True story. My family imported the Elna Press in Cyprus. It's a high quality product that once demonstrated properly had a 100% success rate in making a sale. It was and still is quite expensive, making it a major purchase for a household, not as much as a small car but enough to consider it carefully, more like renovating your kitchen. In Cyprus the banks offer financing so that makes it easier.

As for the quality, it's Swiss made, built to last. The relatively few repairs we had to make were done by us for free because we offered years in extended support, so we didn't earn money on that.

Our competition was Singer which is a household name, and still we dominated the Cypriot households selling basically one per home in the entire country. Back then Cyprus was close to a mere 600.000 in population.

It was a hard money standard business in a fiat world.

We couldn't expand to new markets, our importing license was just for Cyprus. We couldn't charge more for repairs, everything was under warranty. We couldn't sell more, the market was saturated.

The product did need repairs every now and then, which I also helped repair as a child. I had learnt how the electronics worked by heart, even identifying common issues. But in general the Elna Press was a beast, it might work for years without any issues whatsoever.

But we didn't charge for them, so in a fiat world, this became unsustainable.

There was no planned obsolescence build in to need spare parts after a year or to upgrade to a new model.

A hard money business in a fiat world simply cannot compete.