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Mesmerizing Vid of a Limited Edition Leica Coming Together

By Rain Noe - June 27, 2012

in Object Culture

I love industrial design's raison d'etre, mass production. This notion that you can design a useful product and a factory will multiply your efforts by several million units.

I also like the opposite notion of one-offs championed by a company like Bespoke Innovations, where an industrial designer can use digital manufacturing techniques to create a truly personalized, one-of-a-kind item.

What I hate is the in-between Limited Edition thing, where a company arbitrarily produces a small run and uses different colors or materials to contrive scarcity, in order to artificially increase the value of a product. I recognize that "Limited Edition" is an important economic tool, and that it causes collectors a joy that I do not understand but must pretend I do in order to be polite; I just don't like the idea.

That being said, I still found myself guiltily mesmerized by this footage of Leica craftspeople putting together the "Edition Hermès" version of their M9-P camera. At the end of the day, I'm still a sucker for watching beautiful, precision objects (right down to the packaging, in this case) being assembled by hand:

via iihih

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Kevin Mako of Mako Invent

12 years ago

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It's great to see that there is still a strong demand for fine quality hand-made manufacturing processes.
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Scott

12 years ago

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What about the perspective of "some people want something with a little more pop, a few extra features, and more than what you get with the run-of-the-mill machine"? Now a company isn't going to sell gobs of those, but could sell enough to justify limited edition runs, at increased cost of course, but likely less overall cost than the bespoke item would fetch.

I see what you are saying: that it's unfortunate companies exploit supply/demand with an artificially scarce item, but it also generally fulfills a customer demand to have something a little more special, but not quite one-off, so why not?

I suppose it could be considered 'deluxe' edition where it's not exactly limited in number, but simply produced in a lower volume than standard editions... but the marketing bonus of limited edition seems more romantic.
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