Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?
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@goosehd said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
In my opinion, most individuals first IH purchase are one of the continuous items such as jeans or a jacket. Once I made that purchase, then I started buying UHF’s, shirts, etc.
The continuous items gets customers in the door. The seasonal ones keep us here.
That's very true
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@goosehd said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
@Yoprst That only applies when there are limited numbers of consumers. What I like and someone else does are two different things.
I’ve seen shirts sold by IH that I would never wear, but have almost immediately sold out. Does that make me wrong for not wearing it? I’ve seen items that I’ve loved and purchased only to go on discount because of poor sales.
It is impossible to predict sales and as @Giles said, if he could then he would be rich….or something to that effect.
That's true too. May be it would be worth running some kind of polls before restocking or discontinuing certain product therefore to some extent predicting the demand? The poll seems to be a good tool for that task
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@Yoprst Good thought and something that IHUK used to do with notifications for future releases. They often found that items that people were initially interested in, would not always sell as the notifications indicated.
Many reasons for this such as sizing issues, production issues, or something else became available that they were more interested in.
The dobby shirt is an excellent example of strong interest by the community, but due to sizing issues preventing a lot of us from buying.
"I don't give a shit what anyone else is doing, we will do what is best for us and our customers" - Giles P. :)
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@Tago-Mago said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
@Yoprst I understand, and I‘m sure given the resources IH would look at expanding the continuous section. It’s all a question of do you want to compromise your standard of quality to increase production and sales. I can’t say for sure, but I think I know the answer
Giles has already sounded his attitude towards IH quality standards. We are not talking about increasing production and sales at the cost of quality reduction
We are talking about sufficient supply when there is a strong demand.
And taking into account the relatively limited number of IH consumers comparing to that of say L.S & Co there is no need to produce mega tons of stuff with inevitable loss of quality -
@goosehd said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
@Yoprst Good thought and something that IHUK used to do with notifications for future releases. They often found that items that people were initially interested in, would not always sell as the notifications indicated.
Many reasons for this such as sizing issues, production issues, or something else became available that they were more interested in.
The dobby shirt is an excellent example of strong interest by the community, but due to sizing issues preventing a lot of us from buying.
That's very true as well. The demand is a tricky thing to predict and as consumers we change our mind ten times over within a minute and it is not always towards the certain purchase
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@Yoprst said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
We are talking about sufficient supply when there is a strong demand.
IH have talked about this many times on these pages, elsewhere in the forum, and on the Ironcast (podcast). Long story short, it is very hard to predict what will sell well and what won't.
The FW22 UHF shirts, for example, were heavily overstocked (partly by design as an experiment to see if they would sell out like previous years) with the result that they had a lot of stock that wouldn't shift even at a discount. (In the end, they overdyed the excess stock which rekindled some demand).
And you can't just re-run a seasonal item that sold out in minutes. Seasonal stuff is planned out well in advance so that raw material suppliers, factories, and retailers can all be aligned. If your factories are working on FW24 now and will then be moving onto SS25 as soon as they're done, when are you going to be able to ask them to go back to something from FW23 that sold well? Elevating something to continuous production status is fraught with risk and opportunity costs if you get that calculation wrong.
If you could design an algorithm that could perfectly predict demand (in any sphere) you'd certainly win a Nobel Prize in Economics and become very, very wealthy.
Take the dive...
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@Yoprst said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
shirt that has very attractive pattern
The 9oz Ombre pattern will probably make a comeback in future SS seasons, but if you can't wait, there are some from SS23 left in Blue (and less size-choice available in Green)
Blue western here: https://www.ironheart.co.uk/tops/IHSH-348-IND.html
Take the dive...
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@EdH said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
If you could design an algorithm that could perfectly predict demand (in any sphere) you'd certainly win a Nobel Prize in Economics and become very, very wealthy.
Then I would buy at once the whole IH stuff which is in my wish list
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@Yoprst The marketplace is really a great resource for items that we all missed on the initial release. Sometimes luck prevails and you find what you want immediately and then there a few items that we all still have hope for. The hunt never ends...
