Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother?
PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...
Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, aspirational luxury - an ultra-wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead queuing on a sidewalk. Patek and Ferrari operate at the level above, where the signal isn't wealth but access. (HBS calls Ferrari's version "deprivation marketing.")
Is it a game worth bothering with? Enough people think so to sustain billion-dollar brands.
(Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
They might pass the time doing those things, but not as a mere passtime or hobby, like if they were sewing or playing CoD. Unlike those, doing them and telling about doing them serves a specific social purpose.
But I don't view hobbies as that separate from status signals within the hobbying group. Oh you play games? What games? Did you beat it? etc etc.
Esoteric knowledge/practices here are status signls (Oh you reached shattered planet without xyz??).
That starts to sound a lot like "Oh you aquired a lambo XYZ without usual steps abc" and that's a really fun convo in the in-group, and a total miss with the out-group.
(Well, the way that _some_ people play Magic: The Gathering does - but I wouldn't want to play with anyone who raised a stink about proxies)
Apart from the KYC aspect of the process it's their way of solving the problem of artificial scarcity on the second-hand market as the article explains. They want a second hand market to exist to indicate that this is a luxury item, but too many and the price tanking with excess supply.
ego, of course
This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century.
I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.
But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?
Culture shapes our taste. Companies pursue on multi-decade billion-dollar campaigns to shape our culture. We like certain things because famous actors or athletes endorse them; because hip hop artists rap about them; because influencers talk about them; because Hollywood portrays them a certain way. This extends to all form of modern aesthetic preferences from architecture to watches to cars to furniture to dating.
I think the argument pg is making is that brand-obsessed cultures are not maximally truth/beauty-seeking and gets really weird. e.g. Japanese Ohaguro, Chinese foot binding, various cranial deformation practices from the Mayans to the Huns, high-heels, ugly (to outside observers) watches.
I think it's a really thought-provoking essay. But it's too heterodox and "autistic" to share with most of my friends. Socially speaking, it's best to outwardly embrace the current zeitgeist.
Hobbes: …
Calvin: A good shirt turns the wearer into a walking corporate billboard!
Hobbes: …
Calvin: It says to the world, “My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the company to advertise its products!”
Hobbes: You’d admit that?
Calvin: Oh, sure. Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.
Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes people feel better while using and owning their devices.
People absolutely want that feeling and they're willing to pay for it.
Software. everyone can do it now. but you still buy lets say Crowdstrike for security, because is in your brain for years as security software.
Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.
As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.
For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.
P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.
> But you could recognize one from across the room.
and
> Or maybe not so lucky.
and starting a paragraph with
> For men, at least.
Funny thing is, I'm not sure anyone is actually doing either thing successfully. Every time I've looked into an openclaw success story it's ended up being complete fiction.
The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.
Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.
If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.
