White-label economics

When one supplier's catalog part sits inside an entire industry's premium products, the retail price spread measures marketing and investor recovery, not materials: elastic-interface's $6 pad inside $174-295 bib shorts; Nalini's MOA Lab and Manifattura Valcismon (Sportful = Castelli = Karpos) running multiple badges off the same machines (shared-factory-badging is the factory-side view). The defensible exceptions are category inventors with in-house components — Assos's 50 years of own pads, Castelli's Gabba (invention-as-price-defense). Consumer test: check the component label, then decide what the badge premium buys you.

Source: report