SDC Weekly 139; How GPHG Hired a Fox to Guard the Henhouse; Billion-Dollar Strap Gap
Curt Richter's rats, Julien Tixier, Noma's ugly past, Paul Graham on brand disease, Perezcope hits GQ, Jony Ive designs Christie's Rostrum, and lots more!
đ¨ Welcome back to SDC Weekly! This edition is free for all - because Ron Hekier demanded it be so đ
Admin note: The Unofficial Editor is currently shopping for watch accessories and declined to check this edition. We begged him to at least give the draft a quick look, but he claimed he was too strapped for time. Please tap the title of this post or click here to read it online and see all corrections made after publishing.
If youâre new to SDC, welcome! If you have some extra time, find older editions of SDC Weekly here, and longer posts in the archive here.
Estimated reading time: ~30 mins
đ¤šââď¸ How GPHG Hired a Fox to Guard the Henhouse
The GPHG announced last week that Wei Koh has been appointed President of its Jury for 2026. For those unfamiliar, the GPHG (Grand Prix dâHorlogerie de Genève) likes to call itself the Oscars of watchmaking. Iâve covered this institution before and laid out why this comparison is flattering but also wildly misleading. The Oscars, for all their faults, have at least some pretence of artistic judgment. The GPHG is closer to a raffle at a village fĂŞte where you pay for the ticket and hope nobody notices the vicarâs wife keeps winning the hamper.
Quick recap for newer readers⌠GPHG is pay to play; brands pay 800 CHF per entry. The GPHG doesnât fact-check claims such as âin-house developmentâ and they let brands enter the same watch across multiple years just to bank another fee. The whole thing is essentially a âmarketing lotteryâ where brands buy tickets, enjoy the widespread coverage of being in the pool of entries, and a select few win the grand prize of industry-wide PR coverage.
So the question is⌠if the GPHG is fundamentally a marketing machine pretending to be an awards ceremony, why on earth would they want an impartial judge? Well, they wouldnât⌠and they havenât.
Impartiality doesnât sell tickets, and it certainly doesnât generate online engagement. What the GPHG needs right now is reach... they need a megaphone, and who carries a bigger, louder, more sartorially flamboyant megaphone than Wei Koh?
He brings the entire Revolution and The Rake readership. He brings his Discovery Channel audience from his new show Man of the Hour. He bridges the gap between the stuffy Swiss establishment and the new-money collectors who learned about watches through Instagram Reels. The GPHG is buying relevance, and they are paying for it with whatever crumbs remain of their credibility.
In a way, you have to respect it; I mean, if youâve already decided that your awards ceremony is a marketing exercise, then appointing the guy with the biggest platform is actually pretty rational. Itâs like a pub quiz hiring a comedian as the quizmaster; nobodyâs pretending the questions are hard, but in the end, everyone has a good time.
The only real problem is that the GPHG still pretends itâs something more. The press release talks about ârigorous selectionâ and âsecret ballot under notarial supervisionâ and âbalanced and representative list of prize-winners.â You canât have the marketing clown and the credibility crown at the same time. Pick a lane ffs.
â
Now letâs talk about conflicts of interest, shall we? Wei Koh publishes Revolution magazine, and Revolution sells advertising to watch brands. Those same watch brands will submit entries to the GPHG. Those entries will then be judged by the Jury that Wei Koh now presides over. He also regularly cooks up limited-edition collaboration watches with brands through his e-commerce platforms and side hustles like Grail Watch. So he clearly has direct financial relationships with many of the brands whose products he will be evaluating for âhorological excellence.â
In any regulated industry, this amount of entangled financial interest would require a compliance team the size of a small country. In the Swiss watch industry, itâs apparently laughed off as âhaving good relationships.â
I once wrote about how conflicts of interest emerge whenever you occupy more than one role in any situation; a doctor treating their own child, a real estate agent selling their own house, or a watch reviewer accepting free trips from brands theyâre covering. Two roles means two sets of incentives, and in this case we seem to be layering on a third or even a fourth role. Wei Koh is a media publisher who sells ads to brands, and a collaborator who profits from partnerships with brands, and a content creator who covers brands, and now also the head judge who evaluates those brandsâ products. Really? This isnât just a dual-role conflict; itâs a conflict of interest ensemble cast.
And as if the existing conflicts werenât sufficient comedy material, Iâm hearing some rumours about Wei Koh launching his own watch brand. Imagine⌠the President of the Jury launches his own brand, pays his 800 CHF entry fee, and finds himself presiding over the judges table as his watch gets nominated at his own ceremony. It would be the watchmaking equivalent of a restaurant critic opening a restaurant and then giving himself a Michelin star. It would be a footballer being the referee in a match he is also playing in. It would be an author longlisting his own novel for the Booker Prize and then chairing the panel. It would be⌠actually, you know what, I could do this all day, and every analogy would still undersell how absurd this is.
