‘Affordable Luxury’ Watches
Filippo Loreti Venice Moonphase
Another well-known ‘affordable luxury’ brand uses the Miyota 6P00 movement for a popular line of moon-phase watches that sell for about $300 each. Meanwhile, the movement, usually the most important and expensive part of a watch, wholesales for less than $10. In fact, Deogen, a Chinese company, sells an eerily similar watch for only $20 on Alibaba, meaning consumers essentially pay a 1500% mark-up for the ‘brand name’. Moreover, this would indicate a shift in what is supposedly of value in a timepiece: aesthetics vs. craftmanship. Traditionally, the mainstream watch market would shun at products of this grade, but brands like this have been successful by launching through crowdfunding platforms and using social media to side-step the core of the industry. By marketing to the less knowledgeable general public, they’re able to take advantage of the historic information asymmetry that exists between consumers and watch brands; selling their products at considerable mark-ups given the value/cost and quality of the components. This is especially ironic considering that these practices are exactly what these brands claim to oppose on the About pages of their websites. Instead of solving the problem, they’re knowingly perpetuating it, and blatantly contradicting their own raisons d’être.
So, are these brands sustainable? Better yet: have brands like this ever been sustainable? It’s really up to the market to decide: is their marketing simply misleading, and will people accept their products for what they are? Or are they manipulating the most vulnerable segment of consumers, buying time until their branding implodes on itself? We’ll let our readers answer that one. Although, considering that many of these companies have already shifted to calling themselves ‘accessories brands’, it seems we may have already won this battle. Like the Quartz Attack of the 1970s and the Rise of Smartwatches in the 2000s, we seem to have overcome the Affordability Era of the 2010s. So, what’s next?