/cgl/ - Cosplay & EGL

>>9603087
>>9603105

Inflation means that the prices of most things -- non lolita, just everything in general -- is expected to go up every year. For the average worker, you expect an increment in your salary from year-to-year, even a small one. But for the business, this usually means slightly higher cost of the goods they're selling. This is called the wage-cost spiral, and it happens worldwide. So AP is not alone in that, it's simply how the world works, prices of everything is expected to go up little by little every year.

For AP though, they also face increased competition from other brands, and a shrinking market since lolita is slightly less popular than other jfash at the moment. If you look at their releases for 2016 and 2017, quite a lot of them are complete flops, with AP stuffing up to 4-5 dresses into some of their lucky packs last year. iirc that averages out to about 7k yen per dress (which girls who bought them then sold for 16k yen on lacemarket). They must have made quite a fair bit of losses on those releases, quite frankly I'm not even surprised they're trying to cut corners.

None of this sounds very reassuring for you as the buyer who only insists on recent releases (I mean, the older releases are still good and presumeably don't have these issues and are still pretty cute). But at least you should know that they aren't taking your money and laughing while they send you a shitty dress. They really aren't doing all that well, with so many flops this year I wonder what they'll do once they run out of past hits to re-do.

And, while they're cutting costs, imo it's still a decent way of doing things. Most releases the fabric and lace are still good, and they still add all the cutest details like custom buttons and accessories that you won't find on a taobao/bodyline dress.

Also try to keep in mind exactly what you're spending, $200 might be a bomb to you, but it's not even going to buy you a plain piece from an actual high-end brand.