â
Before I wrap this up, I want to clarify that Iâm not saying the GPHG is âbrokenâ for electing Wei Koh. The GPHG elected Wei Koh because the system is working exactly as intended. This is a marketing organisation that charges brands (entry fees) for marketing their products (GPHG media coverage) - itâs that simple. Wei Koh is the final boss of this convoluted system because he maximises the thing the GPHG optimises for, which is attention.
The press release itself is comical by the way... Raymond Loretan calls Wei Koh âone of the most well-respected voices in contemporary watchmakingâ and praises his âindependent perspective.â Independent! The man runs a magazine funded by the brands heâll judge. Thatâs about as independent as Heineken sponsoring an AA meeting.
People asked for my take on this, so here it is: treat the GPHG the same way youâd treat an unwearable 45mm Invicta. Look at it, have a little chuckle at the absurdity of its existence, and then go back to enjoying watches you love. This really is just⌠noise.
đ¤ Billion-Dollar Strap Gap
I read a story recently which might seem like it has zero relevance to anyone who reads SDC, but bear with me for a few minutes. Casio released a new G-Shock (DW-5600MNC) and what seems to be the headline feature is a fabric strap with a magnetic âFidlocâ clasp1. No need to yawn⌠I think the reason Casio made this watch might interest you.
Watch modding is more popular than I realised, and the G-Shock modding community has existed for ages. People love the 5600 case but many hate the OEM resin strap; so modders built adapters that let you swap it for fabric, NATO, or leather options. Casio watched this happen, looked at the data, and thought: âWell, if they want fabric straps on our watches, maybe we should just⌠make fabric straps for our watches.â
Revolutionary, I know.
But is it? When you think about the luxury watch industry which is a market worth nearly 50 billion at retail, this kind of obvious, customer-led thinking is almost totally non-existent. On the one hand we have the G-Shock modding community who told Casio exactly what they wanted, and Casio obliged. On the other, we have brands like Cartier who send cease-and-desist letters to Delugs (a Singapore-based strap maker) for developing their own adapters that fit Cartier cases. Delugs went on to reverse-engineer them anyway... so jokeâs on Cartier. But still, Cartierâs message was essentially: âstop making things our customers clearly want to buy.â
Thatâs fine, in principle. Brands have every right to protect their IP and design language. My problem is what comes after the C&D letter, which is usually⌠nothing. Cartier (and most luxury brands) protect the space but donât care about filling it. Why guard the moat but then not bother to build the castle?
So I started wondering⌠is this a missed opportunity? How big is it?
âIt ainât what you donât know that gets you into trouble. Itâs what you know for sure that just ainât so.â
Mark Twain
The installed base
Swiss watch exports hit 14.6 million units in 2025, a multi-decade low as weâve covered extensively on SDC. The industry has been shipping anywhere between 15 and 30 million watches a year for decades, and mechanical watches, properly maintained, last pretty much forever. The total installed base of Swiss mechanical and quartz watches in active use globally, is enormous. Nobody publishes this number, for obvious reasons, but letâs try to estimate it.
If we assume an average useful lifespan of 20 years for a Swiss watch (and thatâs conservative for anything mechanical), and average exports over the past two decades of about 20 million units a year, youâre looking at something like 300-400 million Swiss watches currently in circulation. Many of those are lower-end quartz Swatch Group products that nobody accessorises, so letâs strip those out.
Letâs focus on the segment that buys accessories, say all watches retailing above CHF 2,000. This captures everything from Longines and Tudor up through Patek and AP. Morgan Stanley estimates that watches above CHF 3,000 retail represent about 30% of units but the vast majority of revenue. If we assume roughly 4-5 million units a year in this bracket, with a 15-year âactive accessorising window,â you get an installed base of perhaps 60-75 million watches whose owners might plausibly buy a strap, case, pouch, or winder.
Back-of-the-envelope calcs
I first considered doing this in Excel, but decided I didnât want to get bogged down in the detail, so Iâm keeping this high-level; youâre welcome to do your own version of this and correct me if you care to.
Anyway, letâs say 10% of those 60-75 million watch owners buy one aftermarket strap in any given year. Thatâs 6-7.5 million straps. The average price of a decent aftermarket strap from someone like Delugs, Jean Rousseau, or Molequin runs between $200-500. Letâs use $250 as a blended average so 6 million straps Ă $250 = $1.5 billion.
Isnât that fvcking nuts? That is just straps!
