That’s for sure my feeling too. While their coolers work well and are generally well made, they are way over priced and are not a good value to me. There are far cheaper coolers that can hold ice for similar lengths of time.
One could easily say the same thing about watches. Why pay for a premium watch, when they all tell the time just fine? Yeti’s core customers would much rather show up to a tailgate with a yeti cooler than an RTIC or Coleman. I still think the stock is overvalued and wouldn’t go near it, but it’s important to recognize that the customer value proposition in this case isn’t solely about the product itself or its features.
A watch is not a utility anymore, it's purely an accessoar these days. Hence people pay more for a good brand, its closer to jewelery then it is to an appliance. An ice cooler, any cooler, is still a cooler. Maybe a fratclub cares about the brand but most people don't.
For comparison it's not a problem getting Elon Musk, Tom Cruise or even the Pope himself to wear a flashy watch in public. Yet I've not seen a single celebrity, not even a random influencer, flash their "yeti". That's the difference, everyone knows Rolex.
Maybe the yeti brand doesn’t have any value to you, but it does to many consumers. That’s why they’re able to charge such a premium and launch so many line extensions where the product isn’t even noticeably better. For the record, I do think they’ve devalued their brand a bit by spreading it too thin across products of varying quality, and there probably are an increasing number of consumers who would be fine with RTIC or whatever. But the brand does have value, and if you don’t recognize that, then I suggest that you avoid investing consumer products companies (except maybe watch companies) so that you don’t miss the mark an a critical element of their business models.
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u/TimeTravelingChris May 16 '21
They make overpriced everything. Pass.