This post will be light on commentary. I'd just like to share that, today, I created a Hans Wilsdorf artificial intelligence bot on Character.ai. Full disclosure: I have no relationship to this startup, I just did this out of curiousity. I imagined that a few people might enjoy a chat with Hansbot. The tech behind this was developed by two Googlers who worked on the company's natural language processing model.
To give you some sense of how it works, I'm sharing a few screenshots of my first conversation with Hansbot. You can find my second conversation with Hansbot at the link here. I began by asking Hansbot about his favorite watch (it got cut off in the screenshots).
My book on the history of Rolex marketing is now available on Amazon! It debuted as the #1 New Release in its category. You can find it here.
Last week, Icebox / Swiss Watches GA, a third party retailer of pre-owned watches, officially acknowledged receipt of a lawsuit filed by Rolex USA in the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia - Atlanta Division. A screenshot of the Icebox / Swiss Watches GA retail location Source: Rolex's legal filing. The cause of action for Rolex's lawsuit against Icebox / Swiss Watches GA is "Trademark Counterfeiting, Trademark Infringement, False Advertising, Designation of Origin, Descriptions, Representations, and Unfair Competition." I've previously covered lawsuits of this sort filed by Rolex against independent retailers who sell modified watches. But this one is an order of magnitude different. Icebox / Swiss Watches GA has some very high-profile clientele. For example, a YouTube video from five years ago entitled "Post Malone Buys Rolex For 21 Savage & Autographs A Bugatti!" has over seven million views (the video content is pretty ...
We're certainly not suffering from a shortage of coverage when it comes to Rolex's recent launch of an entirely new product line: the Land-Dweller reference 127334 (steel, there are also precious metal versions). I've read much of this coverage and I will do my best not to repeat it here. Instead, I hope to share a few takes that you may not have seen elsewhere, including evidence that the watch's design heritage extends in directions that are overlooked. So let's get into it. To begin, the Land-Dweller is undoubtedly attributable to the leadership of CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour, who took the reigns of the brand in the summer of 2015. According to an expose by Bloomberg (more on that later), development of the Land-Dweller began roughly five years ago, a handful of years after Dufour took over. There have been many, equally significant releases by Rolex of late. For example, 2023's "emoji" Day-Date was arguably a bigger "mic drop" than the Lan...
I recently learned that the CEO of Audemars Piguet Americas (APA), Ginny Wright, was departing the legendary watch brand. A tabletop model of the AP "Starwheel," photo taken at AP House NYC. The new CEO of AP Americaa will be Louis-Gabriel Fichet, who joined AP in 2020. I learned about this development from an online watch publication whose editor opined on the matter . I feel obliged to respond to that piece because I think it reveals some concerning biases in watch industry coverage, biases which will only diminish if we talk about them openly and honestly. There were three critiques of Ms. Wright's time at the helm of APA that jumped out to me. First was the allegation that Ms. Wright suffered a "sudden removal." Subsequent to this critique, Ms. Wright posted on her Instagram account that she is "returning to the world of prestige beauty and stepping into a global CEO role." Moving from a regional executive position to a global one is not ind...
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