Two sides to a coin.
My perspective of the market:
1). You have the name brands that have a following, a name associated with a certain fineness or hype. They have a central headquarter with the marketing, sales, distribution to vendors, and outsource the manufacturing; be it a dedicated machine shop plus the fabricator of the electronics and the supplier of the reflectors. As has been since the industrial age, the costs of producing must be considerably less than than the selling price to maintain a profit above the total overhead. Also, the vendors also mark up the supply cost to cover their store expenses.
2). The smaller manufactures that design, make and assemble the product; sell exclusively on low cost platforms (AliExpress / Banggood / Kaidomain / etc.). Their overhead is directly proportional to the actual sales. They don’t have a name recognition in the public’s eyes. As they try to capture a small piece of the pie, they are middled by the cheap knockoffs and the prestigious makes. They more often tightly control the expenditures but will venture with newer attributes (dynamic UI, on board charging, newer emitters) and also make a hodgepodge of the flashlight - creating a thrower with moonlight, adding a timed step down to a diving light, confusing methodology between two built-in interfaces, always adding a strobe to the mode array).
And then there is the occasional user that considers a flashlight as a secondary accessory. Content on using their cell phone’s led as a light. They aren’t trying to better themselves….
i remember talking to one one manager (not that famous one). he said that MAP of reviewed model is around 120. and they sell it to stores for like 35.
i can recall some other similar situations that exposed this price gap.
and they, undoubtly, as manufacturer, earns at least double price on this, so self cost should be about 15$.
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there is one model Fitorch with 26350 battery, that you can buy with erased labels on driver for like 25$ as Boruit, half the price.
and remember all these sales, when you bought stuff for like 50-60% of MAP.
ALL big brand flashlights have astonishing overprice. they offer functional difference, of course, comparing to brands like Convoy-Sofirn, but this difference is way less comparing to price difference.
and there is one thing when you buy like Acebeam for big buck, and you damn glad with this flashlight, or you buy crap like Led Lenser for same price, flashlight which consist of 45% crap, 45% marketing, 5% glass and 5% aluminium.
I was waiting for someone to mention MAP pricing. I worked in online sales managing the Internet sales platforms. We bought from wholesalers and the manufacturers. One was Benchmade. In order ro be a Benchmade dealer, you had to follow their rules for advertising and pricing. They had a 15% MAP, meaning the absolute cheapest I could sell that Benchmade knife was 85% of MSRP. If thr MSRP on that knife is $150, per Benchmade, I can’t list it for less than $127.50. If I bought that knife wholesale from Benchmade for $75, then I still stand to make money on it even selling it at MAP. I think you can make an argument for knives since I believe you get what you pay for up to a point, where quality generally gets a higher as the price goes up.
I learned that the expensive way.
I was relieved to switch from Led Lenser P3 AFS/P back to Skywolfeye B16. Much better switch, much better lens (at least indoor which is 95% of my EDC use), much smaller, much lighter.
Brighter as well but I didn’t have the brightest LL in the family.
$40 for LL, $2 for Skywolfeye.
russian dealer of LL offered it to me for review couple of years ago, i mentioned that he should be ready for bad feedback from readers and that if i find something negative - i will say about it in review.
he added me to black list and sent it to another guy.
of course, comments to these reviews of LL were what i predicted )
Out of the hundreds of flashlights I bought, by far the highest quality flashlight brand I’ve seen to date is Olight. Everything about it screams premium. Here are some videos that show you why it cost so much more than those cheap Aliexpress budget flashlights
I was impressed by my most recent Olight Warrior X Pro but I was even more impressed with how Olight tests the Warrior X Pro to give it a 3M drop rating. See here for why
There is not another flashlight brand whether from China or anywhere else that comes close to Olight in terms of design refinement and build quality. However, they are like the Apple of flashlights. If you want the highest output hotrod, there are many flashlight brands that make much brighter flashlights and also Olight does not have decent WW/NW and HI CRI options.
Another thing is premium brands like Olight and Fenix make the most efficient LED drivers. You get much longer regulated runtime with these lights than with budget lights.
