Wendy Ouriel
Last year I was gifted a bag that cost $7000 in the store. I’ve moved it less than 20 times and yet the corners are already worn, the red coating is fading and the seams are coming apart. It’s from a haute couture brand that claims to uphold the highest quality standards, but the wear and tear on this bag after minimal use suggests otherwise. What’s more obvious is that the $7000 was less about the craftsmanship inside the bag and more about showing off their famous logo.
A few weeks later I visited my tailor to be fitted for a vintage Alexander McQueen dress and he looked at it and commented on how high quality it was and how they “don’t make them like that anymore”. The remark didn’t hit me until later, what was it about the dress that made him notice the quality?
When I returned a week later to pick up the dress, I asked him what made this dress so high quality. Then he folded back the fabric along the lines and said, “See here, in the seam, there are 25 stitches per inch. Today, even the designer items only do 12 stitches per inch.”
And there it was, hidden under the hood, so to speak. I asked, does it really save a designer a lot of money to reduce their stitches from 25 to 12 stitches per inch? The answer was a mix of yes and no, but what really matters is that the price has gone up for designer items, but underneath they use less material, use lower quality sewing methods and take less time per garment.
I then asked if this drop in quality is only seen with this brand and he said it happens with all brands. For Chanel? Yes. For Mercury? Yes. For Louis Vuitton? Yes. Okay, what about the jacket I was wearing? Loro Piana, a “smaller” luxury brand but represents itself as the highest quality in cashmere products. He then pointed to the pocket and said, “here?” and showed a crooked seam coming out.
That damn jacket cost me $3500 and it was no better than anything else. Although he did notice that the zipper and buttons were well made.
I asked him, are there brands out there that still make a high quality product, of all the brands in the entire world, there should be one? He thought for a moment and said “Brioni”.
The Loss of Quality
The reason I created OUMERE was because I couldn’t find quality skin care. Whether it was luxury skin care, natural skin care, or professional skin care, it was the same low quality stuff in different packages. I just found that high quality skin care just didn’t exist no matter how hard I tried to find it, so I had to make my own.
It was hard to believe that there was no high quality skin care because everything advertised and told to me said the opposite. Luxury skin care brands charge hundreds (or even thousands) for their products and advertising, so how could it not be better than the stuff sold at Walmart? But it is true, that the ingredients come from the same sources, the bottles come from the same factories, and the products are made side by side in the same facilities.
And the same goes for designer fabrics, regardless of brand or price. They’re all made from the same low-quality materials in the same factories, and they’re all made as fast as possible to produce the most products.
I believe at one point their products were very high quality, but eventually the brands got too big for their own good and had to trade quality for mass production.
There is a tipping point for quality, and once you reach a certain production threshold, it is simply no longer possible to maintain the same quality standards. It takes a lot of time to make a great bag or haute couture dress. And if you go from making 10 a day to 10,000, then a trade-off happens and product quality is traded for mass production.
The sad part about the loss of quality is that no one seems to care. And if everyone is still willing to buy a $7,000 bag whether it took 100 hours to make or 1, whether it has 1000 stitches or 100, because at the end of the day the logo is the most important part, then the name brands just go to keep reducing their quality because they make this sale regardless.
A necessary change and a new product
I don’t want to contribute to low production quality and lost build values. I would like to see his demise. I am starting a new project with OUMERE that will also extend to the textile industry. We are currently working on a bag to carry OUMERE Skin Care. It is handcrafted here by a single tailor at the OUMERE facility in Orange County from the finest materials I could find. More details to come as they develop.
