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products that last – 19

The world of values is overwhelming and chaotic. One way to provide an overview is to regard it as a festive mix of value systems and choose one as an example. We have picked the traditional electric coffeemaker, because it represents all the models and strategies described in Products that Last. Apart from being a popular functional object, it consumes energy and needs other products - coffee and filters or pads/cups - to do its job.

Let us start from the beginning: the design. The first element in creating value is non-material. A small group of people are paid to envision a new coffee-making device with its very own characteristics in order to distinguish it from its competitors. Since electric coffeemakers have reached their maximum functional potential, the added value is projected mainly through form, texture and colour. The new design addresses a certain lifestyle stereotype, and it is not exceptional that, from a functional quality point of view, it is

inferior to its predecessors. The prototype and the plan to produce and market the item represent the first layer of added value.

After the design and optimisation stage comes production, the most obvious process for achieving product quality. Apart from the material devices used and the factory lay-out as value adding services in their own right, this requires raw materials: metals, plastics and bonding agents in a preproduction form - granulates, sheets, tubes, fluids and so on. Producing these materials from ore, oil and vegetation, including the transportation effort required adds more value. However this, paradoxically, combines with a loss of value, because getting raw materials into shape requires energy. And there will inevitably be waste. You win some, you lose some.

This phenomenon also applies to the production and assembly of parts in order to manufacture this provider of steaming hot drinks. The amount of production waste can be considerable. It usually includes

To improve your own life by improving someone else’s is the standard individual engine of economic activity. Services are performed that range from producing and selling huge container vessels with enormous quantities of trade in their economic wake, to buying one packet of paper handkerchiefs a day and selling them one by one, thus making them affordable to the poor. You can also choose to attend to a sick person in an intensive care unit, teach children, lend money, sell reconditioned engines for Korean cars, or offer shower cabins for rent on a tropical beach. In other words, people offer value for which other people are prepared to pay.

Value the opportunity