The attack of the SuperFakes
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
From the article:
"Historically, less than 5 percent of the watches that we authenticate are fake,” said Powell. “At one point this number was as high as 10 percent.” However, the numbers are growing."
Is it possible that the number of "fake" watches was always going up but that even experts can't tell the difference any more?
And lastly, is it legal for watch sellers re-sell fake watches themselves? If they do, what incentive does a watch seller have for telling you the watch you want to sell to them is authentic?
I've never owned a watch for more than 5 years so none of this is personal experience! However the recent wave of smart watches made me look into watches now and I have a couple of nice dress watches I researched a bit before I purchased.
I owned a five year old Rolex Submariner and had it for about three years. You could tell it was a solid, well built watch. However, after the first six months, I found it was not keeping very accurate time. Sent it back to Rolex and they fixed it and sent it back. Was fine for another six months, then it started again. Sent it back and was charged $300 for the repair. After another four months it started again and I finally gave up on it and sold it for a fraction of its worth.
This is pretty much par for the course on the high end stuff I've bought over my lifetime. High end (not pro stock) hockey stuff just falls apart and isn't durable. Soccer stuff? Same thing. Dress shoes, suits, clothing? Same thing. High end mountain bikes? Same thing. I had three high end mountain bikes (all different manufacturers) and the derailleurs needed adjustment constantly, the high end Magura hydraulic disc brakes squealed constantly and the Fox forks all leaked after a few months. I was a single track guy so its not like I was doing Red Bull contests either. I got a middle tier Cannondale and have had it since 2006 with little or no issues.
I found that after so many years of being disappointed with "high end" expensive stuff, your best bet is to not get the lowest cost thing or the most expensive, but the middle tier stuff I've always found to be not only durable, but far more dependable.
I've been happy with pretty much every midrange purchase I make. I usually regret spending the money when I buy the most expensive thing and learned a while ago not to waste my money on the cheapest.
As far as cars, I know a guy with a Mercedes and it sounds like nothing but trouble. He can't work on it himself, only authorized dealers are allowed to work on it, parts are ridiculously expensive and in the end he uses it for the same thing I use my much less expensive car for, going to work and other random places we need to go. He does have a really nice stereo though...
There's some exceptions. Musical instruments really do get better as the price goes up. You can feel and hear the difference between a $500,$1000,$5000, and $10000 musical instrument. Most tools and equipment used by professionals tends to be that way too. But, I suppose as far as professional gear goes there's probably less of a 'luxury' or 'status' market for those things.
If at all possible I'd look at a more famous place like the popular trails around Tahoe, Downievilla, Moab, North Shore, etc.
For my last bike my wish list was: lifetime frame warranty, threaded (not pressed) bottom bracket, and boost. Other than that I just wanted the one that felt the best. Took me 3 demos of 2 hours each to finally decide.
If you are looking for most reliable I'd check the rentals. If the bike survives a season of rentals without a prohibitive amount of expensive maintenance and parts it will likely last you a life time.
I can assure you that fox forks can last over 5 years without maintenance, but the recommended maintenance schedule is somewhere around annual or 100 to 1000 hours of riding or so.
Current high end disc brakes from SRAM or Shimano can be squeal free under most conditions, which is one of the reasons a large fraction of the high end bikes have switched to them.
In the contrarian tradition of HN, I'm trying to think of a counter-example and can't. Cars? Toyota > Ferrari if you have to get to work every day (see also: Archer's 308GT that rides around on a flatbed truck). Musical instruments? More expensive wooden stringed instruments sound better because they're built more delicately (read: more hand work). You're not going to hurt a $300 violin. I own a BMW motorcycle now after thirty years of owning less expensive Hondas. Love the bike, but that BMW has been back for niggling warranty work a few times (and so has my wife's). Number of Hondas I've owned that ever saw a dealer after I rode off the lot: zero. Motorcycle riding suits? Klim is eye-wateringly expensive and no better than Aerostich AFAICT. I'll put my Garmin Fenix up against anything Rolex makes if we compare utility, price, and durability. Than there is a whole host of things like appliances where there just isn't a middle ground anymore, and the stuff on both ends sucks (the high end just costs more).
