Lululemon yoga pants used to last decades. Now they pill after three washes. Nike shoes used to survive anything. Now they fall apart in months. This isn’t an accident—it’s strategy.
Your favorite products aren’t just getting worse—they’re designed to get worse. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about understanding the business pressures that force companies to destroy the products that built their reputations.
The Success Paradox
Small companies succeed by making exceptional products that solve real problems. This quality attracts loyal customers who pay premium prices and spread the word.
But success brings growth demands, investor pressure, and expansion goals that require higher volumes and lower costs than artisanal quality allows. Companies face an impossible choice: maintain quality and limit growth, or sacrifice quality to achieve scale.
Market pressures almost always force the second choice. The product quality that created success becomes incompatible with the business growth that success demands.
The MBA Optimization Trap
Business school thinking optimizes for metrics that systematically destroy product quality. MBA-trained executives focus on profit margins and quarterly growth rather than long-term excellence.
They identify “inefficiencies”—expensive materials, careful craftsmanship, extensive testing—and eliminate them to improve financial metrics. Product quality becomes a cost center rather than a competitive advantage.
They assume customers won’t notice quality reductions or will accept them for lower prices. This rarely proves true for premium products.
The Outsourcing Death Spiral
Companies that built reputations on skilled domestic manufacturing move production to cheaper countries with different standards. Each outsourcing step removes them further from actual production.
Quality control becomes reactive rather than preventive. The expertise needed to maintain standards disappears. Outsourcing partners have incentives to cut corners that the original company can’t detect until products reach customers.
Cost savings often get consumed by quality problems and returns, but companies rarely reverse course because admitting the mistake would be expensive.
The Private Equity Extraction
Private equity firms buy successful companies specifically to implement cost-cutting strategies that increase profits before selling, regardless of long-term damage.
They replace expensive ingredients with cheaper alternatives, reduce quality control, and eliminate features customers valued. The extraction model works because they can sell before quality reductions fully damage sales.
Brand equity built over decades gets converted into cash profits over 3-5 years, leaving behind hollowed-out companies with ruined products.
Customer Capture Strategy
Once companies capture loyal customers, they reduce quality because switching costs make customers temporarily captive.
You’ve invested time learning products, built habits around brands, and developed emotional attachments that create resistance to switching even when quality declines.
Companies exploit this loyalty by gradually reducing quality while maintaining prices, betting you’ll tolerate degradation rather than research alternatives. This works until quality drops below your tolerance threshold.
Scale Requirements
Growing companies must serve mass markets that require different products than the niche markets where they built reputations.
Premium products with expensive materials can’t be produced at volumes needed for major retail distribution. Scale requirements force companies to redesign products for mass production using cheaper materials and simplified processes.
Companies must choose between remaining small with excellent products or growing large with mediocre products that share brand names with originals. Market pressures make staying small feel like failure.
The Race to the Bottom
When knockoff brands copy successful products at lower prices, original companies face pressure to reduce costs to maintain market share.
This creates industry-wide quality degradation as companies match each other’s cost-cutting rather than competing on quality improvements. Price competition becomes more important than product competition.
The race continues until entire product categories become commoditized with minimal quality differences between brands.
Timeline Mismatch
Investment timelines conflict with product development needs. Venture capital and public markets demand quarterly growth and rapid returns incompatible with maintaining quality while scaling.
Product quality requires patience and long-term thinking that financial markets don’t reward. Short-term financial optimization systematically undermines long-term excellence.
The Awareness Gap
You don’t immediately notice quality reductions, allowing companies to degrade products gradually without immediate sales impact.
Quality changes often affect durability or performance over time rather than creating obvious differences at purchase. By the time you recognize quality decline, companies have extracted maximum profits from the degradation.
What You Can Do
Understanding this pattern helps you make better purchasing decisions. Look for companies that still prioritize quality over growth. Research brands before they get bought by larger corporations or private equity.
Pay attention to when your favorite brands change ownership or manufacturing locations. Consider buying extra products you love before companies inevitably change them.
Vote with your wallet. When companies optimize for growth instead of quality, customers always lose.
What products have you noticed declining in quality? Which brands have disappointed you after years of loyalty?