Pay To Win

The funny thing that people don't really think about or realize but is inherent to me as a maker and now industrial designer: You can just build anything you want instead of buying it.

...even the idea that the things on the shelves came from somewhere is sort of shocking to folks. When I introduce myself as an industrial designer and people ask "what does that even mean?" I gesture vaguely to all the stuff around us and mention that someone had to design it. I'm one of those guys.

They're largely confused. You can see their face scrunch up when they think about it. Things come from stores, but clearly they don't just grow on the shelves. They have to come from somewhere - factories - faceless, nameless factories with no further origin. They just... make things.

But of course we know, even if we've never thought about it before, that somebody had to make the first one. Somebody had to make a prototype of everything, often by hand, in order to turn it into something that can be mass produced for less money. To scale the cost of hand-making 100% of things.

This wasn't very long ago, by the way, less than 100 years ago we were just figuring out that we could make wooden chairs in a more convenient way than some guy literally sawing and carving wood into shape over and over and over for each leg, each seat, each back.

And we take the modernization, the mechanization of this for granted sometimes - we sort of assume that if a machine makes it, we can't.

There's some things that are true for that - very specific machines can do very specific things that maybe we can't - but mostly the stuff that's around us in day to day life is still replicable without them.

From Scratch

So buying something is really just paying to have it now. Paying someone else to make it for you so you don't have to be bothered to learn how or gather materials or execute it as well as they can yourself.

You're buying convenience and time plus a tiny bit of the material costs of the object.

And that's valid - I buy things all the time!

There's a lot of things it'd be silly to make yourself unless you were very determined, especially with rigorously going down the material's raw origin chain: if you make your own cookies do you buy flour or crush it from wheat yourself? Do you have to grow the wheat? Do you have to own a farm and buy wheat seeds? Do you have to make wheat seeds somehow? et cetera.

Realistically, when we make things "from scratch" we're mostly just assembling them.

If you make cookies, you're buying ingredients. If you're building an airplane in your garage you'll probably buy screws and aluminum and paint instead of manually creating them from ever more raw materials.

And there's a cost + a cost savings to these choices: buying flour is pretty dang cheap, but mostly not free and it would be more expensive to go out and buy a farm to make your own wheat just to make some flour just to bake some cookies. There's a sweet spot of price per convenience.

Flour is so cheap, it'd be silly to spend convenience to bypass it's price.

But there are a lot of things - perhaps more things - where this is the opposite: things where bypassing the finished price is actually shockingly easy for how much money there is difference.

We can build a lot of things this way: almost all expensive purses are cheap if you know how to sew and were inclined to fake a logo or - better yet - exclude their branding entirely. There's rarely anything inherently pricey to those materials, just that they are banking on branding or craftsmanship or design to be valuable enough that you're willing to pay for it.

Unreasonable Ends

Now, this is where most arguments stop.

"It's a conspiracy!" they cry "did you know your $1000 iphone is only $300 in parts! Apple is so evil."

...the other $700 goes into immense R&D efforts to make that iphone + the next one. Goes into the factories and machines that can even make those often bonkers design decisions. Goes into advertising. Goes into architecture and payroll and logistics and warehouses and employees and Apple stores and big yearly conferences and finally, at the end, profit for the company just as empty cash.

Right? the parts themselves obviously aren't the whole cost of the thing springing to life.

They have to hire people like me who spend far more time than you could ever imagine dealing with each and every one of those things in order to get them to be $300 in the end.

If you just held out $300 in cash, it doesn't become an iphone and so there must be other steps involved and those steps aren't free.

And so too could you go down the rabbit hole of what people are willing to pay for luxury-coded things: they have to be a bit expensive just to be a brand of status.

The reason expensive purses - which require far less R&D and complexity - can be vastly more pricey than the bargain bin ones is a little bit of materials, a little bit of craftsmanship and maybe 80% name-brand veblen good conspicuous consumption status symbol prestige.

Which is mostly manufactured and fake, but that's fine too if enough people continue to buy 'em.

Time Economics

You can build your own Ferrari in your garage. Name any luxury thing: you want a mansion? They're built by ordinary ol' construction workers, right? You could learn to build that. Fill it with comfy furniture? Even easier. You want a crazy $500,000 watch? Built by humans no more magical than you.

Seriously, that's like a thing you can freely do at any time.

Will yours be any good? Probably not.

Will it take time? Oh yes. Both to learn the skills and then to execute them.

And probably more time to make 5 more when your first few are crap.

But they're not magic. They're not really even that special other than the fact that we've put them on that pedestal and seen them as special. Carbon fiber is just a fabric you can buy at the store, as is resin.

So like we said at the top: what you're paying for, when you spend $500,000 on a watch, is not having to learn and build and execute yourself. You're paying for the convenience of walking in with money and walking out with a watch and getting to wear it immediately. There's people - highly skilled people - who take that money and make watches with it because they learned how to make watches well enough and pre-loaded all the skill and experience into the time when you were doing other things.

Like making that $500,000 in finance or something. It's an agnostic trading medium.

And maybe you can make that whole $500k in an hour. You've traded one hour of your time for X hours of watchmaker time. That's probably a good deal! It would take you much longer than 1 hour to make your own of sufficient quality, right?

But let's say you make $15 an hour. Ignoring taxes and living expenses and everything else, that's 33 thousand hours of work to save up for that watch.

That's nearly 17 years of full time.

Could you, maybe, in 17 years working every day of every week learning and studying and growing, eventually make your own watch that's similar?

Do you reckon the people who actually make the watches have spent that long learning how?

I would guess that most people could eventually figure it out, could eventually become experts. If Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed (and I personally doubt it's even that high) if 10,000 hours makes an expert, you'd be one three times over by then.

Making Your Own Stuff

The way I see it, we live in a uniquely special time: the internet has allowed us to learn any skill, source any part, ask any question, copy or invent any process that makes any item that is around us right now.

In the old days those time economics might have been different: if you wanted to learn how to make a watch you might have to travel by arcane methods to distant lands to apprentice under some dude who maybe doesn't even speak your language in order for you to learn those skills. They were locked off, hard to access, took a long arduous time to seek and discover.

The the parts were hard to find: the raw materials were distant and rare, or the processes unique and specialized, or merely expensive.

Meanwhile, we can order basically anything you can ever imagine off the infinite shelves of the internet and it'll arrive at our doorstep, often with free shipping. We can type into any number of devices and get perfect instructions on how to accomplish any task, instantly, freely.

It's unbelievable.

I think, if I had any real goal in the world, it'd be to help people realize that they can just do these things too. That it has never been cheaper, easier, faster or better to start making your own stuff instead of straight up buying it.

There will always be things to buy, that continue to pass the threshold test of price and convenience.

But the options are out there, everything that doesn't make that gap is fair game for disruption.

Let's build rad stuff together.

Let's build the things we need for ourselves, custom and unique as our contexts and needs are.

We can solve our own specific problems instead of waiting for half-working solutions to be built for other reasons and jammed into our workflows. Solve to our specific tastes instead of picking from a catalog.

Let's build our own Ferraris in our garages and race 'em.