Alexd is clearly targeting a different clientele than you and I...
there's always gonna be the type of guy/gal that will want to show off their $1K grinder for company.
You are starting to get it. These products are not even for me. They are for a market that exists at the top end of any category. The people who buy $10K glass pipes from Mothership, for example, or the people who buy wedding bands from Tiffany, Cartier or Boucheron, or $5000 handbags. Not you or I, and that's OK.
I will never own a Lear jet, and I don't really know all that much about them, but I'd never go on their website just to shit on the plane and troll them, saying I can get to London cheaper on Air Transat... because that's just stupid.
The very top is a small niche in any category, but we created & own the precious metals end of it in cannabis accessories. I am absolutely happy to be focusing on it, because it allows me to create and experiment and iterate, creating functional cannabis accessories in precious metals, combining goldsmithing with pipe making much as Alfred Dunhill did in his very early years in the UK.
We are using the plant itself, unconventional materials like jade, other Canadian gemstones, Canadian diamonds, and even deer antler in some products. We are taking precious metals casting to extremely high levels (that grinder is absolutely brutal to cast, even for a master precious metals caster with over 30 years of casting experience). We're incorporating the very finest Canadian materials into the products, and putting Canadian master goldsmiths, master gem cutters, stone setters, master polishers back to work. Working with prospectors who search stones for us in BC, Quebec, Nfld, Ontario, Nunavut or the Yukon, and cutting them here in Canada to put into our products. That is what this is about.
The silver grinder is equal in grinding ability to the best grinders we tested in our market research. People who buy the silver grinder expect it to work perfectly, and it does. But they are really buying it because it contains over 1/2 a pound of silver, their name can be cast directly into the metal on the flip side, because each one takes over a week to make. They are buying the half pound sterling silver grinder to give to a respected client, or for their own use. They are buying it because they are not made in China. My customers are not interested in $40 grinders from China.
Personally, I want them to buy the grinder so they can pass it on, when their kid comes of age, or when they graduate college, law school, med school, or to give as a wicked wedding gift. That's what I want to see, and now that cannabis is legal in Canada this type of gifting can happen.