product, replacing images and the description, but keeping the higher rating from earlier. Which also to me sounds like fraud.

At least the Chinese brands don’t try and hide it much like the companies listed here, they’ll just generate a new 5-letter new company to sell low quality crap.

It's frustrating that it's hard to know what's going to be good quality.

I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.

The decline of Brooks Brothers is real and sad.

If I recall, their 1818 Madison collection is still mostly made in Italy with Italian fabrics. "Mostly" because some of this collection --- their made-to-measure garments, specifically --- is made in China with high-quality Chinese fabrics. What's sad about this is that their made-to-measure stuff used to be made in Chicago by expert tailors before the acquisition.

The CEO and owner of Luxottica, the dominant company in eyeglasses, bought Brooks Brothers as a present foir his idiot son, much as Larry Ellison did with Paramount and CBS for his. Said wastrel son ran it into the ground and there it remained for scavengers to feed on.

All of my multiple decade old made to measure Brooks stuff is starting to wear out. Obviously I’m not even considering replacing it with anything off the rack from BB now because it’s all garbage.

What replaced off the rack suits for men in the US? Or should I give up and buy some Realtree?

hmm... but that doesn't guarantee that the customer will buy from "my main brand"

rather, if I know A is a "family brand" of B(rooks bro?), then I'll try to NOT buy from A, and buy from C/D/E/F/G/etc instead

This is one of the reasons 3D printers are becoming a lot more common in homes not inhabited by the sort of geek/nerd like me who you would (correctly) assume owned a 3D printer or two.

Yes, something you print yourself will likely be lower quality than a bought one from years ago and you'll pay more in material and time than buying a new one will cost, but... it may be no worse quality than a new bought set, possibly better, replacement parts can be reproduced easily or additional parts added to the set cheaply (no buying a full set to get a couple of extra pieces that you want) and things can be customised.

One of the bigger 3D catalogue sites (I think MakerWorld, but without checking I'm not 100% certain) ran a marble-run themed contest some months ago for which there were a lot of interesting entries, some just copies of basic parts/sets (great if that is what you are looking for) but also some that were more innovative than that. If you have a printer, or know someone who has, it might be worth you looking into that if your kid would appreciate a new set, there are a lot of free designs¹ out there you could experiment with.

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[1] and paid ones, some designers try to make a living this way and some of them produce designs that are well worth the cost as they may be free of issues more amateur designs could have

I bought a teddy bear from them in 2014 and another in 2025. It's night and day. The earlier one is really high quality, the newer one feels like I won it from a claw machine.

FAO's used to be a prestige NYC brand. Of course, they carried many other branded products but those were mostly top-shelf (and expensive) as well. A LOT of formerly pretty high quality brands have ended up getting sold off to brand management companies and the like. I just got a few pairs of shoes from AllBirds because while the name will live on I have no doubt the quality will become pretty generic now that it's no longer a Silicon Valley must-have thing.

+1 on Origin. 100% of their good are built from American-grown/made materials, built by American hands. It's wayyyy more expensive than most common brands ($99 for a pair of jeans), but if you compare them to "luxury" brands like Lululemon, it's comparable and wasn't manufactured using slave labor.

Personally, I love using Origin for everything I can afford to use them for. I acknowledge not everyone has the privilege to spend $99 on a pair of jeans, but if you find yourself able, I think it's worthy to support American manufacturing.

And, before major purchases, check to make sure that private equity firm has not bought them.

Shout out to American Giant. I have like 15 t-shirts from them, some are ten years old and they look new. Buying good stuff saves money in the long run!

Is there any reason to believe that the same carpet-pull won't occur with those brands?

I thought the whole trick was arbitrage on the delayed awareness of reduced quality.

We need a curated directory of brands, like Yahoo of old, but for brands instead of websites. With information on who they are ultimately owned by, i.e., PE, public company, private enterprise, where they do their manufacturing, how they source their materials.

Yeah, I know that would be a lot of work, especially to keep it updated, but a valuable resource in this day an age. Because ownership changes as the article points out. I thought my local grocery store was local (because it looks/feels/acts very local), but it turns out they're now owned by a Korean conglomerate.

I can confidently say I use and enjoy almost all of those brands. A great litmus test for whether a company makes good products is whether they make them locally enough for the CEO to regularly visit the factory.

A somewhat humorous example is System76, where their US built stuff (cases, keyboards) are made with relatively thick aluminum and are surprisingly sturdy, while their laptops can be flimsy and are less ruggidly build. I think it's easier to say "good enough" when your laptop ships from clevo and you don't have a real choice in the build quality

Lots of brands are public and also shit now.

Perhaps the issue is that MBAs are ruining everything?

except for the shareholder's wallets. sometimes.

The trademark system exists to protect companies by preventing another company from making consumers confuse you with them. You can do whatever you want with your trademark within your company - you don't have any duty to prevent consumer confusion within your company.

The Buyr app is made for this, though not sure it covers clothing and toys yet.

