Quote:
Originally Posted by crimson49er
people still wear watches now days? go figure...
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Your sentiment is one of the key threats facing the conventional watch industry. The fact is that no matter how fine a mechanical or quartz watch be, the value proposition issuing from what those devices can accomplish lacks relevance for huge swaths of consumers.
I think that whereas most folks have no problem with wearing a device on the lower portion of their arm, I think they feel that if they are going to do so, it needs to do more than look pretty and display the time of day. That I think has a lot to do with why the Apple Watch is "a thing." I don't think that folks necessarily think that the things it does beyond telling time are "all that," but that it does, and the promise it gives for what a smartwatch can eventually deliver is.
That promise signals the effective end of traditional mechanical and quartz watches as products purchased and worn by millions of people. No, the smartwatch isn't going to affect sales of conventional watches to dyed-in-the-wool watch collectors who are genuinely "into" the art and craft of watchmaking and horology. But let's be real, just how many people really are, even among people who spend huge sums on individual watches like Rolex Oysters, Pateks, VCs, and so on?
I posit that few are. Heck the vast majority of owners of such watches haven't the first idea of how a watch works. I seriously doubt that most folks who buy, say a VC Overseas, are remotely aware of, much less understand, details such as why/how the JLC 920 ebauche inside that watch, if it's not properly maintained, can result in undue wear on the barrel bridge as a result of side-shade, and thereby require the entire bridge be replaced. If they maintain the watch as instructed, sure, they have no problem. If they become lax about it, they will eventually have either a huge repair bill or a watch that just doesn't work. What I think most owners of high end watches know is that they have a lovely watch, made by a company that has a long history of fine watchmaking, and for which they paid a very tidy sum.
I believe that consumers such as that are, at the end of the day, fickle. That is, when a new, and functionally more compelling wrist-borne device comes along, they will begin to adopt it. Sure, they'll come up with and speak of whatever BS they can to justify why the $15K+ VC in their dresser drawer is no longer the best thing for them to wear on their wrist. Yes, some folks will make the transition more readily than others. I'm sure too that some will ask themselves what they were thinking to have spent VC-money on a mechanical watch in the first place.
Will there be wealthy people for whom their large expenditures were of no consequence, folks who knew they spent that kind of money solely because they could, and who just move on to smartwatches? Yes, there will be, and they'll have no reticence about having spent so much because, as the ideal target customers for luxury watches, they haven't really wasted any money that had they not spent it would have made a difference; their lives will be no different, no better or worse, for having spent that kind of money. The Apple Watch can be as readily adopted and subsequently discarded by them as can their expensive mechanical watches.
Be that as it may, spending huge sums on a watch does not a watch collector make, and the only people who will support the conventional watch industry once that very compelling smartwatch comes along will be true collectors, not people who are simply wealthy enough to buy fancy watches. Non-collectors who never bought expensive watches in the first place will switch even sooner.
All the best.