From the Daily Mail:
Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, 20, and software engineer William LeGate have teamed up to launch a progressive pillow company to rival Trump supporter Mike Lindell after first tweeting about it as a joke.
Hogg said that the partners aim to sell $1million of product within their first year.
‘Mike isn’t going to know what hit him- this pillow fight is just getting started,’ Hogg tweeted.
LeGate told DailyMail.com that the new company ‘started two days ago as a joke.’
‘We are 100% serious. Company will be officially incorporated by next week,’ LeGate told DailyMail.com.
LeGate said he will be investing $100,000 of his own fortune into the company, which he said will ‘have a site up this month.’
‘We have had lots of interest from investors as well as many celebrities. As for manufacturing plans, they will be manufactured in the United States and union-made,’ LeGate told DailyMail.com.
Hogg announced this on his Twitter feed.
.@williamlegate and I are going to prove that progressives can make a better pillow, run a better business and help make the world a better place while doing it.
— David Hogg ? (@davidhogg111) February 4, 2021
I have no idea who William LeGate is. I looked him up and apparently he’s a tech CEO for a company that I never heard that does something that is described with jargon that I don’t understand and gets invited to do a lot of talks where he uses more jargon that I can’t figure out what it means.
I know I am not the smartest person in the world. I’m just a simple metallurgist. But when I see these tech CEOs throw around a lot of big words and set up sites and apps that don’t describe exactly what they do, and somehow make a lot of money but don’t charge a fee for their services, it makes me wonder if much of the tech industry is just a giant Ponzi scheme of investment built on a foundation of lies and jargon with some really skeezy shit going on behind the scenes.
But I digress…
Here is exactly what I think is going to happen.
They might actually go through with setting up the company but I doubt it.
I have actual personal experience in setting up a manufacturing line. Going from an empty building to an assembly line producing at a volume necessary to meet customer demand is not a process that takes days or weeks, it takes months to years. Fining suppliers, buying equipment, doing first article inspections, training workers, quality assurance, safety compliance, it’s tedious.
I don’t care that it pillows. This is a segment from How It’s Made from Discovery Science, on how pillows are made.
So Hogg and LeGate want to make pillows to spite Mike Lindell because Trump.
By the time they are done setting up a pillow manufacturing facility, how many people will care to buy pillows to spite the My Pillow Guy and Bad Orange Man?
The zeitgeist for that will have passed.
There may be a few die-hard ultra-Leftist who will buy a Trump spite pillow as a virtue signal talisman a year from now (or more), but that number is probably several hundred to a couple of thousand. It’s not a sustainable market demographic.
Another factor is something I’ve talked about before, the difference between the Tech Industry and meat space engineering. A charismatic CEO can’t come in wearing a turtleneck and sneakers and bootstrap and blockchain an assembly line. There is nothing Forbes or Ing would find glamorous about blue-collar manufacturing, so I figure that LeGate will lose interest in this fast if he can even manage it at all.
Going over to LeGate’s Twitter, it’s clear that his idea of starting a pillow company is simply subcontracting a large order out to an existing manufacturer.
If you are a US-based manufacturer with experience making pillows, please email partners@legate.me – would love to chat & see if we can partner with you given our strict requirements (union-made, workers paid living wage, etc.)
— LeGate (@williamlegate) February 4, 2021
Pillow manufacturers are like: “so how many pillows will be in your initial order… 100? 200? 500?”
And I’m like “uh… at least 10,000” and they’re like ???
— LeGate (@williamlegate) February 5, 2021
Actually, the pare probably like “holy shit, how do we scale production under COVID protocols to meet that order size in the given time frame because this dot com shithead knows nothing about manufacturing.”
Just look at the ammo market right now. You can’t scale production overnight.
My Pillow, for what it’s worth, is a manufacturer, not a company that resells subcontracted products.
And they are having problems too:
I NEED A UNIONIZED PILLOW MANUFACTURER IN THE US
We’re having a hard time finding one
If you know one PLEASE dm
— David Hogg ? (@davidhogg111) February 5, 2021
So let’s say they do order the first batch of 10,000 pillows and a few thousand progressives rush out to buy a My Spite Pillow, then the market will taper off leaving lots of unsold inventory.
I suspect that a few high profile celebrities/Progressive elites will have to come in and buy the rest in a few large orders to keep Hogg’s spite business venture from being a total flop.
Then this will quietly go away and the investors will be left holding the bag because Go Woke, Go Broke is absolute.
My bet is that these idiots simply outsource the production and when people confront them about it they will scream something about “supporting poor nations” or “an alt-right conspiracy made it impossible to get the pillows in the US”.
Also what kind of pettiness is that shit?
My Pillow should make a public statement saying they’ll make the pillows just to see them froth in rage.
Also, Hogg really can’t pull off the tough guy act. Pillow fight? Really? All right I’m in and I’m putting a brick in mine. My team will consist of a local sorority who I have personally seen full on suplex and drop kick another sorority during the most frightening and confusingly exciting pillow fight I have witnessed.
There will be NO survivors.
So their business plan is for two people, with no manufacturing experience, to contract with a manufacturer to make pillows that only rich liberals want, in order to stick it to a Trump supporter? No market research, no vision about making a better product, no idea how to even find a company that makes pillows and meets their political criteria except to put out a tweet. What could possibly go wrong? I expect that some Asian or Nigerian companies are setting up a sham operation to separate these naive morons from their cash right now. Unfortunately, Hogg will survive mostly intact because he has no money in the game, and he has no shame regarding his personal reputation.
My guess is that legate will drop $50 grand on a website that will take pre-orders that don’t actually promise to deliver anything.
A bunch of woke SJW week pay more on the pre-order then it would cost to have two “my pillows” delivered.
6 months later they close without delivering a tenth of what they promised because those right wing extremest refused to do business with them.
LeGate wrote a cheap app for apple that lets you input both sides of a conversation and then screenshot it and if it was real.
“it makes me wonder if much of the tech industry is just a giant Ponzi scheme of investment built on a foundation of lies and jargon with some really skeezy shit going on behind the scenes.”
On the software/website side, you have to wonder sometimes, don’t you?
At any rate, you can’t outsource everything. It’s like debt, in a way. Used properly it provides leverage to do things you couldn’t do ordinarily. Used to excess and eventually you will get burned.
There’s your average pillow, the kind that makes you buy 5 or 6 different brands, until you find one you like, then there is My Pillow, which solves the problem with one purchase. We ordered ours directly, not from Amazon.
I predict bust.
Meh. They’re going for the niche market on bite-resistant pillows, and I’m sure Hogg will be personally testing every single one.
This is hilarious! We need to outsource to a union pillow-making factory that pays workers a living wage.
My Spite pillows will cost an astronomical amount.
Two thoughts, 1. wokesters seem to spend a lot of time crying into or biting pillows
2. This presents an epic troll opportunity if Mr. Pillow sets up a front company, gets the Hogg pillow contract, then reveals who actually makes the pillows.
Of course in the era of Biden expect any actual Progressive Pillow tm to be made in Xinjiang using Uighur slave labor
And, I am sure that when the nation is confronted with a crisis, say the next panicdemic, Hogg and co. will stop production of their product and make PPE to help the nation fight the crisis.
Yeah…
Right…