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. With $300,000 watch doesn’t tell time, sells out quickly
The WSJ’s Wealth Report blog notes the Day&Night watch — “an exceptional timepiece that does not indicate the time!” It costs $300,000. “An avant-garde approach, that is different and even disturbing.” Robert Frank writes:
The company’s chief executive, Yvan Arpa, cited statistical studies to explain how the watch better reflects the time-philosophy of today’s wealthy.
“When you ask people what is the ultimate luxury, 80 percent answer ‘time’. Then when you look at other studies, 67 percent don’t look at their watch to tell what time it is,” he told Reuters.
He added that anyone can buy a watch that tells time — only a truly discerning customer can buy one that doesn’t.
And here’s the best part: The watch sold out within 48 hours of its launch.
Counterfunctionality in watches in particular and other products in general explored in this 10/27/08 07 Consumed, and followed up in a number of Murketing posts and del.icio.us links.
[Thx: Noah!]
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Reader Comments
Rob, I’ll be interested in reading that article when it comes out this October – see your date :)
Clearly you are a man with enough leisure time to not worry about time, even on a yearly scale!
Doh! Fixed, thanks.
what do the 67% of people do to tell the time? check the position of the sun in the sky? or maybe they’re so rich, they get a small child to run behind them, whispering the time into their ears while fanning them with the preserved wings of a dodo?
stories like this make me happy to be poor.
and here’s the best bit: the watch actually looks like shit. yay!
:)
Josephine, that’s the funniest comment of the month. Thanks.
i was kind of going for ‘funniest comment of the year’ or ‘funniest comment of the millenium’ (like that fake award michael jackson got) but i guess it’ll do!
p.s. i love murketing! :)
Well, you’re in the running for both year and millennium, it’s just too early to declare a winner in those categories.
and: thanks!
I saw a bunch of these watches when a friend did a campaign on them. It was Tokyo Flash. Well, they more on the side of nearly impossible to tell time. Though not as expensive as the one you mention, I just can’t grasp the concept of completely giving up function for style.
Though it does remind me of a certain pair of $100 sneakers I own that hurt to walk in more than an hour… hmmm…
Time is something that everyone wants more of and even the rich can’t buy it. I wonder if this is simply a really expensive joke or an ironic social experiment. It would be interesting to see the demographic statistics of who is buying this product. I feel like older rich people who used pocket watches while they worked for their riches would have strong principals against this. Therefore these people are probably young and inherited their cash. If I worked hard for 300,000 dollars I would not waste it on a bracelette that doesn’t even have diamonds, rubys or whatever on it. It’s not even all that distinctive, and if I saw someone wearing that I wouldn’t even notice it. Do these rich people realize they could probably make their own fake watch for far less money? And here I thought being a status symbol was becoming cleche’ with everyone abandoning designer brands for underground labels, and trading in starbucks for McDonalds coffee.
Actually the author of the article is pretty wrong – it does tell the time, but in a rather cryptic manner: each tourbillon cage makes a full rotation in a minute (all of them do, this is how the tourbillon mechanisms work). The position of the tourbillon in regard to the rest of the mechanism tells the hour. There are two tourbillons, each for 12 hours. Which of them runs, tells it’s either 3 o’clock in the night or 3 o’clock in the day. (Cheap novelty watches with rotating discs for hour and minute or with abacus-like moving balls for hour and minute work in a similar way).
~Nautilus