Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

The other aspect is perception based on time based trends. Cartier would be a top of the line luxury jewellery brand, but at the moment you'd have to sell off a shoebox full of solid gold ones to buy a steel Rolex Sub. Which was a mid tier tool watch the same price as other mid tier tool watches. They're now firmly in the aspirational bracket, with a current madness trend on top which placed them in the supreme bracket. Supreme brands Patek and AP weren't even on the radar ten years ago, but now they are as more people decided to put their money into them, so in some senses I would say they've dropped into aspirational. IWC went from aspirational to "who?" near overnight. Breitling ditto. Panerai are going a similar way. TAG Heuer were once squarely in the premium bracket and now they're a wrist faux pas. Well looking back to the 90's, even the early 00's *screen quivers, harps play* when they were at their height the watch hobbyists always looked down on them. What I think happened is as the hobby went mainstream more newbies got into the hobby and picked up that scorn for TAG from the old farts and it spread. Omega have remained very consistent and for a long time too. Longines were huge pre the 1950's but were up and down, mostly the latter since then and have come back to relevance by nicking their pre 50's hits and remaking them for current fashions. They're like the watch equivalent of the Rolling Stones. People want to hear the hits. Zenith were another huge brand but went downhill, tried to bump up their prices and status but failed.

Having seen some scarily accurate fakes readied up by those into that from parts they buy online that cost 500-1000 all in quid he's slapping on a decent profit alright.