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/status/approved

Author here. Good catch... you're right. The wool is still woven in Pendleton and Washougal, but finished product sourcing is a mix and some blankets are now assembled offshore. Will update the Ledger entry and the essay today.

I had to buy a new "Hudson Bay" blanket after a fire. There's apparently still a good mill in Minnesota that produces a look-alike and the product seems really nice. But a lot of the traditional brands are pretty mediocre at this point.

I've been seeing fabric from their US mill, but manufacturing elsewhere (like the DR) for years.

So far I've done OK assuming anything they make that's not 100% wool is cheap trash they're using to cash in on the name (they sell cotton shirts, and linen-cotton blends, and some synthetic blends—all extremely suspect, I avoid these at any price) but the 100% wool stuff is OK even if the construction's not in the US. That's served me well so far, but I reckon it's only a matter of time before they fully enshittify. Luckily their heavier shirts last years and years with occasional mending of e.g. tears (if you wear them as actual work and outdoors-activities shirts, you're gonna tear them sometimes).

Arcteryx, despite being owned by a larger corporation, is still high quality. Their hardshell jackets are the gold standard.

I've also had success with Mountain Hardware, Outdoor Research (jackets and pants).

(I do search and rescue, so a lot of focus on outdoor stuff. It is also really hard on gear so anything cheaply made gets destroyed pretty quickly.)

Check their ledger for a full database of the goods and bads: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/

Costco has the same sourcing issues a lot of other companies have, they do spend a lot of effort on due diligence when sourcing Kirkland Signature brand products, but sometimes what they get in a production run ends up being something else, or there's unexpected issues with the products once the public gets them.

This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it.

That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.

> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.

Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not.

I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.

I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth.

Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.

Presumably because as soon as cheap good-enough clothes became available, high quality clothes became a luxury and are priced accordingly.

> physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s

For a supporting example from the Spring and Summer 1929 Sears Catalog at, https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-158-r-1929...

"If it’s a Hercules, it’s the best work shirt on earth! Sales prove it. Deep down in the mine, in the mills and factories, high on the lofty girders of a towering skyscraper, in fact wherever the work is rugged and the going is tough you’ll find Hercules shirts on the backs of hardy men. It is the undisputed choice of a Nation! This shirt is made of heavyweight chambray in closed front style."

87 cents, postpaid. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ says that's $16.80 now. Fabric breaking strength is 62 pounds/inch. The triple stitched seams have a breaking strength of 58 pounds/inch.

The fancy version on that page is $1.00 -- just under $20 now.

Same shirt, Jan. 1935, price now 77 cents, or just under $19 now. https://archive.org/details/CAT31345884/page/140/mode/2up?q=...

"The toughest, ruggedest, man-size shirt we’ve ever sold. Packed full of more strength, stamina and comfort than ever before. Read every feature above! Sanforized Shrunk means perfect fit. All the washings in the world won’t shrink it. WHERE ELSE can you find such a shirt — such a price — such an opportunity?

Where indeed can I buy it now? I ... think I want one.

Dress shirts were about twice to thrice as much, and up to $6 for "radium silk"; 1929 was likely the last year they used that marketing term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_silk

Author here. The goal is a permanent public record of who owns what, and what that ownership has done to the product, so consumers can make informed purchasing decisions. The long-form essays are the investigations, the Brand Ledger is the ongoing reference. Readers tip me on brands to dig into, and entries get updated as news and reader reports come in.

Consumers have power to affect change with their dollars... providing they have the right information

> Super interesting -- outside the premise which we all know to be true.

Obviously we do not "all know it to be true," since this business model works.

> What is their goal here -- to crowdsource information so that we have a public record of note for companies? What are they planning to do with that information etc?

This website? You kinda make it sound like a conspiracy. This seems like basic consumer advocacy: identify a problem, get the information out there so consumers can make better choices and not be fooled, and maybe (a long-shot) get some kind of cultural or legislative change to solve the problem.

Speaking of the latter, it would probably be a good idea to change bankruptcy law so that brands and trademarks cannot be sold in liquidation (at least without the associated business operations). Practices like the article describe undermine the social value of a trademark, and turn them into an opportunity for deception.

Though with these kinds of blogs, if it gets successful and influential, eventually it may just turn to a pay-to-play. IIRC, that's what happened to "mattress review" blogs.

Can we have something like this blog that's not AI slop? Please!

This is an illustration of why AI is terrible: it just destroys trust. Is the blog good or bad? It's really hard to tell without putting in more work than it'd take to write a similar article.

At least in the pre-AI days, if you saw polished writing, it meant someone at least put some effort into it.

I'm going to admit I'm emotionally invested in this blog. I really enjoyed this write up.

I'm troubled by your statement because I can't tell if you are saying it is incorrect and AI made it and therefore BAD. Or if you are just saying AI made it and therefore BAD.

Writing is at such a precipice. Every time I compose an email, gmail underlines every single sentence to say there is a better and more concise way of saying it. I feel stupid so I generally accept it. Isn't this AI writing as well? But, the thoughts and intentions are mine.