"I don't give a shit what anyone else is doing, we will do what is best for us and our customers" - Giles P. :)
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@EdH said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
@Yoprst said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
shirt that has very attractive pattern
The 9oz Ombre pattern will probably make a comeback in future SS seasons, but if you can't wait, there are some from SS23 left in Blue (and less size-choice available in Green)
Blue western here: https://www.ironheart.co.uk/tops/IHSH-348-IND.html
Thanx for the tip, however the whole point for me was in that color combination. Yellow and Blue is one of the best colour match. Just like Red and Black colours. It's classic colour combination
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@goosehd said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
The hunt never ends...
Just like fishermen. It's not about fish it's about fishing itself
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@EdH said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
@popvulture said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
I was thinking it’d be cool if IH were to make a button down oxford
I had the same thought, but my inner monologue came back with "nah, thank your lucky stars they don't make oxfords, or you will go poor"
I find myself wearing button downs more in recent weeks, and have changed my mind.
Button down shirts with a single pocket, like the one that was done in the boss check, but in chambray would be awesome, I'd get one in white and one in a pale blue. (And, looking at the 283 thread, tuckable would be great.)
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@Giles said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
We do remakes and reruns of old classics from time to time, but we can't even keep decent stock levels of our constant items. Capacity is seriously limited so what we do make is a juggling game
Excuse me if my suggestion was trite or outrageous. Probably a bit of both since it was not well received and the subsequent discussion steered in a direction tangent to my post/thought:
IH currently makes new* seasonal items and re-runs "continuous" items. I think this (smartly) serves and drives demand in different ways. And yes: occasionally some old classics get rerun (eg IHSH-332-SAX). Given the amount of discussion in this forum of cult-classics that were only once run, I was pondering what it would look like if the later were more regularly represented in what gets made. I'm imaging something akin to how Dan Smith revived Fender instruments in the early 80's with the introduction of the "Vintage Reissue" series that were made in the Fullerton plant: faithful recreations of old-classics.
Please note this (idea) is, like almost everything in this thread, a pie-in-the-sky suggestion that is absent the reality of manufacturing constraints and opportunity costs. -
@boit I love discussions like these, it allows us to expose some of the constraints we have to work with.
In the early days, I steadfastly refused to remake earlier (usually seasonal) items. I thought that if you had bought something that was obviously limited, then seeing it remade would take some gloss off the purchase. As we got bigger and our customer base expanded, more and more people would look at the back catalogue and ask us to remake stuff, so I relented and we did start remaking stuff.
The single biggest issue we have in this regard is capacity. We just cant do everything we want (and our customers want us) to do, so walk a tightrope of seasonal innovation, remaking classics and keeping decent stock of the continuous items.
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I never understood the whole exclusivity thing. Who cares? It’s not like you’re likely to see the same flannel in everyday life. And if you do, that’s actually kind of cool.
Think it, be it.
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The thrill of the search of a holy grail piece is something unintentionally that happened and something i really like about IH. Also trying to create new collections and new fabrics is what happens imo when you keep trying to reinvent things with the overengineerd vibe from IH. So instead of making it all over and over again i like the ‘limited’ idea.
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@mclaincausey said in Iron Heart Products - What do you think we should make?:
I never understood the whole exclusivity thing. Who cares? It’s not like you’re likely to see the same flannel in everyday life. And if you do, that’s actually kind of cool.
In my everyday life, other than at an Iron Heart event(or the like), I have seen a stranger wearing Iron Heart once - and that was in Japan. So when people bitch about Iron Heart getting too big/ ubiquitous, I do a Haraki eye-roll
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@mclaincausey exclusivity drives sales. Whether it's a limited run item or a core item like Wabash with only 1 left in your size. If everything had an unlimited supply the random one off colors and fabrics would be much less intriguing to buyers.
I know you know all this info, but I want to spew it out anyhow.
Life is filled with impulse decisions driven by chance, opportunity, rarity, exclusivity, FOMO, etc.
Iron Heart buyers aren't immune to a purchase driven by the above factors that they then realize wasn't the best idea after the hype settled. Or, it becomes a favorite item that has a cool story that no one cares to listen to about it.
