Per the top comment -

The author is describing lifestyle brands. This is a market segment that’s as old as time, they are prevalent on Instagram.

He complains about a direct-to-consumer underwear brand costing 10x as much as fruit of the loom. This isn’t any different from Ralph Lauren, or Calvin Klein, or any of the legacy players in the segment.

Lifestyle brands have large creative and marketing teams, with production secondary and technical production largely outsourced, sometimes to the manufacturing partners.

This is a well worn business model for product categories in which all the margins have been competed away. Pricing power comes from the emotion of brand alignment.

Per the next top comment -

I’m surprised no one here has mentioned the chocolate. Hershey’s Kisses are terrible. They contain just at or abouve the amount of cocoa in a product that the US allows to be called chocolate, and a lot of butyric acid which gives it a cheesy taste and vomit like odor. Almost any chocolate is better and will cost more.

A lot of interesting comments on this one

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There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

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