"Quality follows care"

People think of product reviewers as influencers, and I can understand why. Many are. But there is another category of reviewer out there as well, and I want to draw your attention to one today.

Keyana Sapp is the writer behind a publication/public accountability ledger called Worse on Purpose. I’m a fan of this kind of reviewing. It’s the product of investigative journalism, not affiliate relationships. It’s motivated by the most honest force we know of: care. Someone gives a shit about the topic and wants to understand what’s going on. Not for riches, recognition, or attention, but for interest’s sake. Because it mattered to them.

The topic at hand is quality, and because it’s a bit of a slippery concept I appreciated that Keyana took the time to write out the site’s definition of the term in this fantastic blog post. It manages to do two things: it translates our shared intuition about quality into something tangible, and it also explains how an incomplete definition leads to decline, particularly when companies try to industrialize quality in a superficial way.

Here’s what I highlighted:

That is what every craft tradition is: a transmission system for the unnameable, carried in people rather than paper. It is why apprenticeship survives every technology invented to replace it: the judgment that produces quality transfers only by demonstration and correction, through thousands of supervised repetitions across years, from a person who has it to a person who does not yet.

Whatever resists definition resists measurement. Whatever resists measurement vanishes from the dashboard. And in a company run from dashboards, what vanishes from the dashboard vanishes altogether.

Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter's, comes back as "no detectable difference," and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total.

It is by this mechanism that quality, the unmeasurable property, erodes as a company places a greater insistence on measurement.

Every measurement a company takes lands on one side of the objective/subjective divide or the other. Spec sheets, tolerances, and materials testing measure the object alone. Surveys, star ratings, and focus groups measure opinions alone. And they sample the opinion at the wrong moment. A star rating gets filed in the first week of ownership, while the surface still shines, and the failures arrive in year three, when almost nobody returns to amend it.

Nothing measures the relationship, because the relationship only exists in use, in the hand, on the road and across years. So when quality drains out of a product, it drains from the one place no instrument points at. Both sets of numbers can hold perfectly steady while the thing between them disappears. That is how a product gets worse without a single metric moving. That is also how the people doing it stay convinced that nothing was lost.

A good object is a fossil record of care. Thousands of small selections made by people who could tell the good facts from the bad ones and picked the good, even when not doing so was cheaper or easier.

When outside capital buys a great brand, nobody issues a decree that the product shall now be garbage. Instead, the people who previously made those thousands of selections either get laid off, retired out, or reorged into irrelevance, and the decisions migrate to a floor in an office building where nobody has ever actually used the product. Care cannot be exercised at that distance. Quality follows care out of the building, and the whole thing happens without any individual ever choosing badness directly.

That was 1968's confusion: good things that looked cheap. We industrialized the reverse. The heritage fonts, the small-batch copy and the unboxing moment engineered to simulate the exact feeling my Les Paul earned honestly. The surface has never been more perfected, wrapped around the glued joints and the plastic gears.

There are two ways to make money on quality. You can make a thing so good that people pay for it, keep it, and hand your name to their kids. That is the Miles road: quality found cheaper, profit as the receipt for care. Or you can buy the name after the caring is done, spend down four generations of accumulated trust, and be gone before anyone's memory catches up.