Kirschner Brushes hasn’t changed a thing. The Bronx, NY company makes brushes the very same way, employing many of the same machines it bought 50 years ago. Kirschner sticks with the old ways because, unlike with toys and T-shirts, a big chunk of the brush business caters to professionals who aren’t merely shopping for price but rather for quality.
At the other end of the business is Braun Brush, which is constantly creating innovative brushes so that it never has any competition. Bruan makes a beaver-hair brush that’s solely for putting a sheen on chocolate, an industrial croissant-buttering brush, a heat-resistant brush that can clean hot deep fryers, and a tiny brush that helped Mars rovers dust debris from drilling sites. When Braun sees other firms making one of it brushes, it often drops the product rather than enter a price war. Braun has grown at 15-20% annually for the past 5 years.
Despite all the doom-and-gloom US manufacturing stories, there are still more than 200,000 small factories, like Kirschner’s and Braun’s, that provide a solid, if rarely heralded, base line of American business. Very quickly though, the US is becoming a nation of Brauns–one in which a product faces extinction, or a rebooting, shortly after it is unveiled. This flexible economy has many advantages–and over time, it delivers more economic growth to the US.
Discussion questions:
1. Which operations strategy will be more successful in the long run–Kirschner’s or Braun’s?
2. Why will customers stay loyal to Kirschner Brushes?