Now add watch rolls, travel cases (Wolf, Rapport, Mirage), winders, display boxes, tools, microfibre cloths, pouches, cleaning kits, and the apparently popular custom buckle market. Iâd guesstimate these categories collectively add another 30-50% to the strap figure.
So letâs say the total addressable market for watch accessories sits somewhere around $2-2.5 billion a year, maybe more. You can quibble with my assumptions, and you should - the 10% attachment rate might be too high for the mass market and too low for the enthusiast segment, so feel free to adjust as you please. The directional conclusion, I think, holds regardless⌠this is a multi-billion-dollar annual market, and the brands capturing it are almost exclusively third parties.
Now that I think about it, I think that estimate is probably conservative. The 10% attachment rate assumes an âaverageâ owner; but you and I both know that the enthusiast segment probably buys 3-5 straps a year. And if a brand like Vacheron or Patek captures this market themselves, their price isnât going to be $250; it will be $500-800 with the brandâs name on the hardware. Now apply standard luxury multipliers to this category and the gap could be closer to $4-5 billion. But still, I want to deliberately use (what I believe to be) lower numbers because Iâd rather be accused of underestimating than of inflating a thesis to prove a point⌠but yeah, I am convinced the real figure is probably higher.
While working on this post, I shared it with the co-founder of Delugs (Kenneth Kuan), and he pushed back on the $2 billion figure. His argument, which is fair, is that the majority of watches in the addressable segment (especially Rolex, which is the lionâs share) are sold on bracelets. Bracelet owners, he says, are far less likely to want a strap swaps, so that conversion rate is probably closer to 1% than 10% for that group. He also pointed out that many people who want to change their strap donât actually do it, because they lack the tools, the confidence, or the willingness to work on something that costs more than their first car.
Heâs right that these factors would pull the number down. But Iâd counter with a few things. First, the bracelet point applies mostly to Rolex and other sport watch references; the vast majority of dress watches and many mid-range pieces ship on straps. Second, the confidence gap is a solvable problem, not a permanent constraint. If a brand offered strap changes in boutique (the way Rolex ADs already resize bracelets), or if aftermarket strap makers produced better video tutorials and included the right tools, youâd convert a meaningful chunk of that latent demand. The barrier here is friction, not desire⌠and I think friction is the kind of thing that good business models are built to reduce.
Ken also made a point about fragmentation; the $2 billion figure is an industry aggregate, but no single brand can address the whole market. A Cartier owner probably wonât buy JLC straps. So the relevant number for any individual brand is their own slice. Add in the âarchive problemâ where brands like JLC or Omega have decades of discontinued references in active use, with each potentially requiring different lug widths and fittings, and the per-brand opportunity looks smaller and more complex than the headline number implies.
All of this is true, but none of it changes my overall argument, which is that weâre talking about a large, demonstrated market which brands are almost entirely handing over to third parties on a silver platter. Whether the real number is $1 billion or $3 billion, the question is identical.
Also, to give my low estimate some context, $2 billion is approximately the same as Richard Milleâs entire annual turnover (CHF 1.75bn). It is also larger than the turnover of Vacheron, Breitling, Hublot, IWC, or TAG Heuer. Hopefully you appreciate the picture I am trying to paint; and this market is being served by small independents working out of Singapore, Stockholm, Paris, New Jersey and other corners of the world.
Whoâs eating the brandsâ lunch
Delugs is probably the poster child. It was founded in Singapore, has grown massively since COVID, and they make all kinds of straps including leather, rubber, and fabric - and they make these for almost every major watch brand. Their website even has an AR tool that lets you visualise what a strap looks like on your watch - which is something most luxury brand websites still canât manage (and Iâve complained about this before in the Luxoplasmosis essay). Delugs has done partnerships with Vacheron Constantin, OEM deals with Armin Strom, and commands a pretty loyal following; their average strap runs ÂŁ150-300, but they do custom straps too which can add up.
Jean Rousseau is the heritage play; a French maison making bespoke straps since 1954, and supplying both private clients and several brands on an OEM basis (e.g. F.P. Journe). Theyâre probably the closest thing the strap world has to an âestablishmentâ player. (Yes, I know thereâs Camille Fournet, and that Hermès does watch straps too⌠this is not trying to be an exhaustive strap guide!)
Molequin has carved a niche with minimalist, Scandinavian-vibe straps that photograph absurdly well on social media, I have to say. I think their marketing is sharp and their growth seems to have been rapid as well.
Forstner is interesting to me because they specialise in metal bracelets, particularly for vintage-style watches. Their Komfit and Flat Link bracelets have become the de facto âupgradeâ for Omega Speedmasters. Isnât that nuts? A third-party accessory maker has effectively become the default bracelet choice for one of the worldâs most iconic watches - because Omegaâs own offerings were either too rubbish, too expensive, too modern, or simply not as good-looking.
