But you're not paying for raw materials or labour. You're paying for designers and marketers and managers and receptionists and support personnel in western countries (Germany, UK, Australia and New Zealand) to be able to live expensive lifestyles with expensive cars and expensive land and expensive houses and expensive advertising and expensive public health care and cheap television on expensive big screens, compared with a person in China or Thailand or Vietnam or Korea who's more likely to live in a highly and densely populated city with a generally cheaper lifestyle. Judge products on the quality you're getting all you like, but I'm no longer sold unconditionally on the sweatshop-just-because-it's-cheaper arguments. It still happens and it definitely shouldn't, but when you visit some of these countries, you'll also see a lot of people who are living contently because they have work which gives them the support they need to be able to live in those countries.
Besides, when a German company has to offer support to a distributor in an English language speaking country (the NZ distributor for Miendl is Stager Sport in Australia) that's in a time zone completely outside normal business hours, and with a very small market compared with Europe and the US, it's not necessarily going to be as cheap. Someone has to pay for all the overheads (especially sending back unsold stock), and ultimately that will be the customer, or the local distributor if they screw up.
Perhaps Miendl just decided that with so many brands already in such a small market, they don't want to take a risk of opening up large scale selling here, and similarly few local distributors are any more willing to take on much of a risk instead. If you like, you could start up your own distribution company with the intent of selling Miendl boots as cheaply as in Europe. If you offer a good enough deal to Miendl, they might take you up on it.
But that's what it costs, and the alternative is to buy another brand as @geeves suggests, or buy something more directly from the manufacturing source.
exactly, what starts as cheap raw materials gets a ridiculous amount of value added to it to prop up expensive lifestyles of middlemen
So do you think they should be paying themselves the same wages to live in western countries as what the people in the manufacturing countries are paid?
wilderness mag have just done an article that talks about the retailers.. the distributors are struggling to find enough retailers to sell enough of their product, the berghaus distributor sold up and got out of the business a couple of years back for that reason
the market is dominated by chain stores that are selling most of the product, if those few chains don't want to sell you're product , that doesnt leave you much room to move to make a living.. bivouac has the distribution rights for a no of brands so its less interested in selling brands from other distributors if they are products that are duplicating their own, and they can sell their own products cheaper than other distributors...
you've got some good brands out there that just arent making a go of it in nz either because the distributors want to make more money or they just cant sell enough to make any living at all...
independant retailers are going out of business, and struggling to stay in business. they cant match the prices of the big chains and distributors cant or won't lower their prices to help the retailers...
I haven't seen that article. Maybe there's space in the market for a decent NZ-based web retailer or two, without all of the brick & mortar overhead costs. I guess it'd be tricky with so many of the products being clothing and similar, which many people want to try out first.
The chain store issue goes a long way to where we are now.
Macpac and Katmandu have been selling there own brand and rebranding other gear to match for a long time. They are both big enough with a prominent enough brand to do this and add a premium onto the cost
Bivouac Mountan designs etc have there own niche brands and promote them at the expense of everything else.
Now FCO is muscling in on the action with some of the same brands as the others and in some cases undercutting the others by a country mile but more expensive in others. The wifes North Face jacket came from there at less than half what it would of been elsewhere. They are tied up with Super Cheap Autos and the term parallel importing comes to mind. I wouldnt ask FCO staff for advise though.
Get in touch with the Tramping Bootique. From memory he is based in the Wairarapa. I picked up a pair of Makalus for about half normal retail and they had only been used once.
