Was this because of a Covid related over expansion? I know home gyms exploded in popularity for a bit and then ran into a post Covid collapse of demand.
As I understand it, this also reflects recent decisions by The Fed. In that past, when money was cheap and easy to come by a company like BowFlex could tred water (at least a bit longer than usual). That luxury, that life line is no longer available so bankruptcy sooner rather than later becomes the only choice.
Same / similar can be said of tech companies and recent layoffs. The financial salad days are over. Now it's pay your own way (i.e., make money) or sink.
I don't think that's all that's going on here, though. Bowflex has been in business since the 1980s, and IPOed in 1999 -- it's hardly as though they were a recent startup burning through VC money.
"Americans are losing interest in cardio equipment"
Alternatively: Americans started buying exercise equipment when working from home freed up hours and hours of time every week, allowing them to have free time outside of work. Now that executives have decided they need to show workers how powerless they are by forcing unnecessary, and in many cases objectively harmful (to employee health, morale, and most damningly actual productivity) mandatory return to office policies, workers have lost that time and therefore exercise and mental and physical well being take a back seat to executive egos.
Sometimes I do wonder why downvotes happen. I almost feel like downvoting should have a mandatory text field that needs some kind of (original commenter visible) text in it so the downvoting isn't just a trivial instant I-don't-like-this button. I'd be interested in seeing how it would impact downvoting across HN, but also whether it impacted my own downvoting? (@dang feature request? :D)
Yeah, I mean there must be thousands of live routine of dumb bells from highly experienced trainers at NYC exercise studios. So 50-100 dollar a month service for a gamified dumb bell routine wouldn't be outrageous at all.
I don't know of anyone who has figured it out yet, but some dumb sensors (accelerometer, camera) plus some smart AI (pose detection, rep counting, LLM-based motivational phrases) could go a long way to creating a trainer that's 80% as good as the best human trainers.
Pithy saying, but they were largely a mid-range brand and didn't have the air of very high margins, especially once you account for the distribution and logistics overhead on large, heavy, service-hungry products.
I really doubt that they had much room to trim prices without just switching to throwaway equipment made of even flimsier materials than they'd already been introducing.
It's much more plausible that a changing market combined with inherently high inertia just sent them driving towards this cliff.
> especially once you account for the distribution and logistics overhead on large, heavy, service-hungry products.
Wasn't that supposed to be the key differentiator of Bowflex and the whole "flexing bows" approach? Their machines were lighter than their competitors because they didn't need to include hundreds of extra pounds of weights. I wonder how successful they would have been sticking to that product line rather than going all in on growth and just becoming a generic exercise equipment brand. Seems like that was similarly misguided as Peloton's deadly foray with treadmills.
I had a minor argument with someone a few days ago (week?) in HN comments on the kitchenmaid mixer thread on this topic. If you're not a major name brand you cannot charge significantly more than junk/throwaway equipment, regardless of the quality of your product vs the junk/throwaway quality stuff. Consumer grade quality means low quality, because you cannot charge more than the junk/throwaway stuff, and therefore cannot make any profit - not "you cannot make lots of profit" but literally you can only make a loss: you're competing with products that have shaved every single cent of production cost to make any profit at all, so the moment you do anything more than they're doing you cost of production is more than their sale price.
The problem is people go "why is your product more than this other 'identical' one, yours is a ripoff price", and then couple that with cheap equipment of this kind still lasting years, and you have a somewhat no win scenario.
On HN you get the same argument with Apple products, where people compare the cheapest apple product to the cheapest "equivalent" non apple product as though they're equivalent construction quality[1]. I think it's an even harder comparison to counter for computers than other equipment types simply because the way computers goes a completely functional, totally non-broken, perfect condition, computer can become nonetheless functionally obsolete just because it's too slow.
[1] This was especially true when the unibody stuff was first introduced, but I believe at this point a bunch of the more premium PC brands have that kind of construction now? Also, to be super clear, I am not critiquing the complaints that focus on obvious insanity like ram and drive space which is 100% BS [edit: I mean the pricing itself is BS, not the arguments about the pricing being BS]
Ok this seems like very very poor advertising by the companies of the allegedly superior product.
I don't know, maybe EXPLAIN with modern diagrams why your product is superior? Maybe explain why X old brand sticks around and why yours uses the same (or better) engineering to accomplish the same goal?
I would be fascinated to know why old appliances lasted longer and how the overseas ones are half-assed. Maybe AI can help with this. A better AI search might be able to pick out from tech docs why one product is better, but hard to believe AIs in this regard when that is deep level knowledge and the bullshit factor of LLMs is so high.
And further, this isn't throwaway information. It's not like blenders and the like are fundamentally transformed every year like a lot of tech products (which nevertheless manage to accurately communicate their yearly improvements to a dumb public). Explain why the electric motors are better well once, and keep that around on your website, and one-off as needed.
Maybe there can be some outreach with Consumer Reports to help fund the ratings/reviews of product classes (CR is restricted by a budget after all), or barring that (probably against CR's charter), why not provide information on your competitor's designs and models? Talk some shit, especially if it is deserved.
This just seems like a massive business/management fail. There's simply this bias against labor and US labor, and the prospect of disenfranchising blue collar workers and getting to exploit overseas labor instinctively appeals to the sociopath control freak MBA. It's also easy. Some Chinese company does all the hard work of making the product, you just need to slap on the label and negotiate a sales channel.