Everest and Rubber B seem to dominate the aftermarket rubber strap space for Rolex owners. If you own a Submariner and want to put it on rubber for the summer, youâre usually buying from one of these two companies, because Rolex themselves sell precisely zero rubber strap options for the Sub.
Then there are the case and storage brands (Wolf, Rapport, Mirage, Cul De Paris, etc) who collectively serve the âlifestyle of ownershipâ which brands talk about a lot in their marketing, but do almost nothing meaningful to facilitate.
Why donât the brands do this themselves?
There are a few possible explanations, and I think most of them are just⌠bad.
1. âItâs beneath us.â The most charitable reading is that luxury brands view accessories as a lower-margin, operationally complex distraction from the core business of making watches. A Patek strap retails for CHF 300-800 depending on material. The margins are excellent (probably 80%+), but the logistics of stocking dozens of strap sizes, colours, and materials across a global retail network is probably annoying. Fair enough.
What I struggle with is the idea that a brand generating CHF 2.5 billion in annual revenue canât figure out strap logistics when a small team in Singapore is already doing it.
2. âWe canât let customers personalise our product.â This is the control argument, and Iâll accept it is more coherent, philosophically speaking. Brands like Rolex, Patek, and AP try to keep extremely tight visual identities. If you allow customers to pair a minute repeater with a neon green strap, you might dilute the brand image. Some brands have responded by occasionally releasing a few limited strap options - but always through their own boutiques, at eye-watering prices, and in extremely limited quantities.
The problem with this argument is of course, that customers are already doing it. Go to any watch gathering and count how many Pateks are on Delugs straps. That horse has bolted. The brand image âdilutionâ is already happening; the only question is whether the brand participates and earns revenue from it, or whether they pretend it doesnât exist.
3. âThe margins are too small.â This one doesnât survive five minutes of scrutiny. The gross margin on a leather strap is probably 80-90% at retail for a brand that already controls distribution. Compare that to the 25-30% cut they hand over to third-party retailers on the watches themselves. Accessories are higher margin than the core product.
4. âWeâll cannibalise service revenue.â Some brands charge CHF 200-500 for a basic strap replacement at their service centres, which includes the strap cost plus âlabourâ which is a joke. If customers can buy straps directly and swap them at home (which they already can, and already do), that visits-based revenue evaporates. This is the most economically honest objection, but I think it is also the most short-sighted, because it trades long-term customer loyalty for short-term service fees.
5. âWe canât guarantee the integrity of third-party hardware.â This is perhaps the one argument I actually have some sympathy for. If a strap has a spring-bar failure and your ÂŁ100,000 Journe hits the pavement, youâre probably going to blame Journe, no matter who made the strap. So itâs no surprise that brands tend to worry about liability, reputational risk, and the nightmare scenario of a warranty claim where the damage was caused by someone using their name. This is a valid concern, but there is a way (see licensed partnerships below) which solves this. Take any brand - if Cartier officially certifies a Delugs adapter, the liability question disappears. The hardware will automatically meet the brandâs specifications, they can lock this in contractually, and the customer will have peace of mind - plus the brand will maintain control over whatâs touching their case. This is a solvable engineering + QC + legal problem, nothing more.
6. âItâs a fundamentally different business.â Ken from Delugs made this case to me and I think itâs the most reasonable argument of the lot - even if I still think itâs ultimately surmountable. Straps are a high-SKU, high-variety category, and this is the inverse of what luxury watch brands are built to do (except maybe Omega lol). The marketing is different (no âbig launchâ moments, just always-on demand), the distribution needs are different (sales staff need to be retrained on leather types and strap replacements etc), and the customer support load is different too. In short, retrofitting an accessories business onto a watch brand would create operational friction that might exceed the revenue it generates, at least if you try to do it all in-house.
I think this is the strongest argument for partnerships and against in-house models. It is emphatically not an argument against the market existing or being worth pursuing. It just means the smart approach is to outsource the âcomplexityâ to people who already know how to manage it, which - funnily enough - is exactly what the strap makers are already doing without the brandsâ help.
Casio lessons
What Casio understood, and what the Swiss luxury industry mostly refuses to accept, is that the modding and accessories community is a feature, not a threat. If people spend money making your product more personal, more wearable, and more âtheirs,â they are in fact deepening their relationship with your brand. Every Delugs strap sold for a Cartier Tank is a signal that someone loves their Tank enough to invest in it further and make it truly theirs. That person is not your enemy, Cartier! They are, quite literally, your most engaged customer.
