Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Mass-produced clothing is also a commodity.

You're just convinced it's not.



No, that's wrong. Mass-produced clothing is the direct opposite of a commodity.

A commodity would be silk, or cotton - the raw fabric used as base materials. What you then do with those materials to increase their value directly changes them from commodities into products.

Put another way - gold is a commodity, as is silver. Jewelry, however, is not. It can't be a commodity if the material has been changed into a diversified form to increase its value - it has to be raw in order to be a commodity.


Mass-produced clothing is the direct opposite of a commodity.

Check your dictionary.


No, it's not. Commodities are products with multiple sellers and minimal differentiation. You can only put Ralph Lauren clothes into that bucket by willfully ignoring the concept of differentiation. Meanwhile: there is literally no differentiation between different suppliers of IV saline; it's a standardized product.


When a brand label is reduced to "this is what we put on products our buyer/sourcer has obtained at the lowest cost", you no longer have a design element at work. Increasingly, brands don't designate manufacturer, but middleman (yes, there are exceptions, but they're increasingly, well, exceptional).

Some very high-end custom-designer fashions might be excluded, but if you're buying off-the-rack (or mail-order/online) clothing manufactured in mass, you're buying a commodity, in the sense of a largely undifferentiated item. The label is the _only_ item of distinction (and not even that when you're getting grey-market goods).

Incidentally, look up "commodity" in your dictionary, it doesn't mean what you think it does.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: