Manifesto

The quality movement has a simple goal: to choose quality, locally made products and services.

Politics

The quality movement is not political. The goal is to change ourselves as consumers so that what we favour is of real value. This change would be brought about by illustrating that we don’t have to accept poorly made crap peddled by marketing and hype merchants who also exploit global cheap labour markets and ruin the environment by shipping goods globally. Buying locally made, high quality products necessitates small businesses and less massively concentrated wealth because of the logistics of those businesses being locally situated and serving a small customer base. The fact that these businesses would both employ locals and serve locals high quality goods and services should also be a point of difference increasing their value to consumers. We’re not trying to take away anyone’s choices. We’re trying to encourage people to make better choices.

Trust and Transparency

Since wealth is so massively centralised at the moment by massive brands, the quality of goods is not commensurate with the price of those goods. The quality movement is about realigning the value of goods with the price of those goods. It's about cutting through the hype and marketing, the lies. Bringing back transparency and honesty, in order to build trust.

Brands in our Hands

Brands are a dangerous route to the lowering of quality. The original idea had merit, but brands have now devolved into simple deception, almost true is that: Brand = Lie. I like the idea of actual quality. Not someone trying to tell me that their product has quality. Measurable, factual quality. The concept that brand marketing has to convince you to trust a companys product or service, and that this is virtually the only voice on the topic distorts the truth. In an era where we can use pervasive sensors and scientific processes like the double-blind study, we need not believe unsubstantiated claims. Combine the capability to establish facts scientifically with the ability to immediately communicate them over social media, there's no reason for self-interested hype to be the most powerful voice we hear. We can, or should soon be able to, find out for ourselves exactly the quality of the options available and select one based on price and quality merits. As technology and openness in local businesses improves, we will trust local businesses more and more. Not on the basis of their marketing, but on our first hand and word of mouth knowledge that what we buy is of good quality. In a democratic system, we need to decide for ourselves how we want to learn about products and services. Do we accept the idea of being lied to by marketing companies? Do we want our children's sensitive self-worth damaged by companies creating problems that don't exist in order to sell solutions? Let's take back control of the narrative, and instead of letting corporate brands stamp us with their hype, let's apply our own brand on corporations based on independently measured truth.