Weâve covered the experience economy on SDC before, and this fits neatly into that narrative. Steven Holtzman at CD Peacock runs 3-4 events a month in his store because he understands that the experience of ownership drives loyalty and future purchases. Accessories are the physical manifestation of the same idea; I donât need to tell you this, given you read SDC⌠but a new strap tends to transform a watch. It makes it feel fresh; maybe not quite the same feeling as a new watch, but itâs not nothing either. It can extend the honeymoon period, it can ignite excitement about a watch which youâve grown tired of, and honestly, it can also delay the moment when you start browsing Chrono24 for âsomething new.â
From the brandâs perspective, this should be a dream. Instead of spending millions on marketing to acquire new customers, you could be earning revenue from existing ones while also making them happier to keep coming back to your store. The âcustomer acquisition costâ of a strap sale to an existing owner is effectively zero.
Ken from Delugs made a good point here as well; even if the pure strap revenue is smaller than my estimates suggest, the halo effect on watch desirability and customer loyalty is real, and maybe thatâs the more compelling reason for brands to pay attention. More strap options make watches more wearable, more visible on wrists, and more desirable to prospective buyers. The accessory will âdeepenâ the relationship with the core product - and thatâs harder to put a dollar figure on, but probably worth more than the straps themselves.
What would it actually look like?
I think there are three models that could work, and none of them require brands to reinvent the wheel.
Model 1: In-house accessories line. Build a serious, seasonally refreshed strap and accessories collection. Stock it online and in boutiques. You can even offer limited editions. Or better yet, imagine allocation-only straps; accessories you can only buy if you own a specific reference. In this case, the accessory is extending the scarcity model into a new category, and it becomes a badge instead of a commodity. Brands already know how to do this with watches; doing it with straps would be far less controversial and far easier to manage. Vacheron actually did this with the Overseas straps a few years ago⌠not sure why they stopped, but look at this:
Iâll be the first to admit this model is probably the hardest to pull off. The SKU complexity alone would be painful, especially for brands with lots of discontinued references in circulation. It requires a level of operational commitment that most watch brands are not equipped for. Straps are a different business from selling watches, and most brands would be setting themselves up for frustration by trying to run it internally.
Model 2: Approved partnerships. Officially partner with established strap makers. Let Delugs produce âDelugs for Cartierâ straps with official adapters and approved colourways. The brand earns a licensing fee, maintains some creative oversight, and the customer gets a product they already want, but now with the brandâs endorsement. Vacheron has done a version of this with Delugs already - so we know it can work.
Ken suggested that this is where the industry is heading, and I think he may be right about the direction, if not entirely right about the final structure. His vision is of a âco-brandâ where both the watch brand and strap brand carry some weight. He drew a comparison to Casetify, the phone case maker that built its own brand identity, its own customer following, and then leveraged that into collaborations with brands and artists.
Itâs a great parallel in one sense; Casetify proves that an accessory maker can become a brand in its own right and use that brand equity to negotiate partnerships. The difference here, is scale. Casetify operates in a market where billions of people buy phone cases. The watch strap market is a tiny fraction of that. More people buy phone cases than buy BMWs, which is why Casetify can build brand recognition that extends beyond the enthusiast community. Delugs is a big name among watch nerds, but outside of that world, nobody knows who they are. And I think that is important to keep in mind when we think about how these partnerships should be structured.
My view, for what itâs worth, is that the âco-brandâ model overstates the value of the strap makerâs name in most transactions. It is widely known in the watch community that Jean Rousseau makes F.P. Journeâs OEM straps. Yet Journe does not allow Jean Rousseau to put their name on those straps. It isnât co-branded because the customer is buying a Journe, and Journe is the brand. The strap makerâs identity, however excellent their work, is subordinate to the watch brandâs identity in the customerâs mind.
I think the better analogy is authorised service centres in the car industry. Audi and Mercedes donât run every service centre themselves. They have some, but they also certify independent workshops that adhere to manufacturer standards, have access to OEM parts, and operate under the brandâs quality standards. The more authorised centres there are, the better the ownership experience for drivers. Nobody asks what the service centreâs âbrandâ is. They just ask whether itâs Audi-approved or whatever.
So imagine an equivalent for straps; a network of âapproved strap makersâ⌠each certified by the watch brand to produce straps that meet specific quality and design standards. The watch brand sets the colourway guidelines, certifies the hardware, and maybe even provides the proprietary adapter specifications. The strap makers do what theyâre already good at, which is design, manufacture, and customer service. The customer doesnât need to worry about liability or compatibility, because the whole thing is officially sanctioned.
This is different from a simple licensing deal with one maker, and itâs different from Kenâs co-brand vision. This would be a kind of platform of approved suppliers, and the value for the customer scales with the number and diversity of makers in the network. One approved maker is a nice collaboration, but dozens of approved makers across leather, rubber, fabric, and exotic materials is more of an ecosystem.
