Hi Scott,
my name is Marcel Schoenen and I am one of the owners of Vision Ears. Thank you for your e-mail and giving us the chance to do a statement on the things your are quoting about our products - although you did not listen to the VE 8 before, right?
I read all the comments in your thread in the meantime and I really must say that your opinion about products of higher price is already very set and I highly doubt providing you with a Demo-unit would lead to an objective valuable result. But you are highly welcome to visit one of our dealers worldwide and compare your favorite earphone with one of ours.
I would like to take the chance to give you some insight to our products calculation and what generally is important for a high class product. So here are some points you should consider when you are doing calculation on our products:
- Your 8 driver earphones cost approx 80 EUR. So these are 16 drivers in total - I have honestly no idea how this can work out to make profit. This is only a fraction of the price I would pay for 16 drivers from my supplier and we already get better prices because we´re one of the biggest In-Ear manufacturers in Germany. Maybe they use copies of the original drivers which are less expensive, I really don´t know.
- Our 8 driver system is custom made. It´s not only more time consuming building an individual shell - doing each unit exactly like it was designed by the customer is not possible to do in mass production because each earphone is unique and requires a lot more attention during production.
- We have dealers with Demo units. This service and also promoting a product does cost money and need to be included in the products price as well. Your benefit is to have heard of the product due to our promotion activities and you are able to listen to the model before you buy it.
- We have dealers who need to earn money when selling our products. Margin needs to be higher as with universal products because an individual product needs more consulting and sometimes after sales services.
- We are known to do premium quality products and this quality can only be achieved when you put a lot of effort into training your workers and doing reliable quality control. For example, some already finished earphones don´t go to customers because of little blemishes - so we build them new. This high quality standard cost money in the end but it´s our philosophy to stay on this high level - and people appreciate it. I highly assume that many Chinese companies, that do really cheap earphones, don´t have such standards. This means if you buy five earphones they all sound different maybe. So there is no consistency in the products character and quality. So with a higher price you not only pay for high quality but also for a reliable product due to high quality standards.
- In many countries of the world wages are much higher than in China, which is in my opinion the main factor for huge price differences. Additional in Germany we have to pay 45 % taxes in total of all sales volume. Which is extraordinary high compared to other countries. I know with this point there is no direct benefit for you as a customer but on the other hand this is the reality we have to cope with, so we do our best... But frankly speaking what is the consequence of your proclamation? If everybody thinks like this, everybody would only buy products from low wage countries and passionate companies like ours have no right to survive? This is a world I don´t want to live in!
So, frankly speaking, I also see the process of some manufacturers exploring the boundaries of what is the most expensive In-Ear worldwide. Some are still reasonable, some are not - the customer should decide whether the product is worth the price or not. You mentioned our VE8 many times and calling it to be not worth the price because you only count the drivers inside. Besides the fact that you never heard it, you don´t know how hard we worked to get the experience and knowledge for beeing able to create this earphone. When we develop, we don´t leave the result to chance - we have a clear vision what we want to achieve and sometimes it takes very long until we are satisfied. For the VE8 we spent one year development with lots of tries and fails. We believe it´s worth the price, but again - the customer should decide if he is willing to pay for the result. So you break down all our experience, our innovative ideas and our passion to just counting 8 drivers. Hope in the meantime you understand that there are many more factors which are important.
When talking about high price products, you surely know our Erlkönig? It took us almost three years development, so many design aspects to create, to decide, so many mechanical problems to solve, physical aspects to consider, finding a perfect shape of the earphone shell, designing the exclusive wooden box with all its functions and thousands of more tiny things we created and needed to decide…! All the communication with the manufacturers of the accessories and production problems - it was a hell of a project! But we did it because we had the vision of creating a luxury earphone with so many high class features that makes it worth beeing one of the most expensive earphones worldwide. A stellar earphone with so much more than just 13 drivers per side.
We love what we do and hopefully we are able to excite our customers with our products for many many following years because they value our products - is it in shape or in sound. They value our service, our innovative ideas, we meet our customers at shows around the world and share with them our passion. And hey - some of them value the brand itself as well, because the spirit and reputation of Vision Ears is also a valuable part of the product.
Sincerly
Marcel Schoenen
