Rolex at retail prices

Deleted User wrote: »

They do though. If say a Porsche dealer was allocated a single limited edition model, do you think they would sell it to a whoever was first in the door or someone who has been a regular customer over the years?
Porsche themselves have mulled leasing limited edition cars to avoid them being flipped or dealers cashing in.

Yep the high end car crowd have been at this for years. Ferrari pretty much started this back in the day. Enzo would only sell his road cars to those he deemed "worthy"(and who would advertise the brand for him), which of course increased the cache no end. Though when he was first trying to get a foothold in the US that went out the window and it was whoever had the cash. You can have the same going on with women's handbags that cost eleventy million pounds. Standard operating marketing procedure to push the luxury, you're really special stuff among your customer base. It works on those who end up with the item and trickles down to those who aspire to own said item. Constrain supply and voila! Rolex have played it extremely well over the last few years. First they upped the RRP's, then constrained supply and turned a mid tier watch brand that had near zero penetration outside of Britain and her commonwealth into the worldwide luxury brand behemoth it is today, and did it with steel watches. They had some cache, though somewhat dubious a one back in the day, but it was gold or two tone bling to wideboys, potentates and suburban accountants.

Now you hear that Audemars Piguet with their Royal Oak and later Patek with their near clone brought "luxury" to the steel watch market, but in reality AP took most of the 1970's to sell off their first thousand or so Royal Oaks and Patek's sales were still mostly gold dress watches. Royal Oaks and Nautilus' are very high profile over the last few years, but in the 70's 80's and 90's and well into the 00's they were way off the radar. You just didn't see them. However Rolex were plugging away throughout. Yeah the two tones and bling were the big sellers but the steel subs were a consistent seller and they leveraged that into the steel costs more and is luxury today. The Rolex in steel is the luxury watch for the vast majority of people.

While I struggle to think of another Swiss big watch brand that innovated less*, Rolex are without any shadow of a doubt the finest marketing machine of knowing what their customer base wants and have been since they were founded. They're one of the finest marketing outfit of any brand full stop. That is not easy to be and to be that good for that length of time.




*even here they have convinced the majority of their customer base, potential and actual, from newbs to many collectors that they essentially invented the modern wristwatch. Better yet they pulled that incredible trick off without saying a word on the matter themselves. They let others do the talking. They haven't pushed the innovation angle since the 1930's pretty much. They were nobodies in the chronometer trials, yet have "Superlative Chronometer"(which is a trademark) on the dial and again are seen as the chronometer brand.

Yep you can tell the date alright N, the boxes weren't as fancy as then before box opening vids on youtube. Though the 1950's gave the best box in my humble...

When we start to see ads for Rolex financing that'll be another bad sign.

They won't provide the professionals like you is the more accurate. They're doing a DeBeers and constraining supply. It's an entirely artificial lack of supply decided upon by meetings in Rolex HQ. And fair enough and fair bloody play to them, because clearly it works, but that's the actual reality of it. They produce around a million watches per year. Their figures are deliberately fuzzy as part of their marketing, but this is not a small outfit hand fettling one offs in some leafy artisanal setting. They could quite easily ramp up what is an extremely industrial process and supply the market's needs, but that would affect their luxury cache in the eyes of their market and devalue the brand. So they won't.

And yes for those who want to buy into the game the reality certainly is if you're willing to pay way over the odds on a watch that is already overpriced by every metric but the price of the ink on the dial you can get one, but you're paying for that smoke and mirrors. Begging to pay Ferrari money for a high spec Ford. Hey if that's what floats the oul boat great too, but talk of overall realities isn't nearly so simple.

unkel wrote: »

I agree. Delayed gratification seems to have disappeared pretty much entirely from the generation who have recently become adults and anyone younger than that.

I'd say it started way before them, just in other areas. A chap in his 80's I know into gardening all his life noted this during the celtic tiger. Whereas people before from the very rich with acreages of gardens to the not so well heeled with a small garden measured in feet would build up a garden over years, decades, even lifetimes, planting seeds and seedlings and letting them grow, the Celtic cubs were into instant gardens, pregrown plants, even pregrown trees so they didn't have to wait. Similar was and is still going on with house renovations. Buy gaff, then add to the mortgage to have instant McMansion, rather than adding to things over the years. Those cubs are mostly in their fifties now.

It's an interesting phenomenon this delayed gratification. The old almost always consider the lack of it a fault of the young, but it isn't. It's usually, but certainly not always a feature of flashing the cash, which can be humble or decadent depending on the target it's aimed at. I've seen guys getting into the vintage thing show up on various forums and just go nuts over a very short period of time, instant collections type of thing, from cheap Swatches to house price Pateks and all points in between. Online arenas like forums, facebook and especially youtube and instagram feed this need for ever new wrist "content". It weaponises both the very human collecting hoarding need and the very human need for display and status.

I'd be worse than most on the hoarding angle and if I were to do a Tube channel I reckon I'd have maybe 6 or so vids in me as far as themes would go. I reckon Fitz' idea of looking to other guy's watches in the forum is a great idea. Import the madness.