"The worst thing that you can do in terms of bringing a product up to the market is to be two days after someone else has brought a similar product to the international market-It's dead"
About this Quote
A two-day delay sounds trivial until you remember the world Ann Macbeth lived in: a moment when mass production, international trade, and the early machinery of branding were turning “novelty” into a perishable good. Her line has the snap of a warning, not a theory. It treats timing as the hidden ingredient in invention, the part polite craft culture preferred not to talk about.
Macbeth’s intent is bluntly practical: the market doesn’t reward who made something best, or even first in an absolute sense, but who arrives first in the consumer’s line of sight. “International market” is doing heavy lifting here. She’s not imagining a local bazaar where reputation travels by conversation; she’s describing an accelerating, competitive circuit where ideas leap borders and get replicated quickly. In that system, the second product isn’t evaluated on its merits. It gets read as an imitation, and imitation—however unfairly—signals lower value.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of modern commerce’s cruelty. A “similar product” can kill yours even if it’s inferior, because attention is finite and distribution is momentum-driven. Macbeth is also giving creators a moral permission slip to think like strategists. For an author associated with design and domestic arts, that’s significant: she’s nudging makers to accept that aesthetics and usefulness are only half the job; logistics and publicity are the other half.
“It’s dead” lands as a dark punchline. Not “it will struggle,” not “it may fail”—dead. The phrasing captures an early 20th-century truth that now feels eerily contemporary: in a fast market, being slightly late is treated as being irrelevant.
Macbeth’s intent is bluntly practical: the market doesn’t reward who made something best, or even first in an absolute sense, but who arrives first in the consumer’s line of sight. “International market” is doing heavy lifting here. She’s not imagining a local bazaar where reputation travels by conversation; she’s describing an accelerating, competitive circuit where ideas leap borders and get replicated quickly. In that system, the second product isn’t evaluated on its merits. It gets read as an imitation, and imitation—however unfairly—signals lower value.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of modern commerce’s cruelty. A “similar product” can kill yours even if it’s inferior, because attention is finite and distribution is momentum-driven. Macbeth is also giving creators a moral permission slip to think like strategists. For an author associated with design and domestic arts, that’s significant: she’s nudging makers to accept that aesthetics and usefulness are only half the job; logistics and publicity are the other half.
“It’s dead” lands as a dark punchline. Not “it will struggle,” not “it may fail”—dead. The phrasing captures an early 20th-century truth that now feels eerily contemporary: in a fast market, being slightly late is treated as being irrelevant.
Quote Details
| Topic | Startup |
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