How is this different here? The author is pointing out really relevant information that I know anecdotally to be true. If that story is 85% written by AI, or 15% written by AI, I still see the human behind it.

I'm troubled by AI writing, don't get me wrong. But, it deserves further thought. (And, I also have strong negative bias towards palantir...)

gross. I want to unread it now. annoying because this kind of brand degradation is something important to me. but that's not enough to make me read a Palantir AI dude.

Weirdly, the author has his mediocre GRE scores on his LinkedIn page.

Extracting any useful signal from brands requires keeping up with news about the businesses, and keeping track of various sub-labels and the hieroglyphic knowledge to distinguish them, which is so fucking tedious but is still easier than evaluating every single garment you're interested in in-person (and developing the skills and knowledge to perform that evaluation).

Or you just have enough money to buy only from less-widely-known but actually-good brands and don't worry much about price. The ones that haven't started cashing in on their "high class" branding by moving down-market toward the middle class... yet.

This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands

Have you ever thought "I won't use Google products because they keep killing them?" or "nobody got fired for buying Intel?"

I'm still wearing a jacket I bought 28 years ago. I wear it nearly every day through the summer.

Blame the fashion industry. Every year they come up with something new that is fashionable that year - a style, a color. Year over year it doesn’t have much impact on majority of people but over several years it compounds and your clothes become not trendy or old fashioned. That’s why BIFL doesn’t work for people. They wouldn’t want to pay a significant premium for quality clothing that they can wear for 10 years when it will likely be out of fashion after 5.

I am picky about what shoes I wear because I have toebox trouble. I used to like Brooks the best but the price has skyrocketed and I think they are going in the direction of fashion over quality. Now my mainstay is Pumas but I have a pair of New Balance shoes I am carefully breaking in that might enhance the gait of a character I play but also put a lot of stress on my legs.

Once in a while I find a $35 shoe at Walmart that is compatible with my feet and looks great and lasts about half as long as $70 shoe but most of the time Walmart doesn't have them in stock which is sad.

Author here. The Ledger is designed to cover both sides. 59 Approved brands right now, 31 on Watchlist, plus the Avoid list and Former Great. It's meant to answer "what's still worth buying" just as much as "what's not."

It's a living document and has just been released - will be expanded quickly

Trawling Reddit with great care and a critical eye, plus obscurer topic-specific forums, is the best solution I've come up with. Though even those are full lies-for-pay (advertising) especially on Reddit.

> If you're fancy, what do you do when mass production and the internet make the markers of fanciness accessible to the very people you're trying to be fancier than?

We need a Manhattan Project for curing Cluster B disorders.

Part of the marketing for a consumer hostile change like this is cooking up a reason to blame the victim.

Look at the implicit assumptions we're supposed to make in the story you shared, like there was some point in time when people decided to start abusing the policy, necessitating the change. Like people cared about new ll bean so much they'd scour garage sales and do the return fraud. Like they hadn't built this margin into their product to begin with. Like they didn't have a dozen other ways to address these trends, if they were actually happening. (like restricting the policy to original purchasers, requiring you to have a receipt, tracking it themselves, etc)

It really seems like hogwash if you think about it critically. They just wanted to expand their margins, simplify bookkeeping, etc.

> Just but either professional (as in practitioners of a trade us it) or military products — those tend to be much better than “consumers” products. They cost more but they will last a lifetime.

Eh, I'm not sure that's such good advice. IIRC, I remember stumbling across tacticool "military grade" USB thumb drives, for instance. I doubt those are any better than your typical name-brand drive. "Professional" seems to be an often used marketing keyword to indicate quality or power (e.g. "Mac Pro").

Some keywords that may work better are "industrial" and "commercial," they don't have the same ring to them as "professional" and "military grade."

There's a broader law: If it needs to insist on what it is, it probably isn't. E.g. "People's Democratic Republic of Foo".

Not really - it’s __one form__ of capitalism working as intended but capitalism (like most -isms) can take many vastly different forms.

There can be a much better form of capitalism also in the US - since this whole thread and discussion is pretty US-centric.

It really isn't though. Capitalism doesn't have to be like this. This is a side effect of certain aspects of capitalism.

It's like saying lack of innovation is communism working as intended.

I'll repeat my definitions/understandings of capitalism as generally understood within the USA today:

1. strong entrepeneurial culture, limited obstacles from government when starting new business ventures and/or products & services

2. a "free" market, meaning that in broad terms government does not control prices nor what can be bought & sold or how much or when it is sold

3. distribution of profit generally goes to capital (stockholders) rather than employees.

None of these require enshittification. I also believe that we could have a thriving and vibrant economy without #3.

If capitalism is about meeting market demands apart from any objective sense of quality, then yes. It's basically curve fitting.

The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.

It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.

The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.

Yeah, it's sad to see classic Australian brands caught up in this debasement process