The Fourth Wheel, Issue 69

Some modest proposals for the improvement of watch retail

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that this week, is solving watch retail for ever. Also: a few thoughts on the Louis Vuitton Tambour, Hodinkee’s latest conflict of interest, a sneak peek at something very exclusive (I guess you would call it The Fourth Wheel’s first scoop!) and of course a fine selection of further reading from around the internet. Enjoy.

---

---

The Fourth Wheel Reader Survey is now open! If you have ten minutes to share your thoughts on this humble newsletter three things will happen.

1. I will be enormously grateful
2. The newsletter will get better as I listen to what you want
3. You will be entered into a draw, giving you a chance to win a year’s free subscription

---

I’ve been around the watch industry for a little while now - some twelve years, all in - and over time you develop a pretty good picture of the common causes around which watch fans rally. There are the obvious cliches about date windows and helium escape valves, and the tribalism around brands like Rolex, Omega, Grand Seiko, Lange and so on. But there are very few things on which truly everyone agrees. This might even be the only one:

No-one is satisfied with the experience of buying in-demand watches.

I’ve written about this topic a little bit before, around the time that Laventure got called out for possibly being a bit sneaky with its online pre-sales processes, but that was a while ago. Crucially, it was pre-MoonSwatch, which I feel has added another dimension to our collective unhappiness with the retail landscape. Given that in the last few days we’ve seen the Swatch x Blancpain Scuba Fifty go on sale, with queues around the block once more, and the announcement that MB&F has just opened a raffle to secure the opportunity to buy one of 1,500 M.A.D One Green watches, it seemed like a good moment to think again about how we get our mitts on top watches, and whether anything could be done differently.

Let’s dwell a minute on the root problem, although only a minute, and let’s also acknowledge that we’re not talking about buying watches full stop: I can buy many, many watches right now on Mr Porter (apparently there are other places to shop, I guess, as well) and they’ll turn up at my house in a couple of days’ time. We are talking about oversubscribed watches.

The root problem is so basic and has been discussed online ad infinitum so I won’t waste your time: there are not enough of certain watches to meet demand. You would be right in thinking that is a fundamental property of luxury goods, to an extent, and you would be right again to say that it is no accident; brands and retailers have a firm interest in making sure demand exceeds supply.

I don’t have an issue with this as a business model. Certainly there is no point just saying ‘But why don’t they just make MORE WATCHES?’ I was talking to everyone’s favourite industry analyst, Oliver Muller, this week, and he raised the example of Omega’s Speedmaster Dark Side Of The Moon. “The Swatch Group, when it finds something that works, reacts like a fast-moving consumer goods company (FMCG). It sold fantastically, it was in demand all over the place, but what did they do instead of keeping people hungry, they increased the output and brought out new variations, and then of course very quickly demand came down because the market understood it was not that rare.”

I do think that things have got out of balance - again, it has been plentifully discussed. Rolexes ‘for display purposes only’ are the poster child for the problem and for as long as the Rolex brand remains stronger than the Incredible Hulk after a can of spinach the scarcity isn’t going to hurt it, I do think that a world in which people give up on even aspiring to own a Rolex¹ one day is a world out of alignment.

What I really want to address are the retail methods - or rather, the methods used to decide who gets what they want. I might have come up with a few ideas of my own, too.