I don’t get why Omega would do this - my initial reaction is it’s dilutive to their brand and I’m happy I’ve never bought one.
Don't worry, I just went to check, and it's still a good watch.
You are paying a substantial premium for the name Omega on the front of the watch.
Here is one website that can give you an idea of how much a watch should cost built out of premium materials, but not with a luxury brand name. Steinhart watches being a great example of quality from a non luxury brand. [1]
No one really believes the parts that make up a Rolex Submariner are worth $12000. It's worth that much because it's a Rolex. You can actually buy quality forgeries for under $1000 that you'd likely need to take apart the entire watch to prove it's a fake.
I would never ever buy a new Rolex. Maybe a really old one, an antique, but not a new one. To cite the famous actor Nicolas Cage from the master piece movie Gone in 60 Seconds: "I saw three of the at McDonalds yesterday. And that tells me that there are too many people with too much money and not enough taste in this town". Rolex, to me, is like a golden Bentley, only their to show even the poorest dude that you are rich. Money doesn't buy taste or style so. Some Rolex are nice, most seem to be bought by people only to show of wealth.
Not to judge so, because there are certainly enthusiasts out there that own the Rolex of there dreams.
I owned a tag, it was partially made from rubber, it was a formula 1 series watch, the rubber perished, was bad.
> I’ve never seen a nice looking Rolex.
Fwiw, this is not a commonly held opinion. You can't argue taste, but most would disagree. What kind of watches do you like the looks of?
1. It has generated significant attention- which has value.
2. Like a BMW 1-series, I imagine the idea is that once people have the "beginner" version, they'll aspire to upgrade to the real thing. It gets people "on the boat".
3. Rolex sells a cheaper version of their flagship watch under the Tudor brand- it's virtually identical and hasn't diluted Rolex's brand value.
4. The funky colors is probably less to do with style and more a guarantee it'll never be confused for the "real" version.
That all said, I would definitely still be salty if I owned a Speedmaster. But I applaud Swatch for making bold and interesting moves- which doesn't exactly happen much in the luxury industry.
Unless you're saying the entire watch collectors market is a scam driven by companies and not collectors.
Do you think Action Comics #1 would drop in value if DC reprinted it? No. It's worth $3 million because the collectors care about the history that represents and the rarity of finding the original. Otherwise it's just ink on shitty paper. Collectors are deciding the value of the original and it can't be manipulated by merely making a new version. Omega would have to start selling the real thing for less money to tank the price. A clone can't do that.
People aren't going to stop buying the original either. Think about knock off designer handbags. It's easy to get a really high quality fake. But no one is buying the fakes if they can have the real thing. A watch collector sure isn't buying the fake since the movement would play a big part in owning that specific model. You want the same model that went to the moon. Not the plastic version.
Even if the supply of the clone is not constrained, I bet some colours are more popular than others, leading to some natural rarity. And in 50 years if they stop making these things and regular people throw them away, that Pluto watch will be worth more than the Mars and a complete collection will be worth even more. All they have done is create another thing for watch enthusiasts to collect.
There's a reason why Patek doesn't sell a $1000 version of their watch, or why Porsche doesn't make a Corolla competitor.
If you disagree, then you're free to do so. Just understand you're disagreeing with people with a lot more practical experience, knowledge and skin-in-the-game than you.
Also, as someone who's not that into watches - the Neptune and Mercury Swatches are gorgeous.
Brand prestige is huge. A much better example here is the Volkswagen Phaeton. A truly stunning product at a great price point - significantly better than the luxury cars it competed with - but it failed because no one wanted to spend their luxury money on a brand associated with affordable normal products.
It failed because there wasn’t a huge market for gimped S-classes among the E-class buying segment.
The only people interested in Phaetons ended up being corrupt mid-level politicians in eastern Europe, they had full time drivers but didn’t want to be seen in a S-class.
Also keep in mind that for the price of a V8 phaeton you could’ve had such cars as a V6 LS.
Had the phaeton been just a bit nicer, it could very well have survived. But that’s not the car VW built.
The minimum cost for an Omega watch is around $5,000. The Moonswatch that we're talking about here in this discussion is a Swatch. It may additionally have the Omega name on it, but anyone and everyone knows that it is a Swatch, produced to normal Swatch standards, on a Swatch assembly line. It has nothing to do with the line of mechanical Omega watches besides having the name on it.
The existence of an officially licensed Porsche toy car does not degrade the value of a real Porsche. Same for this Swatch.
Don't treat people like they are rational, because they aren't. If you seriously think the Moonswatch isn't canabalizing Omega's brand cache- just ask yourself: If Casio put out the exact same product with the exact same design, would people be lining up to buy it?
You don't actually need to answer that, because as somebody else pointed out, the Pagani Speedmaster already tried it, and it clearly didn't work.
People aren't buying this because they like the design, they are buying it for the Omega logo.
Try to justify it however you will, but at the end of the day, that $250 watch is an Omega watch in the eyes of those who buy it. It might not be a "real" Omega, but it'll still be an Omega watch. And that's too bad for those with "real" Omegas. Because nobody wants to be lumped in with a bunch of hypebeasts and dead-beats who spend an afternoon lining up for a toy watch.
I have a more expensive watch but my daily d(r)iver is a Seiko SKX009. Indestructible and with a bracelet upgrade it looks great. And here in Asia you see a lot of marketing for Seiko, and tons of shops. And there’s always Grand Seiko if you want to make watch snobs STFU. Or mods if you want to out-nerd the watch nerds.
I don’t own a Toyota yet but I probably will buy one soon!
Anyway, this is a testable hypothesis. All we have to do is wait and see.
Cheaper in this case means starting at around 3-5k$ not 300$. Also you have to be pretty into watches to know that Tudor is a Rolex brand. It's not really something they advertise.
Omega specifically can’t meet demand and while that might sound like a good problem to have, they can print these moonSwatches, I’m sure the upside to this is significantly greater than any perceived knock on their luxury brand.
The industry is talking about this as a marketing tactic to get new watch buyers in the market, but I think that is a bigger unknown than any potential perceived dilution of the brand only if because retail has prepurchased Omega’s future production for the foreseeable future.
This is the same strategy used by single malt whiskey brands. They have bottles that defined them as company, but they also sell tons of un-aged whiskey to the mass audience. They gobble it up because it's got the brand name. Most of their revenue comes from these lower end, higher margin whiskeys.
While not "easy" per se, you could probably score a precious metal or two-tone Rolex at a dealer without a ridiculous amount of difficulty. I'd say you could get a SS Oyster Perpetual or DateJust (barring certain exceptions - i.e. the Tiffany dial) without too much difficulty too, unless things have changed drastically in the past few months.
But even beyond that, many people who're into watches really don't care what other people think about them.
that's been precisely opposite of every interaction I've had with watch enthusiasts.
in fact, that's been opposite of every interaction I've had with any luxury-goods enthusiast, cars/watches/planes/art , you name it; if it was expensive and rare you're likely going to hear about the purchase at lunch.
people don't tend to want to bring up their new 9 dollar Casio or their 1997 Corolla, go figure.
I’m around people who spends thousands on a single garment from brands that the unacquainted wouldn’t know about, but the trained eye can tell the difference. There’s a saying in fashion, “if you know, you know”. Some people just like well designed and nice clothing, and yes, they want to look cool, but they don’t need people to know it’s expensive.
It depends on what OP think of as “luxury”. Maybe for fashion, OP will think of Louis Vuitton, Gucci, but those are Veblen goods as other commenters have mentioned. Ann Demeulemeester, Raf Simons, Dries Van Noten, Maison Margiela, basically all the Antwerpen fashion designers are equally expensive as those “luxury brands”, but the untrained eye would not recognize them. Dover Street Market, not Sak’s Fifth.
Vacheron Constantin is an analogy with watches ( in terms of brand familiarity ).
With this said, the real elitism is the people who buy expensive stuff with the intention of being esoteric or that people don’t understand/recognize.
> people don't tend to want to bring up their new 9 dollar Casio or their 1997 Corolla, go figure.
But people do bring up what’s great about Toyota. I think you’re projecting. I’ve spent $200k worth of men’s wear over the past 5 years, but I’ll still praise and highlight Uniqlo, especially Heatech.
It just happens to be that stuff from H&M and Zara is trash. And niche, therefore expensive, products are making an interesting or artistic statement, whether that is functional or not. No one is buying these thousand dollar watches for the function. A Toyota is about function. It’s literally designed to be utilitarian, and utilitarian is usually not the most provocative as with art.
Fun fact, the real Omega Moon watches given to the Apollo astronauts was also a Velcro band.