alt Hacker NewsI think its just how cheap / rudimentary the basic model look for 1K. Like it seems there's a viable Indochino / send measurement to Asia manufacture model and get bespoke product back for fraction of the cost. Or some sort of modular break down kit that you can take to a bike shop to tune to custom needs for less. I admire Jerry's effort, but I think people correctly sees $200 product that cost $1000 in US, and somehow it's considered "affordable".
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How can you even judge how basic it is just from the photos?
A $10k bike designed for racing has the same kind of components as a $100 bike from Walmart, but every single one of them is far, far better - better materials, higher tolerances, a geometry finely tuned to the rider. None of that is really obvious until you look closely. A rally car looks kind of like a road car, until you realise that it only shares a few body panels - every other component is built to a far higher spec.
Maybe this would be a $200 product if he was mass producing them to the same dimensions. But he's not, they're custom made on order to the dimensions of the user.
I've owned a few low cost Chinese bikes, and while they're OK, there's always parts on them that fail because they're clearly made to be as cheap as possible. If I depended on a wheelchair for moving about every day, I'd be damn sure it was well built and reliable. That's the market he's operating in.
I don’t know anything about wheelchairs, but there’s a similar very high-margin market for eyeglasses. Freakonomics did a podcast about it:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-your-eyeglasses-cost...
Frames have crazy 100x markups and the market is dominated by a small number of companies. They interviewed people from Warby Parker (a newer, more inexpensive brand) and even they said they had to raise prices so they didn’t seem like knock-offs.
I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using a chair all day and out in the world.