undefined | Better HN

0 pointsphamilton2y ago0 comments

> max capacity

As determined by what? Probably the current manufacturing facilities that they have strategically chosen not to expand.

0 comments

ipqk2y ago

You can't just expand willy-nilly. It takes tons of investment, money, and you need to find a labor force. And what happens if demand softens (like it's doing at this very moment)? Then you're stuck with a bunch of extra capacity doing nothing.

phamiltonOP2y ago

Digging a bit, it seems the wait-list really started to be a thing in 2019.

> It takes a ton of investment.

I'm not an expert, but for an "assembled by hand" luxury product it seems like incremental capacity is much lower risk. They don't need to stand up a factory. Couldn't they hire and train 10% more technicians for assembly? And when demand softens, scale back?

nicoburns2y ago

I suspect you’re underestimating what it takes to train a technician for his kind of work. I imagine that could easily be a multi-year process (10 years even), and require a lot of attention from your highly skilled and already in-demand master practitioners.

yardstick2y ago

An element of the decision may also be around quality control. Especially if a lot of the work is highly skilled but still manual human labour.

Bayart2y ago

They are expending manufacturing as much as they can. The constraint is really the workforce.

llamaInSouth2y ago

Glad they are not the main producer of high tech chips then (AKA TSMC)...

zappb2y ago

If mechanical watches had nearly the order of magnitude of demand that ICs do, then maybe they’d be faster at it.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse