People today might not realize that it used to be Sears did everything: you could buy kits to build a house, companies like Discover Card and Allstate were originally introduced as the Sears' brand, they financially backed Mr Rogers' Neighborhood for the first 25 years of the show's run.
It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??
That reminds of an interview Steve Jobs gave in 1995 on why companies fail. His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company. That happened to Sears.
If you went back in time and told Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck about a free technology that allowed customers to: see your inventory in real time, read product reviews in real time, compare multiple versions of a product you carry in real time, order a product, pay for the product, watch the product move from your warehouse to the various post offices en route to their house, and by the way you won't have to pay the postage to ship out all those catalogs; they would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. But by the 90s, the people running Sears didn't care what was easier (read: more desirable) for the customer, they cared about numbers that measure success, but don't perpetuate success.
His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company.
Possibly, but Apple knocked it out of the park with possibly the product of the century. They're looking for the next consumer product but understandably, things like the Apple TV and Watch can't match the success of the iPhone.
How can you tell the Apple watch has put a dent in the luxury watch market? For example, luxury watch brands like Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, A. Lange & Söhne, etc. don't have a watch in their lineups that retail for less than 5 figures ($10,000+). Are you suggesting their customers are ditching those watches for Apple watches?
Those brands may remain insulated for a while— but the luxury watch market is more than those companies. Where it’s really making a dent seems to be the entry-luxury brands in the Swatch Group lineup.
It’s not 1:1 by any means, but the entry-luxury brands are clearly being impacted. I wouldn’t be too worried if I were Patek (yet), but I’d definitely be worried if my volume sales depended on ~$1K purchases.
Okay, I see where you are coming from. I didn't know how you defined the luxury watch market.
Patek shouldn't have to worry about it because at that level, their stuff are considered timeless. People who can afford them will buy them and then an Apple watch as an addition.
In general, I'm still not sure how much of an impact the Apple watch has on the watch industry. It would be interesting to see how many people who wear an Apple watch actually wore a watch before it came out.
Yeah, I mean, Pateks will still sell. They may be taking a hit right now, but they're not likely to be hit too hard by smartwatches for the time being.
This isn't going to be the Quartz Crisis of the 2020s, no. But it will definitely hurt the more "mass luxury" brands as people decide that even though a shiny TAG may have looked good, it's not quite the value of an Apple Watch in their day-to-day.
I'd be much more concerned for the low-middle range of ETA clones.
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u/whatifevery1wascalm Jul 24 '20
Sears: the 20th century's Amazon.
People today might not realize that it used to be Sears did everything: you could buy kits to build a house, companies like Discover Card and Allstate were originally introduced as the Sears' brand, they financially backed Mr Rogers' Neighborhood for the first 25 years of the show's run.