Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

You know you’ve made it when people want to copy what you do. Or create a pitch-perfect spoof of it. Best Made Company have been featured on this site and in my book for their audacious use of justification marketing to avoid cognitive dissonance. Now, Re-Made company are calling them out. 

Best Made Company sell $350 axes. It takes an awful lot of reasons to make people want one of these axes, and then to subsequently keep them from feeling buyer’s remorse. So Best Made provide the reasons, laying them on thick with plenty of hipster references.

Of course, many of these reasons are metaphysical; unprovable suggestions of a better life if you own the product. Re Made Company have used an old rhetorical technique, reductio ad absurdum, to help us see through these metaphysical reasons.

remade co plunger spoof
Re-Made Company’s $162 plunger is the cheap option. Custom painted versions sell for $350.

The basic idea of reductio ad absurdum arguments is to demonstrate that a statement is false by showing that a false, untenable, or absurd result follows from its acceptance (Wikipedia description). To do that, Re Made simply change the product from an axe to a toilet plunger, while keeping everything else the same.

You could argue that toilet plungers perform a similarly necessary and utilitarian role to axes, but because of the values we normally associate with a toilet plunger we are forced to re-evaluate all the statements that were made about the product. That re-evaluation is probably not particularly favorable towards Best Made Company.

Congratulations to Re Made Company for such a detailed re-examination of the reasons that Best Made Company was using to convince us to part with so much money for an axe.