Horolonomics

It is fair to say that collaborations in the watch industry are, at present, less a novel strategy and more a mature tactic that a brand can use to generate excitement and interest in their products. The success of collaborations is driven by diversity. A brand has its unique heritage, design motifs, and comparative advantages. An outsider has their own philosophy of design, track record, and areas of strength. The two come together and the whole is, hopefully, greater than the sum of the parts. This post is about a very early collaboration in the watch industry. The brand in question is Rolex, a manufacturer that does not have a reputation for collaboration in product development (beyond the "collaborations" which were necessary in order to source parts in Rolex's earlier years). The outsider is Lewis Griffith Cresswell Evans Pugh, who went by Griffith Pugh. Their collaboration was unique in that Rolex did not explicitly market the lash up with Pugh. In fact, his role

This isn't a post I really wanted to write or share. The reason: it involves a brand I admire and respect. Some readers might decide that what I write here casts a negative light on that brand. At the end of the day, when I see information that just doesn't make sense, I feel obliged to comment on it regardless of whether it might ruffle a few feathers. I just feel a responsibility in that regard when it comes to readers and subscribers. It is important to me that the state of the watch market is truthfully known. As a side note: I'm going to soon post another story about the brand in question that highlights a neat achievement on their part, so please stay tuned. Ok, so here we go. Last week, a story in Bloomberg claimed that watch brand Zenith now has wait lists that are similar to those seen at Rolex and Patek Philippe. To set the stage: buyers have recently waited months or years for certain models from Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet (among others). The Bloomber

This will be one of my more brief posts on the state of the watch market. The punchline is that, when you review charts anywhere, always make sure to check if the publisher has included the origin in the chart. The origin is the point where both variables presented in the chart take on the value zero (the really important thing is that the origin for the vertical value is included). Let me illustrate why this is important. In the first image presented below, I present data from a watch pricing analytics company. The data represents an "index" of Rolex asking prices on the preowned market. I think "index" is probably not a great way to describe this data, it really represents an average of some sort. In fact, I'm not really fond of this type of index for other reasons. A stock price index, for example, represents averaging of homogenous assets. It's true that stocks come from heterogeneous industries, but they are all subject to largely identical reporting

There is an insightful piece of advice I've heard from longtime watch collectors. It is this: you only have two wrists and they are extremely valuable property. Think carefully about what you buy and ask yourself if a watch brand has earned the right to reside on your wrist. Saraswati, the Indian goddess of wisdom, music, art and speech. It recently occured to me that wrist real estate has doubled for many people these days. No, I'm not referring to some kind of surgical grafting of additional limbs. I'm talking about the "metaverse." Before the advent of this buzzword, I generally refered to this space as virtual reality, so I'm going to stick with that for the purposes of this post. A bit of background: back in December I bought my family an Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook (now Meta). This is a wireless VR headset with accessible pricing. One of my kids had tried out a game call "Job Simulator" in the past and loved it. I thought I'd bri

This post started as an investigation into whether the crypto "winter" does actually explain recent changes in luxury watch prices. I was motivated by a Bloomberg article containing this claim (as well as subsequent discussions of that article). As I started working on this post, though, I realized that the data referenced in the Bloomberg article is so bad, my plans had to change. Fam: we have a problem. People publishing numbers relating to the watch industry do not seem to understand some very fundamental concepts when it comes to markets (I'm going with this possibility rather than a rather more troubling conclusion: they understand and they're actively misleading people). Those same people are making statements and drawing conclusions based upon some very shaky foundations. So, this post is going to explore why a lot of the numbers we see when it comes to the watch market do not actually measure prices. Many claim to report prices, but that is not what t

One premise of economics is that human behavior often follows certain predictable paths. It isn't always the case, but it often is. For example, every semester I poll my students with a certain question and every semester the results of the poll are perfectly predictable because there are two laws in economics which almost always hold. Of course, I would be hypocritical if I didn't also follow a predictable path and I'd venture to say that I follow a law of behavior that applies to almost all empirically-oriented economists. It is this: when we see a table of data we want the spreadsheet. Yesterday, I virtually attended a talk hosted by the Horological Society of New York entitled "The Royal Oak: from Iconoclast to Icon" delivered by Audemars Piguet's Heritage and Museum Director (Sebastian Vivas). A fairly rare red-dialed Audemars Piguet Royal Oak I photographed at a Phillips Auction preview. The Royal Oak is a horologically famous watch design celeb