I dunno, maybe phones and computers are the only exception, and I'm not even willing to take a strong stand on that (how much better is a Pixel XL than a $50 no-name Android phone, really?).
I'd argue that the iphone and apple products in general are really the apotheosis of this. They are thoroughly mid-ranged mass-market products that are so well designed that there is almost no room for a 'luxury' segment.
Pretty standard for the pads that are designed not to fade out on you under prolonged, heavy use. Sound is not a factor for race-performance gear.
You probably also found their performance pretty crap when they were cold. Performance pads on cars have similar characteristics.
I did find this to be true.
We tried "baking" them several times at the shop. It did help some for a few days and then went back to squealing. I just put up with after a while.
When I finally switched over to SRAM I didn't get any more squealing.
The rep all gave us full S9 (which I think now are the X line) setups and said, "Test it out, run into the ground. I'll be back in two months and see what you think."
Two months later, most of the shop was riding SRAM.
I wonder how low in the price range you have to get before you have visibly uneven chapter ring marks. I think I can print a perfect one on paper on the laser printer here at work. Although the ring on my sarb is not perfectly aligned.
My rule at this point is to avoid Seiko chapter rings, unless it's a Grand Seiko or I can see it in-store.
I'd bet Casio has perfect chapter rings at every price.
That doesn't quite sound like it's the case here though. That's what happens with other products and after-hours, unofficial production runs though. In that case, there is no difference and the issue is really just a legal one. It sounds like these watches, while difficult to determine as fake, aren't quite the same quality as the real things.
But of course, the fakes usually are cheaper, because they are not as well made as the originals. That is ofte not visible by an outside inspection, but might contain different qualities of metal used, different production processes, less care of assembly. Have you seen how much know-how goes just into making the main spring of a Rolex? They invested a lot of R&D into it. Of course you can just use a standard spring. But it won't be the same quality.
If you don't appreciate that extra bit of quality in a Rolex (or any other comparable brand), then there are excellent original mechanical watches at basically any price point, starting at $ 100 up.
Finally, I don't think it is legal to sell or resell fake watches in many places, in some countries even owning them can be a felony. If you don't disclose that the watch is fake, it is clear fraud, and even if you do, it is still a misuse of copyrighted and trademarked material.
It’s not about simple, straightforward metals either, but very specific, proprietary, researched blends. Some watch brands use metals that make the watch incredibly light. Others, based on clients’ preference, make the watch very heavy.
Particluarly, in a high end watch, not only do you pay for the craftsmanship and artistic design, form and function, but also for accuracy (e.g. +/- seconds lost per day, how certain tilts and the effect of gravity on influencing loss in accuracy) and power reserve and level of complications all working together. No disruption from magnetism or other natural forces. A lot of refinement goes into a high end watch. A fake becomes pretty obvious.
You also have to appreciate the scale. All that mechanics. Went from grandfather clocks to pocket watches to wrist watches. Getting smaller, more complicated (day, date, moon phase, alarms, etc.) and days of “natural” power reserve.
It’s quite fascinating engineering in fact ....
Worse, it means that the company no longer controls its own distribution channels, pricing or exports.
If the company makes a mid-model change (bug fix, whatever), then it also can't stop shipments of the bad ones.
It means made by an entity without authorization to produce that thing with that brand. Not authentic. It's operating without the historical reputation of the brand (company) behind it, which typically applies to things such as quality, customer service, resale value, etc.
If I buy an identical item (as close as possible) to a high priced luxury watch, made by a counterfeiter, are they going to provide me support for the item I bought? Do they stand behind the counterfeit? No. That's the consequence of it not being authentic, it doesn't come with any of the other substance behind it.
There was once I spotted a fake in a Sony showroom in Asia and even they were blown away when I pointed out the differences. Thankfully, they took it off the shelf.
