How a house full of nothing led us here

A few years ago, we bought our first house. After years of renting furnished apartments and making do with whatever came with the place, we suddenly stood in an empty kitchen with nothing but bare countertops and a lot of decisions to make.

We needed everything. Pans, knives, cutting boards, a coffee machine, storage containers, kitchen tools; the list seemed endless. And for the first time, we had to actually think about what we wanted to own.

Our instinct was to do what we'd always done: buy cheap, replace when it breaks. But something was different this time, this was our house. We weren't moving again anytime soon and whatever we bought, we'd be living with for a long time.

The Reddit rabbit hole

That's when we discovered r/BuyItForLife — a Reddit community dedicated to finding products that last. People sharing their grandmother's cast iron pan still going strong after 60 years. Kitchen knives that had been sharpened for decades. Coffee grinders from the 1970s that outlasted five cheaper replacements.

The philosophy clicked immediately: instead of buying a €30 pan every few years, invest €150 once in something that lasts a lifetime. Not only do you save money in the long run, but you actually enjoy using quality products more. Every single day.

Our first real investments

We started researching. Really researching. Hours on Reddit threads reading genuine user stories: people posting photos of their 40-year-old Victorinox knife still going strong, threads comparing Dutch ovens with replies from users who'd owned theirs for decades. We dug into manufacturer histories, read professional chef forums, learned about materials and construction.

Our first big purchase was a Le Creuset Dutch oven. Yes, it cost more than we'd ever spent on a single kitchen item. But holding it, cooking with it, seeing how evenly it heated and how beautifully it seared, we understood. This wasn't just a pot. This was a tool we'd use multiple times a week for the rest of our lives.

Then came a Victorinox Fibrox chef's knife. A Boska cheese slicer (unchanged since 1896, we later learned). A Demeyere stainless steel pan. Each purchase felt deliberate, considered, meaningful in a way that grabbing the cheapest option at IKEA never had.

The frustration that started this site

But finding these products was hard. Search for "best chef's knife" and you get endless listicles clearly written for affiliate commissions. "Top 10 pans for 2024" articles that recommend completely different products than the same site's "Top 10 pans for 2023" — because they need fresh content, not honest recommendations.

The Reddit community was helpful, but scattered. Great recommendations buried in comment threads. Conflicting opinions without clear explanations. No central place that compiled the research we were doing anyway.

So we started documenting our findings. What began as notes for ourselves slowly turned into proper articles. We shared them with friends facing the same decisions. And eventually, we realized: this could help more people than just our circle.

Why we do this

Lasting Standard exists because we believe the Buy It For Life philosophy deserves better resources. Not affiliate-driven content farms, but genuine research by people who actually use these products and care about getting it right.

We're not professional reviewers. We're not getting free products from manufacturers. We're just two people who got tired of replacing cheap stuff and discovered there's a better way.

Every product we recommend is something we'd buy ourselves and in most cases, already have done so. We write the articles we wished existed when we were standing in our empty kitchen, overwhelmed by choices and skeptical of every recommendation we found online.