SDC Weekly 126; The FFC Double Standard; Seddiqi and Saudi Arabia
Notes on ending the year, Howard Marks opines on the AI bubble, Isochronism and Oscillators, thoughts on whether Breitling is still "sketchy" and more!
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Estimated reading time: ~25 mins
🖐 The FFC Double Standard
Francis Ford Coppola’s F.P. Journe FFC prototype sold for $10.755 million at Phillips New York on 7 December, smashing the record for any F.P. Journe watch and for any independent watchmaker. You’ve probably read about this already, because the watch world couldn’t shut up about it since it happened; in fact, even this morning, over a week later, random news outlets are covering it. For me, there’s something else in this story that speaks to the absurd hypocrisy in how this industry treats collectors.
I saw the above video on Instagram; François-Paul Journe sitting there with Coppola, all smiles, radiating support and warmth as this man prepared to sell the unique watch that had been made specifically for him. This was a watch that emerged from their friendship… from Coppola’s idea about using a human hand to indicate time, and from many years of collaboration and prototyping. Journe seemed to be genuinely and visibly delighted about this sale. And you know what? Good for him. That’s exactly how it should be.
But wtf?
If you ever thought you needed ‘permission’ to sell a watch, there it is in that video. If you’ve been sitting on a piece that’s worth “life-changing money” for you, but felt guilty about selling it because of some imagined loyalty to a brand, this sale should be your wake-up call. François-Paul himself is sitting there with his mate Francis, and he couldn’t be happier about this watch going to auction.
So why is it that when regular collectors… people who actually saved up, who waited on lists, who built relationships with boutiques… decide to sell their watches, they’re treated like pariahs? Why do brands punish them, blacklist them, whisper about them in disapproving tones as if they’ve committed some cardinal sin?
Do you recall Sly Stallone and his Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime? He flogged it at Sotheby’s for $5.4 million just a couple of years after getting it, and landed in Thierry Stern’s bad books. The watch media had a field day with it, and many wrote pointless articles about his “classic flipper behaviour” as if he’d committed a crime. Thierry himself moaned about it, going on about how it’s not fair for a client that may have been waiting for the piece for many years and then sees it being sold, and how he gets emails from people complaining about watches being sold to certain individuals who then resell them.
But so what? Stallone bought a watch. Then he owned a watch. And then he sold a watch. That’s how ownership works, the last time I checked! If Patek didn’t want him to sell it, they shouldn’t have sold it to him in the first place. But they did, because he’s famous, and because it’s good for the brand to have Sly Stallone wearing their watches.
This is what really gets me - brands create artificial scarcity, build up these elaborate relationship games, make collectors jump through hoops to get allocated a watch, then have the audacity to act betrayed when someone needs or wants to sell. They reap all the benefits of inflated secondary market prices and then guilt-trip the very people who created that value in the first place.
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Which brings me back to François-Paul and his good mood in that video. If he’s this supportive of Coppola selling a unique prototype made specifically for him, then he really ought to to extend that same grace to every single person who owns one of his watches. You can’t have it both ways, and frankly, this applies to every brand playing these games. If you’re going to celebrate celebrity sales at auction, and smile for the cameras when a $10 million result comes through, then you forfeit any right to complain when Mr Nobody from Royal Tunbridge Wells sells his Black Label Optimum because he needs to pay for the house extension he promised his wife.
When brands treat this dynamic so preciously, deploy emotional manipulation to prevent you from making rational financial decisions about your own property, and create systems designed to make you feel guilty about exercising basic ownership rights... just walk away.
We need to normalise not feeling bad about selling, and to stop participating in a system where the house always wins and you’re made to feel like a villain for wanting to cash out. Sell you watches when you want to.
#rantover
🤝 Seddiqi and Saudi Arabia
Dubai Watch Week hosted a panel featuring Mohammed Abdulmagied Seddiqi (CEO of Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons), Yasmine Alshathry (Founder of CLÉ, a Saudi luxury platform), and moderator Munther Al Muzaki. The room had live translation equipment, because the whole talk was in Arabic. As it happens, this might be one of the most fascinating watch industry conversations of the year; not for what was said, but for what wasn’t said!