Why you will never see "-70%" with us: honest pricing instead of discount battles
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Shortly before Black Friday, my inbox fills up every year with the same subject lines: "70% off EVERYTHING", "Today only!", "Last chance". You will never read that at GeorgWerner. Not because we are too proud for a good deal, but because the entire system behind it doesn't fit what we do here.
Discount battles only work if there is enough stock beforehand that needs to be cleared. Fast fashion deliberately produces more than it can sell, builds price reductions into their initial calculations, and turns throwing things away into a business model. We only print each shirt once you order it. There is no surplus stock that we would need to make appealing with a red sticker – and therefore no reason to pretend a higher price beforehand, only to "generously" lower it later.
The price you see is the price we mean.
The cost of a shirt with us is based on what is actually in it: GOTS-certified organic cotton, fair production, a design that someone actually came up with, and the fact that no second shirt is rotting away in some warehouse for your shirt. This isn't a premium markup to show off, but an honest calculation. If we could lower the price by 70% in the short term and still make a profit, we would simply have charged you too much at the original price.
This doesn't mean there is never a fair occasion for a promotion here – but it is the exception with a real reason, not the built-in normal state that everyone is waiting for anyway. Waiting is exactly the real problem: as soon as customers know that a discount is coming in six weeks anyway, they no longer buy what they need, but what is cheap right now. This drives exactly the throwaway mentality that we actually want to avoid with print-on-demand.
We are aware that honest prices trigger less dopamine than a flashy discount countdown. But we are not building a brand here that lives on the next clearance sale, but one where you can be sure: what you pay is fairly calculated – today, in three months, and on Black Friday too.
