So am I. I was in manufacturing for forty five years and that particular motto got you a long way down the road for a long time but what happens when your rivals ‘quality’ matches yours. The customer then looks at price!
To solve Naim’s problems you need two heads. Don’t forget that the Naim and Focal owners are more venture capitalists than music lovers, so the ‘bean counters’ will rule their world. With the other head engaged you have to solve how you maintain profitability, market position and customer loyalty? Not an easy combination as they don’t sit well together.
In my world of manufacturing, when these situations arise, we’d often try a ‘reverse engineering’ approach. Decide where you want to ‘be’ and then design what you need to get there. Sounds simple but the trick is always to think ‘outside the box’! The traditional manufacturing approach will no longer cut it. It’s the ‘how’ that holds the secret. How can I remove transportation cost, how can I eliminate mistakes, remove over-production issues, reduce waiting times, stop staff over processing things, limit staff motion, reduce item defects and masses of expensive inventory, etc, etc. This is the basic ‘bread and butter’ of modern manufacturing nowadays. If you can’t produce an amplifier for the same core cost as you could in the 1970’s, then there’s probably something wrong with your manufacturing model.