It's a really, really a sad thing in the collector's world.
China of course, is where most fakes are made, and you'd be surprised how many fakes are out there on Alibaba, despite Jack Ma claiming otherwise. This is their bread and butter. With all that said, I think it's perhaps a cultural issue, as everything they possess is a clone of something:
Baidu = Google
Weibo = Twitter
Youtube = Youku
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Even their high speed rails were a brutal rip off of the Japanese trains [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_MDR-V6
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiGoyNbVDvI
[3] http://fortune.com/2013/04/15/did-china-steal-japans-high-sp...
If you want to know what time it is, get a solar-powered Casio G-Shock that corrects from WWV and similar time sources. Costs $89.[1] Requires no user attention. More accurate than any mechanical watch.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/G-Shock-AWG-M100-1ACR-Tough-Solar-Ato...
Not just "some," many of them do, in fact.
A lot of low end "luxury" watches don't even have custom movements, just standard ETAs. Chinese factories can produce clones of the ETA 2824 and 2836 movements, so you can get a fake watch with the exact same movement for a fraction of the price. If you ever decide you want COSC-level timing, you can just buy an ETA and swap it in.
Factories are also producing high-quality replicas of in-house movements such as the Rolex 3132 -- I say "replicas" because they can take the same parts that you'd use to repair a genuine movement. Once you're at that level, you need a loupe and a mental encyclopedia to be able to figure out what's going on and which is real.
Edit: Replaced "China" to clarify that it's not a national aim or anything like that.
> G-shock
Ironically, the fake industry doesn't just apply to mechanical watches -- even G-shocks are faked quite well. You can buy them from $5-10 quite often because the base parts are just that cheap.
[1] http://support.casio.com/storage/en/manual/pdf/EN/009/qw593....
I love my mechanical watches but I bought them because they look cool not for their time keeping ability.
That someone would slap you for having a healthy skepticism about their claims doesn't inspire faith in said claims.
This is no different.
These brands were there first and did the research and development pursuant to establishing what is a good user experience and most-desirable in a handbag, watch, et cetera.
The only way to recover R&D costs is through protected IP, with my personal preference being brands and trademarks.
Fashion is not protected. That's why it changes so quickly. If you can't come up with new and appealing designs every day, you will die in that industry, because the knock-off copies are being made the day after they ship, at the latest. If you have a valuable brand and poor security practices, there might be copies on the market from the day after your design reaches the factory. But the legal knock-offs will not have your brand labels in them.
The problem is trademark infringement. It isn't copies, but counterfeits. Here's the money quote from the article:
"Detecting and combating counterfeiters is not easy," said Monks. "Many are operating out of countries where prosecution may be impossible, and that gives them the confidence to flaunt their products on image-driven social platforms such as Instagram. Taking action against their accounts is digital whack-a-mole; the counterfeiter generally has dozens more accounts already created and ready to activate in order to avoid disruption to their trade."
So... caveat emptor. Without a global convention on trademark protection that heavily punishes incoming trade from non-member nations, the burden is on suppliers to devise anti-counterfeiting measures that allow consumers to determine at the point of sale whether a product is genuine or not.
Design is not about 1%er luxury or fashion fads - it's really important at a national level. Obviously there is soft power with its indirect effects, but there is also the direct economy. Good design eventually tends to become commoditised and so there is economic value in being able to create new design - this is actually a vital process for every developed economy not to be crushed by whichever country is offering the cheapest labour.
