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.
Let's get some preliminaries out of the way: I don't particularly admire or respect how Patek CEO Thierry Stern responded to criticism of Cubitus, the brand's newest release. Three pocket watches on display during the 2017 Patek Philippe Grand Exhibition in NYC. Here's what he said : “The haters are mostly people who have never had a Patek and never will, so that doesn’t bother me.” Does this remark seem filled with hubris and disrespect for potential buyers? Yes. Will it matter for Patek financially? I don't think so. Let me explain. In order to understand the financial side of watch brands, we should never forget that retail buyers are not their customers (with some rare exceptions). I know that sounds crazy, but it is 5,000% true. For a brand like Patek, the primary watch market is financially mediated. There is a third party standing between brands in Switzerland and collectors. Namely, Patek sells to authorized dealers, they don't sell to collectors....
This may not come as a surprise, but I do not read German-language newspapers on a regular basis. Dial of a vintage Omega Constellation, pie pan. I am, however, keenly interested in a scandal involving the Swatch Group and a "Frankenwatch" Speedmaster which was sold at auction a while back for over $3 million. I won't go into all the minute details here, but the punchline is that Swatch Group bought the watch only to discover that some of its own employees may have been part of a conspiracy to assemble a watch which would be quite rare and important if it were authentic. But, apparently, it was not authentic. When the deception was uncovered, various people who were part of the "inside job" lost employment and, reportedly, legal authorities were notified in Switzerland. I originally wrote about this in 2023, you can read my coverage here . There's been excellent reporting on this matter from many sources (see, for example, this story from Bloomberg). ...
Today, I received a dispatch direct from Le Brassus, aka global headquarters for Audemars Piguet. The email cautions collectors that fraudsters are targeting clients of AP and other brands with potentially bad consequences. In the interest of collector protection, and as a bit of "public service," I'm copying the main body of the AP email below. Be careful out there, always check email headers and double-check with your known contacts at any brands before wiring money, for example: "Cybercriminals are trying to scam customers in every industry and watchmaking makes no exception. At Audemars Piguet we want to be sure that our trusted community is well protected against cyber- criminal exploits. Recently, threat actors have been using spoofing techniques to send fraudulent emails pretending to come from trusted brands, such as ours, in an attempt to deceive individuals into disclosing sensitive information, making payment to illegitimate accounts or engaging in fra...
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