Rolex 01/09/2020 - predictions?

Cyrus wrote: »

well i was referring to the core watches i think the colourful stuff is really to appeal to ladies if im honest

My first thoughts were...

893bet wrote: »

I ain’t sure how much they were last week but it seems crazy. There are literally 100s of 1000 of that watch in circulation.

"Rarity" is like "value"(and "authentic), all marketing points in luxury veblen branding like watches. It's much more about perception than reality. The reality is these items aren't rare. We're not talking old master's paintings here. If such watches were rare we wouldn't have much of a market or hobby. Patek who would be well above Rolex in the luxury and quality end produce 50-70,000 watches per year. Compared to the population in the market it's not a huge amount, but it's a lot of watches and given their prices the market population would be small enough. Rolex keep their usual silence on actual figures but it's around a million watches a year. That's a lot. So to make things look rare and exclusive they factor the dealer network into it and squeeze supply. Their soft marketing is just as clever as the more obvious stuff so fans egg up the brand for them. I suspect they didn't expect such a crazy bubble/trend as in latter years, but I'd bet the farm they milked it when they saw it happening.

They're not the only Swiss company that pushes the marketing angle. Hell the 80's Swatch push to make mechanical watches "authentic" was a great example of it that got them out of the doldrums of the quartz crisis(it was actually more a digital crisis. The Swiss had some fantastic quartz watches, but completely missed the boat on the digitals). Ironically they did that on the back of the massive war chest of cash they made from selling cheap plastic quartz Swatch watches. Genius.

Longines with the exception of the new VHP quartz have mined deep into their heritage angle. IWC were masters of claiming all sorts of firsts for the brand until the interwebs came along. One Year Zenith just went and upped thier prices across the board, just cos. Omega do it. I mean how many "special limited editions" of the Speedie have they produced? Limited in the sense of many thousands of examples(IMHO limited is sub 1000 pieces, better if sub 100). Never mind the Speedie, a fantastic watch just like the Sub, is now priced at least four times higher than they were when the lads were walking on the Moon. Consider that back in the pre Swatch etc days say around 1970 a Rolex SS Sub ran between 200 and 300 quid/freedom bucks depending on the model. The same price as equivalent Omega and Longines and Blancpain divers(specialist up to date divers from Doxa and others were more like 4-500). They had to be pitched around the same prices as they were all separate enterprises selling "tool" watches competing in the same jewellers and dive shop windows.

The Swiss changed the market in a fantastically inventive way and the internet expanded that beyond their wildest dreams. Trust me, if you were "into watches" pre the interwebs you were a stone cold weirdo. Well except in Italy. Italian men even then had more than one watch. It's a fascinating subject. To me anyway.