For those defending this, what specific advantage does the $78 re-branded version offer? What does the 60% mark-up on the existing retail price buy you?
For those defending this, what specific advantage does the $78 re-branded version offer? What does the 60% mark-up on the existing retail price buy you?
I'm not sure it's a matter of defending. It seems difficult to avoid, unless the plan is to argue only OEMs are allowed to sell products.
In this case it seems like the fact the Music Hall Mini was based on the Rolls board was already known if you spent 30 seconds googling the product and they may have used different components or made some minor changes. Whether or not they did, a $20-$30 difference could easily be accounted for by legitimate marketing spending. As a business owner, I could discover a particularly impressive niche product and decide that I can do a better job finishing the product and marketing it. So I buy the OEM's board and produce my own version. This is how the vast majority of small to medium size brands operate these days, just look at the PC component industry. Very few OEMs, but hundreds of brands.
If you argue that only an OEM can provide differentiation/value then you're basically saying support, marketing, distribution, and finishing are not useful industries and they should all go away. I think people would have far fewer options in products if that were to happen, and much less efficient markets. The two egregious cases are a bit different because buying finished consumer products and reusing them in your own product without even the permission of the original brand(!), with a price 5-10x or more higher seems closer to actual fraud than normal rebranding to me.
In any case, though, Youtubers love to pretend they "discovered" something relatively minor that was already not difficult to find information about and make a video riling up their fans. That's the part of this that annoys me. If you want to rile your fans up, at least do it about something significant not a normally rebranded <$100 preamp.
Here, we're not talking about an OEM board being packaged and branded. Instead, we have an already-finished product being repackaged and resold in an identical case, with only the colour and the brand name printed on it changed.
What evidence of that was provided though? It seems... unlikely that they are buying the finished rolls at retail, taking them apart and repackaging to charge $30 more. It's hard to imagine that being very profitable.
But hey, maybe it makes economic sense for them to do that because Music Hall is better at marketing, and if it does, who is in the wrong here?
They don't seem to be taking anything apart - it's the same case too!
I ask myself: could I take a cheap product and make no changes to it and therefore add zero value to it, and then sell it for 60% more than the original product costs and not disclose that it is in fact the same product? The answer is no - this would be unconscionable IMHO.
It is painted and labeled differently though, which you couldn't do with the board in the case. My guess about what is actually happening here is that Music Hall just orders wholesale from Rolls with different color and labeling specifications, and that Music Hall is not doing any manufacturing at all.
In this example, the Music Hall value is finding good products, and selling them with the same branding and aesthetic so they look nice together on your shelf. If Music Hall is doing a good job of that, not only would I pay +$30/product for that, I would consider it an incredible bargain given the ridiculous amount of research you need to do to find quality audio products from random OEMs yourself. And if they're not doing a good job of it, well then they're a ****** brand. Even then, being bad at your job doesn't make you unethical.
Honestly the only possibly unethical part here is that someone on a website said that Music Hall claims their product has 'improved components'. I couldn't find that on their website, but, if they are claiming that when the board is actually identical, that would be dishonest.
To illustrate where I think the line is, if Music Hall were selling the Rolls unit and being open about what it was, I would consider them absolutely free to charge a 60% surplus over the standard retail price. But then nobody who used google to price check their purchases would buy it.