Originally Posted by
Macca
The way I see it is you start out building them in your kitchen or whatever, you want to sell some and you want to develop a rep so you take your time to get them bang on and you sell them at a bargain price. Your overheads are low and you are not really costing your time. Your probably not even paying yourself minimum wage.
After a while you get a bit of a rep and move into a small workshop, maybe get some help in. You decide to do a higher end product now you have some reputation and that goes down well. After a few years that becomes your bread and butter so you stop doing the cheaper stuff altogether. By now you've a firm with maybe 20 people on the payroll. But your name is a byword for quality.
Then you get an offer from a much bigger company to buy you out, name, everything, you will stay on as a self-employed consultant to smooth the changeover. The money is too good to resist - you could retire if you wanted. So you sell.
Later down the line they will let you go as a consultant and gradually start using your brand cachet to sell cheap consumer tat from China at a premium price. That works for a while but the reputation erodes with time until finally the marque is discontinued or sold to the Chinese for buttons.