â
Any of these models could generate pretty decent revenue, and it would be at margins that make CFOs smile. The question is, can brand leadership get past the instinctive protectionism that has defined luxury for the past century?
A word on intellectual property
I understand why brands issue C&D letters... If someone is producing a strap with âRolexâ stamped on the buckle, thatâs counterfeiting and it should be stopped. If someone is using proprietary quick-release mechanisms patented by a brand, thatâs a legit IP issue.
But compare this to how the automotive world handles accessories. BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche all have extensive OEM accessories catalogues - floor mats, wheel options, interior trims, roof racks, you name it. They also tolerate (and sometimes endorse) a thriving aftermarket. Nobody at BMW is suing Brembo for making better brake calipers that fit the M3. The car industry figured out decades ago that aftermarket customisation increases the desirability of the base product. (Letâs not get into how theyâve started coding OEM parts to block non-OEM alternatives - the key difference is they actually supply the parts themselves.)
The watch industry, by contrast, seems to believe that the moment a customer puts a non-OEM strap on their watch, the brandâs curated image shatters into a thousand pieces. This is, to use a technical term, utter b0llocks.
Opportunity beckons
Let me bring this back to numbers, just to underline the opportunity which I think is starkly underappreciated. The Swiss watch industry is contracting, and nobody is disputing that volumes are at multi-decade lows. The top four brands now account for more than 50% of the total market, and everyone else is fighting over a shrinking pie.
In that environment, a brand like IWC or Omega - both of which have loyal, passionate customer bases - could build an accessories business worth $50-100 million annually⌠with relatively modest investment. For context, thatâs roughly the annual revenue of a mid-tier brand like Ulysse Nardin or Oris. The magical thing here is that this revenue comes from existing customers, requires no movement supply, no atelier, no complications R&D, and carries margins that would make all their CFOs shed tears of joy.
Even for the smaller independents, a curated strap programme is essentially free money. MING already gets this⌠their recent Polymesh bracelet is a CHF 1,500 accessory that people are super excited about. This thing extends the brand relationship beyond an initial purchase, and even brings non-MING (watch) customers into the MING ecosystem.
Any brand that figures this out soon will find themselves enjoying a new revenue stream thatâs both profitable and loyalty-building. The ones who keep sending C&D letters but only offering sh1tty strap colours in their boutiques, will keep wondering why their customers spend more money at Delugs than they do on after-sales service.
I accept that I may be wrong about the specific numbers, and perhaps someone will argue that the addressable market is $1 billion instead of $2.5 billion. The logistics may be harder than Iâm making them out to be, and yes, Casio is a volume manufacturer with automated production lines and a completely different business model. Iâm not suggesting Patek should start 3D-printing NATO straps⌠I just think the general direction of this argument feels valid. There is a large, growing, and demonstrated demand for watch accessories that luxury brands are almost entirely ceding to third parties. Casio saw its customers modding their watches and thought âletâs give them what they want.â Luxury brands see the same thing and think âwe know betterâ - and in doing so, leave billions on the table.
I guess we will find out in due course whether anyone bothers to go pick that cash up.
đ Links of Interest
â The Worldâs Most Complex Handmade Watches? Meet the Master, Julien Tixier (30 min video)
â Meet the Watch Expert Catching Multimillion-Dollar Counterfeits. As vintage watches grow in value, the incentives for skilled counterfeiters have never been higher. Jose Perez (Perezcope) wants to help collectors avoid getting conned.
âď¸ Audemars Piguet opens advanced in-line factory to make cases and bracelets. They describe the new factory complex in Meyrin as a balance between modernity and heritage, with 200 people devoted to manufacturing cases and bracelets from a single site.
â˛ď¸ Balmudaâs pocket watch-inspired The Clock. Telling what time it is isnât what Balmuda has in mind, but allowing users to experience what it could feel like using lights, relax time, and sounds. Named The Clock, the pocket watch-shaped device features no hands, but a system called the Light Hour.
đŁ Tech Guru Paul Graham Says The Watch Industry Has Brand Disease. An attempt to diagnose the ills of luxury watchmaking hits a nerve, but is it correct?
đŚšââď¸ Rolex trader was front for drug dealing and money laundering. Kent Police seized 38 watches, mainly Rolex, with a value of more than ÂŁ400,000.
đ§âđŤ Cartier Explained. Told in six chapters, weâre diving deep into the evolution of one of watchmakingâs most iconic names, from its founding to the creation of models like the Tank and Santos. Tony Traina did a 40 minute video for Teddy Baldassarre - it runs a bit long but this is easily solved by watching at 2x speed.
âď¸ Hands On: Christopher Ward C63 Sealander True GMT. Dialled-in for frequent flyers.
