The Fourth Wheel, Issue 89

The Piaget Polo 79 arrives, and we ask: where are the risk-takers?

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that next week, as is tradition, will be answering your questions. Every 10th issue I do an AMA, and every time you provide excellent questions, and I have no doubt issue 90 will be the same. Send your burning enquiries to me by response to this email, in a reply to this thread, as a message on Instagram or by simply engraving them onto the caseback of a pre-1970 Cartier Tank and mailing them to me - I am willing to go halves on the postage.

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

An Unfiltered Response To LVMH Watch Week
What Was The Greatest Era Of Chronograph Watchmaking?
2023 In Review
What To Expect In 2024
The Best And Worst Watch Brand Websites

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I started the week considering two takes from my fellow journalists and substackers. Tis the season to be pontificating - or at least it was, until Piaget opened the action proper with the return of the Polo, but we’ll come to that. 

Jack Forster, prefacing the question with the hope that he was wrong, asked if 2024 would be the year people tired of luxury watches. Key quote:

“Finally, I think that increasingly, watch brands struggle to make anyone understand why anyone would want to buy a luxury watch at all. In a rational – or less irrational – world, watches would be bought at a price that has at least some relationship to actual quality in construction and content in terms of watchmaking. The last few years have not been a distinguished one for innovation in horology, holding the line in terms of movement quality in construction and finish, or even inventiveness in design.”

Tony Traina responded in his January round-up. Citing the increased pluralism of horological tastes, he reached a more optimistic conclusion, but along the way made a couple of points that really aligned with Jack’s thesis. Specifically, the idea that the industry - including us in the media - has somewhat squandered the opportunities of the boom times, and perhaps inevitably, that it’s only when times get tougher and companies feel the pressure that good ideas emerge. Key quote:

“In the good times, easy money is a hallucinogen for actual success… Now that we’re in the Less Good Times, we’re seeing what has real staying power.”

I was still mulling this all when news broke of Piaget’s Polo 79 revival, and as luck would have it, the Gadrooned Goldzilla of Gstaad played right into my coalescing thoughts. 

Let’s take the bare bones of Jack’s argument as gospel, for it is hard to argue with the critique of rising prices, undignified retail tactics, derivative design, slowly declining standards of craftsmanship and minimal invention. Let’s also accept the consensus, per Tony T and also pithily summarised by Tim Barber for Subdial last week, that the year ahead will be a challenging one. We are in the ‘less good times’. What is it going to take to succeed in such an environment?

The industry could double down on its current trajectory, produce more of what previously sold well, but try and sell it for considerably more (and scrimp and save on margins along the way). Almost certainly what will happen, but I doubt it will lead to success. I think it will see us sleepwalk into what Jack calls the “moribund phase in which it will have to work hard to regain the sense of interest, excitement, and pleasure in ownership which ought to characterise fine watchmaking”

What has a better chance of succeeding, if you ask me, is risk. When everything starts to look and sound and feel the same as everything else, the opportunity is there for a brand to take risks and do things differently. 

But then you have to ask: what would even constitute a risk, in 2024? What could a brand unveil at Watches and Wonders this year that would actually stop me in my tracks? Who is capable of taking a genuine creative risk, and what would that even look like?