An example is suitcase manufacturer Rimowa. If you look at their website it's a history of innovation in their field for the last 100 years, from aluminium trunks in the 1930s, to watertight luggage in the 70s. Still if you want a super expensive very high quality aluminium suitcase, they don't have competition, I guess due to that requiring pretty specialised production and expensive raw materials. If you buy one from them, they will repair it and knock dents out for free for lifetime (likewise Hermes will clean and press their ties for free, a difficult job which can easily ruin a silk tie) - so very high quality and standards. Maybe one day you will be able to buy a near-enough Asian copy for very cheap, but until then, this German company has the whole world's business for really nice aluminium cases. Rimowa also made a materials innovation in 2000 with polycarbonate suitcases - extremely lightweight, flexible, and near unbreakable from impact. For quite a while they were the only ones to make them. Recently however, that's been commoditised and you can buy cheap knockoffs which are fairly close to the original at a functional level. So now Rimowa have to find the next innovation as the cycle repeats to find a new USP for their products (e.g. now they are starting to get into trackable luggage with electronic airline tags).
That's Rimowa, but each company in a developed country within a global economy cannot compete on being cheapest, and instead needs to follow this process of competing on intellectual capital to stay in business. It requires at least a society with high levels of education in design, and a functioning legal system covering IP. China are now also starting to face this reality as they cease to provide the cheapest labour globally and have a growing middle class to support - and you'll therefore see increasing focus on design, innovation, quality, and finally IP even.
To your original complaint, you do sometimes hear of flashy gaudy things which are supposed to signal status via cost (tacos made with gold leaf and caviar, diamond-encrusted phones, gold-plated ferraris etc) - but you'll notice that those are considered poor design, never get taken up and commoditised, and only have economic value as marketing tools to get gawpers in for lower price items. They don't ever represent real IP in the way that the ipad, or high quality luxury goods do, but are instead held up as anti-patterns (which is why we hear about them).
I'd be curious to see if you could tell the difference under blind testing. In just about every other area it turns out that most people can't tell the difference.
That’s what I’m talking about. Not old world craftspeople making one-offs.
I think perhaps what you're getting at is that it requires education and buy-in from the consumer and perhaps that we don't live in a world of urban sophisticates who care that much about the stitching of their trousers. I'd offer some counterexamples there - 1. iPhone. Not the cheapest smartphone by any means but has design writ large and running through the user experience - and hugely popular in emerging economies where you may expect everybody to be on cheaper android phones. 2. Adidas, Nike - kids will pay premium all over the world and don't want fakes. 3. Japanese denim enthusiasts. Got to have the old looms for making high quality denim and people are ready to pay huge amounts for that. That has even extended to reviving old ring spun looms to make sweatshirts so they have the right weight and feel. 4. Coca-Cola, Red Bull. 5. Premium alcohol brands. 6. Super expensive premium Spanish ham - huge in Asia now.
Yes, there is a large markup on luxury items, but in most cases when you buy fakes, you don't get the same quality and of course, you are just pirating the original design. This is as legit as "buying" software for $1 a piece.
You trust the brand.
Edit: And of course, the beauty with a fake is, that if it fails, the blame does not fall onto the producer of the fake, but even possibly of the original brand ribbed of... another incentive not to make overly well built fakes.
but, don't you just need to show off any old cellphone, and then say something like 'this baby has twenty-three ARM IXXIX cores, running at one hundred point six gigahertz, with forty terabytes and a double AMDXOLCiD display!' to fake the specs?
FTFY
You can buy an excellent watch for under $30 at any Wal-Mart. It'll come with a no-hassle warranty, will be handsome in appearance and will function flawlessly.
But it won't be a 'luxury good' and it never will be.
“Since my earliest days I have been frugal, but I am a frugal person in that I hate waste, at any level,” says Feeney, who always wears off-the-peg clothes, a cheap plastic watch, and reading glasses of the type sold in book-stores. “If I can get a watch for $15 that keeps perfect time, what am I doing messing around with a Rolex?”
The question is: what is luxury? Is it anything beyond owning the most basic device that will perform its task for a short period in time? Is wanting a decent robustness and longlevity a luxury? I don't dispute that high-end watches have a high silliness-level as they are extremely expensive for little to no gained practical value.
"Wow! What kind of watch is that?" "I got TAKEN!"
The ultimate Veblen good.
Verizon should send the author to live in Yemen for a year.