đź Citizen Marks 50 Years of Solar with Japanese Paper Dial. Citizen invented the first solar-powered analogue watch way back in 1976, and now itâs marking 50 years of its signature timepiece with âThe Citizenâ Eco-Drive 50th Anniversary.
đ¸ Phillips Watches Online Auction: The Hong Kong Sessions, Spring 2026.
đŤ Talking To Daizoh Makihara, AHCI Candidate And LV Watch Prize Finalist. The indie watchmaker is one of the biggest talents coming from the land of the rising sun!
đŞ Jony Ive Discusses Redesigning the Christieâs Rostrum With David Snowdon. (10 min video)
đĄ These High Schoolers Wrote Letters to Kurt Vonnegut. This Is What They Got in Response.
đŞ How Scientists Unlocked the Secret of a $400 Skin Cream: Playing Music to Kelp. La Mer claims the magic of its bestselling products happens in a lab where chemists brewâand DJ forâthe âMiracle Broth.â
đ The Shock of the Old. What happens when everything is a reboot?
⥠How the worldâs first electric grid was built. In 1918, fifty systems supplied Londonâs electricity. Turning these into a grid required war, nationalization, and an act of engineering insubordination.
đ Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chefâs Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the Worldâs Top-Rated Restaurant. Dozens of former employees say RenĂŠ Redzepi inflicted physical and psychological violence on the staff for years.
𤨠We Have Learned Nothing. Startup pundits sold us a failed science of entrepreneurship. The Red Queen offers something better.
đ§ Val Kilmer in âAs Deep As the Grave, His Performance was AI Generated.
đŽ Excessive screen time could limit vocabulary of toddlers, experts warn. Children aged two with highest screen use can say significantly fewer words, UK government research finds.
đ Two Literal Crypto Bros Built a Real Estate Empire. Then the Homes Started to Fall Apart. In 2019, two Canadian brothers blew into Detroit with an irresistible pitch: For $50, almost anyone could become a property owner. When houses decayed and the city intervened, the blame games began.
đľ Trump Is Finally Eyeing an Exit From Iran. But Will He Take It? President Trump says he is considering âwinding downâ operations in Iran. But many of his original war goals remain unaccomplished.
đŞ A Brief History of Asking for Help After Being a Total Dick. Britain learned this lesson the hard way
đ Appleâs New Emoji Pretty Much Sums Up 2026! Hereâs the Face Youâre Probably Making Right Now.
Oh⌠and hereâs a random pdf you might enjoy:
đ End note
In case you missed this last week:
On swimming and drowning
In 1957, a Johns Hopkins psycho-biologist2 named Curt Richter conducted a rather troubling experiment on rats. He placed twelve domesticated rats into glass jars half-filled with water and watched to see how long theyâd swim before giving up. Three of the twelve explored their surroundings briefly, realised the situation was hopeless, and drowned within minutes. The other nine kept swimming for days.
He then tried it with 34 wild rats; these were purportedly fierce, aggressive, recently trapped, and known for their swimming ability. Before the experiment, youâd have expected them to outperform their domesticated cousins but yet, every single one of these was dead within minutes.
Richter wanted to understand why, so he designed a third test. He placed another group of wild rats into the water, but just before they were about to give in and drown, he pulled them out, held them briefly, let them recover, and then put them back in.
The rats that had originally surrendered quickly, now swam for over 60 hours.
His published conclusion, from a paper titled âOn the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Manâ, was pretty nuts: âafter elimination of hopelessness, the rats do not die.â
I find that quite staggering to be honest. After just a single fleeting moment of rescue, their capacity to survive grew by something like 240x. They basically âlearnedâ that the situation was survivable, and that help could come. To them, they now figured something along the lines of âthis was going to be hard, but perhaps it will be temporary.â
Iâm typing this on Sunday afternoon, and as a matter of fact, this concept often comes to my mind on Sunday evenings and/or Monday mornings - when the week ahead stretches out in front of you like a glass jar with slippery walls. In these strange times, it is likely that the market is moving against you. Or maybe youâre on a project which feels stuck. Whatever your current challenge may be, it may well feel like youâve been swimming for a while, the edges are hard to grip, and youâre getting close to drowning.
Now remember, in the study, the rats which gave up immediately were the ones that had previously been trapped, restrained, and handled roughly - thatâs because they had already decided, loosely speaking, that âthe world only offered bad outcomesâ - so they figured there was no point trying. The ones that kept going and had a will to survive, had experienced (even once) a moment that reminded them âthis can get better.â
This was a rather elaborate way to say if youâre heading into this week with heavy legs, maybe take a beat to remember a time when it did get better. Think of a deal you closed, a problem you solved, or a difficult time you managed to get through despite feeling - at the time- that it was impossible. If youâre reading this, I would bet dizzying sums of money that you have been âpulled out of the jarâ before - and that memory should be used as fuel.
