Pages

Friday, March 06, 2026

6: Iran

The Brand Age For years the Japanese had been able to make cheaper watches. Now they could make better ones too. ......... A handful survived as independent companies. And the way they did it was by transforming themselves from precision instrument makers into luxury brands. ........... Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol. ................

The Swiss watch industry probably makes more now from selling brand than they would have if they were still selling engineering.

.................. Instead of falling off a cliff, the revenue numbers merely flatten out for a while, and then take off like a rocket in the late 1980s as the surviving watchmakers come to terms with their new destiny. .................

one of the most powerful forces of our era: brand.

........... Cheap, thick pocket watches were derided as "turnips." .............. The best watches of the golden age have a quiet perfection that has never been equalled since. And for reasons I'm about to explain, probably never will be. .................... That's the thing about minimalism: there tends to be just one answer. ................. Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal. ................ "You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world — the Audemars Piguet 'Royal Oak'. What makes it even more precious than gold is the time that went into building it, by a vanishing breed of master watchmakers." At the bottom of the ad they turn the traditional formula on its head and describe their watches as being "priced from $35,000 and down." .................. You could wear a diamond ring or a gold chain, but those would have seemed socially dubious to investment bankers. They might have been barbarians, but they weren't mafia. ................. expensive mechanical watches now serve as de facto jewelry for men, and women don't need de facto jewelry because they can wear actual jewelry. ............... The most striking thing to me about the brand age is the sheer strangeness of it. The zombie watch brands that appear to be independent and even have their own retail stores, and yet are all owned by a few holding companies. The giant, awkwardly shaped watches that reverse 500 years of progress in making them smaller. The business model that requires a company to rebuy their own watches on the secondary market to catch rogue customers. The very concept of rogue customers. It's all so strange. And the reason it's strange is that there's no function for form to follow. ........................ The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world. ............... The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.

at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)