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.
What it might look like if Aragon and Argon watches actually went to court over the trademark dispute. My prior post described a disappointing development for those collectors hoping to acquire an Argon Spaceone watch via the brand's Kickstarter campaign. The campaign had reached over $1 million in funding when Kickstarter's management stepped in and froze the whole thing over an "intellectual property dispute." When I posted about this development on Instagram , Hodinkee editor Tony Traina noted in the comments that another brand, Aragon watches, had filed a complaint with the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) back in April (thanks Tony!). Argon's account replied and indicated that they had already filed a registration for their brand name and they were retaining counsel in New York City. On Tuesday, June 27 of this week, more details were offered via a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The case is filed on behalf
Among many avid watch collectors, the term "in house movement" seems to elicit eyerolling disdain. Pieces of an assortment, including balance spring, from a non-Swiss movement. There is a sizeable perception that "in house" is, in fact, nothing more than an unnecessary marketing ploy designed to tease more money out of the wallet of buyers (by way of definition, an "in house" movement means that the mechanism inside a watch was predominently manufactured by a brand itself, kind of like "we make our own bread" at a restaurant). I'll confess that I'd begun to think similarly, that is, until I read a 66 page report posted by the Swiss Competition Commision on May 10, 2023. Yes, this is the kind of thing an economist finds interesting on a weekend, or at least this economist. Before we get into the details of this report, in the interest of full disclosure I should say that the original document was in a different language: lawyerese.
There comes a moment in the servicing of a watch that is probably easy to miss among the hundreds of steps required to remove a movement from a case, inspect the parts, repair anything amiss, lubricate all the pieces, and put the whole thing together again. A watch that Rolex's investigator bought at Beckertime for approximately $4,500. The lawsuit refers to this as "Counterfeit Watch One." That moment is when a watchmaker takes the dial and reattaches it to the movement. There is nothing particularly unique when it comes to the tools required or the tasks involved in this step. Instead, what is unique about this moment is that the watchmaker holds in their hand a mark that is not the property of the watchmaker and it is not exactly the property of the watch's owner. In the case of Vacheron Constantin, that mark is a Maltese Cross. For Audemars Piguet, it is the brand's initials. When it comes to Rolex, the mark is a widely recognized crown. If the reassembly
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