We all need a reason to keep swimming.
â
Until next time â
F
đŚ Horological Parents
If parenting content isnât your thing, skip this!
Grey Market Value
You probably remember the peak of the 2021-2022 bubble when the Patek 5711 with a retail price of around $30k was trading north of $175k on the grey market. Some variants went even higher. A steel watch, no complications, no precious metals... Itâs a cool piece, sure, but at that price you could have bought a house in parts of the country. And yet, tons of people were queueing up to pay it.
Then the market did what markets always do, and it corrected. The people who bought the 5711 because they loved the dial, the proportions, the way it sat on their wrist⌠they were fine because they still had a watch they loved. The people who bought it because it was âworthâ $175k, and thought it would be worth $275k next year learned an expensive lesson about the difference between price and value.
Journeâs ĂlĂŠgante is another interesting case; itâs a quartz watch⌠a clever quartz watch, granted, but it is, at the end of the day, a quartz watch. Retail sits around $15-20k and some configurations are now listed for well north of $100k on the secondary market. Is it worth it? Well that depends entirely on whether youâre buying the watch or buying the chart.
As it happens, some people do the same thing to their kids, and we should probably talk about that.
Some treat them like assets⌠and they track their âgrey market valueâ constantly. I am talking about grades, trophies, accolades, teams, rankings and so forth. âMy kid is in the elite group.â âMy kid is head boy.â âMy kid is reading Hemingway at twelve.â These are flex statements pretending to be casual conversation, and what these people are really doing is quoting a spot price. They are flipping their children for profit in the âstatus economyâ, and measuring their worth by what the market is willing to pay for them on any given day.
Seneca was among the wealthiest people in Rome... He owned vineyards, estates, and reportedly had a personal fortune of around 300 million sesterces - which is perhaps the Roman equivalent of having a Tiffany Nautilus in every drawer. And yet, this was a man who spent his life writing about how wealth was âindifferent.â He argued that external goods like money, reputation, and status, were neither good nor bad in themselves. They only mattered insofar as you handled them well.
He lived in luxury but preached simplicity, and people have been calling him a hypocrite for two thousand years because of it. But I think his point was actually more subtle than it sounds; he was saying that the price of something and the value of something are completely different numbers, and most people confuse the two their entire lives.
Montaigne, writing fifteen hundred years later, landed in a similar place. He retired from public life at 38, locked himself in a tower, and spent the rest of his days reading and writing essays about how to live. He had money, land, a title⌠and he concluded that none of it meant anything compared to knowing yourself and living honestly. He was, in a sense, a man who looked at the grey market premium on his own life and decided it was just noise.
Thereâs an old parable, sometimes called the Chinese Farmer story, that I really love reminding myself of. A farmerâs horse runs away, and his neighbours say âthatâs terrible luck.â The farmer says âmaybe.â The horse comes back and brings several wild horses with it. The neighbours say âthatâs amazing luck!â The farmer says âmaybe.â His son tries to ride one of the wild horses, falls off, and breaks his leg. The neighbours say âthatâs terrible luck.â The farmer says âmaybe.â Then the army comes through the village conscripting young men for a war, but they leave his son behind because of the broken leg. The neighbours say⌠well, you get the idea.
The farmer in this story understands that fortune is fluid and youâre a fool if you assign a âfixed priceâ to any single event. This applies directly to how we evaluate our childrenâs milestones. Your kid might fail a maths test, and maybe thatâs bad. Or maybe it will teach them something about effort that a string of easy passes never would. Your kid might get into a top university, and maybe thatâs wonderful. Or maybe they coast on the prestige of that institution and become an insufferable pr1ck. The grey market price of any given moment in your childâs life is just that⌠a price. Itâs not a value. It changes every day, and youâll drive yourself mad trying to track it.
The 2022 market bubble and correction taught people a great lesson, which is if the only reason you love a watch is what itâs worth on the market, you donât actually love the watch. You love the number⌠but numbers change.
The same is true for your kids. If your pride in them is tied to their grades, their team selections, their CV, and their acceptance letters, then what you love is the paperwork. You love the grey market premium, and youâll ride the highs and crash with the lows just like any speculator who bought a 5711 at the peak.
So stop checking the charts. The value of your child is whatâs inside, and it has absolutely fvckall to do with what the world is willing to pay for it.
Quick favour⌠please hit ââ¤ď¸ Likeâ before you leave. Thanks for reading!
What a daft name⌠makes it sound âfiddlyâ đ
Sounds intense doesnât it?!