Valco’s Black Friday is here, and rumors of the biggest discounts of all time have filled the internet! Is it finally possible to grab Valco’s top-tier headphones at half price? Is this the moment you find the audio gear of your dreams for ridiculously cheap? Well… no.
Prepare to be disappointed: we don’t have discounts now or ever. But don’t run off just yet, we have a completely sensible and honest reason for it, and it has nothing to do with fighting overconsumption, laundering our conscience, or any other similar excuse.
The truth is that at Valco, we’re simply too lazy and stupid to do any pricing tricks or campaign nonsense.
Usually pricing follows the textbook model: first the product gets a high price for cream skimming, then the price is lowered to the "real" level. After that the price gets sawed up and down according to sales campaigns, until it’s raised again for one big Black Friday push right before the product model disappears from the lineup.
A fucking lot of work, and it takes all kinds of coordination.
Here at Valco, we have this basic Latin-style value called “mañana”. We believe anything can be done tomorrow, so why do it today? This applies especially to making any kind of plans in advance.
Just the thought of going out and doing some campaign crap because “everyone else is doing it” pisses us off to begin with.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to just price the product right from the start. No cream skimming, no price dumping. If we’ve sold something at a discount, there’s been a clear and justified reason for it, like a preorder. And that sure as hell wasn’t planned in advance.
Our operating model is simple: we make good products, sell them at a sensible price, and use the money on truly important things, such as:
- Beer
- Child support payments
- Fast cars
- Big watches
- Building the Death Star and conquering galaxies
The pricing gimmick show
But let’s get back for a moment to how Black Friday campaigning works, and why we don’t really have any chance of jumping in on it anyway.
- Leftovers from the warehouse: Usually this time of year is when they clear out the last batch of an aging product that’s been haunting either their own warehouse or the manufacturer’s warehouse. Kind of like finding half a Christmas chocolate at Midsummer and thinking, “yeah, this’ll still do.” But we don’t have any leftover batches to sell. If we did, we’d tell you.
- Price hikes before discounts: Often prices are raised a bit before the campaign so they can then be dropped into a bigger “sale.” We only have two headphone models, and if we tried raising prices, customers would know it before we did. Also, our moral compass is still intact enough that it won’t let us do that.
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Cream skimming ends: A new product is often priced high at first and they “skim the cream” off the top. Then when nobody wants to pay the premium anymore, it gets sold at a "discount" for a more realistic price. At Valco, we’ve priced our products honestly from the beginning. Maybe even stupidly honestly.
As a result, we can’t offer big discounts even to resellers, which has partly slowed down our products getting onto store shelves more widely. For the same reason, special models have a special price. Part of their sale price goes to royalties, and there just isn’t enough room in our own margin for that.
A comparative example
Let’s take a look at how the big boys play the pricing game. As an example, we’ll use a couple of products from a big manufacturer that we think represent roughly the same category as the VMK25. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get our own VMK25 curve into the images. Its price has stayed pretty steadily at no more than €199, and the graph just doesn’t go that low.
Figure 1: Cream skimming and artificial drama
Both graphs clearly show how the manufacturer starts the price straight up in the clouds (cream skimming™) right at launch, then drops it quickly once it turns out nobody is willing to pay that much. After the initial dip, the price moves around more steadily, although there are a few “price shows” in between where they get a prettier discount by first pushing the price back up.
The second graph looks like an amusement park ride: first they skim the cream off the top, then slowly drop the price lower. Whenever they want to boost sales, the price gets yanked up into the clouds and then “discounted.” In this year’s Black Friday frenzy, the price has been pulled up again, and next year this model will probably quietly disappear from the lineup. It looks like the manufacturer’s strategy is to swing the price around so much that the customer eventually loses all sense of what the real price of the product even is.
What does Valco do?
We set the price fair right out of the gate. The VMK25 costs 199 euros, full stop. No pricing tricks. No cream skimming at the start. If we’ve ever given discounts, there’s been a clear reason for it, like an empty warehouse and an even emptier bank account. And if we ever sell the rest off cheaper to make room for a new model, we’ll say it straight.
Is fairness boring? Maybe a little. Would we make more money some other way? Probably. Are we too lazy to run campaigns? Absolutely!
That’s why we don’t do sales. We want our customers to know they’re always getting a good deal, without any hidden hooks. And honestly, all this messing around with prices and tuning campaigns takes time away from what’s actually important: drinking beer.
Read more about the history of Black Friday
If you want to dive deeper into the history of Black Friday, from a story inspired by Robinson Crusoe and Kekkonen all the way to conspiracies and diplomatic note crises, we recommend reading our blog, based on Doctor Rajaniemi’s extensive knowledge of alternative history.
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