Inflation
As backintheback mentions, when inflation is taken into account, the price of the Dyson cleaners has not moved much. When launched in January 1998, the Dyson DC03 cost upwards of £279.99 depending on the model. Some were over £300. In today's money, £279.99 is around £418. So strictly speaking, there is is little change.
What has changed of course is that the price of all electrical goods has plummeted, and for numerous reasons. This had now altered our perception of what we are paying, and if we're talking about vacuum cleaners (as indeed we are) I'll compare like-for-like by mentioning that a Numatic Henry -a cleaner which year on year has always retailed for around £100- would have cost about £149 back in 1998, thus being 50% more expensive than it is today. So In a world where the cost of pretty much everything has gone up, electrical goods have gone down, which means that effectively Dyson cleaners have held their price.
Dyson will, of course, attribute this to the brilliance of the goods they sell; I, on the other hand, consider it far more to do with the excellent marketing and the way in which Dyson has managed to forge itself into a must-have "brand". Retailers do of course work out their own margins, but the biggest factor in all of it is the cost price of the goods. So the more Dyson charges the retailer, the less profit they make. In turn, those who get good cost prices are able to sell for less, meaning those who don't get such favourble cost prices make less profit, and even more so when they have to match their retail price against that of a bulk-buying competitor. Taking this to it's logical conclusion, as is the case with many goods in retail, sometimes it's cheaper and easier for a business to stop selling that product, especially if there is something else they can sell and make more on instead. It's never about retail prices, but profit. As an example, someone selling a £400 Dyson may well make less % profit than they would on selling a Henry.
I disagree that unreliability and "insane" pricing of the Dyson washing machine was behind the decision to suspend production, rather I always believed it was the lack of KNOWN reliability which put the fear into many consumers. When the washing machine was launched in 2001, the electrical marketplace was an entirely different world from how we know it today. In-store finance was plentiful; the economy was good; consumers were encouraged to take out more and more credit. Therefore paying for a Dyson washing machine was not quite an issue, given that one could choose how to do so, even going so far as to take longer to pay it off if needs be.
However, at this same time, the consumer was still looking for a machine which would stand the test of time, as we were still very much in a culture of getting white-goods repaired and expecting them to last a good deal of years. The reports of unreliability did not really filter through until the latter days of production of the washing machines. Like I said, it was the unknown reliability which caused the problem. Had the machine been a lot cheaper to buy, more consumers may have taken the plunge and invested in one. It wasn't that they objected to paying the price, more that they didn't really know what they were going to get back. We need to remember also that by the year 2001, the reliability of the vacuum cleaners was arguably very questionable, even if such matters did not affect sales.
Of course, having a washing machine which was purple & yellow didn't help matters either, not when so many UK consumers have the washing machine on show in the kitchen, though I appreciate that there was another model in white too. But the flagship machine was uber garish.
Now that Dyson appliances have been on sale for over 20 years, and now that a "brand" has been established, I think that same Dyson washing machine might well sell today, even if the credit terms might not be as plentiful as they once were. We have new generations of consumers who are too young to recall what it was like to buy a washing machine with a view to it lasting, and who are too young to know about the "Dyson Story". In a world were so-called 'Technology' is everything, the Dyson washing machine could well have stood a chance. That said, the core selling point of being able to wash clothes quickly may well be lost on the consumer of 2014, given that "quick wash" options are available on probably all automatic washing machines, and are favoured by consumers, irrespective of the thoroughness of such washing cycles.
