On January 22, 2018 Richemont announced its intent to purchase the remaining shares it doesn’t already own of online luxury retailer YOOX Net-A-Porter Group (YNAP). There’s much more to this story than just a corporate acquisition. This is as much about Amazon and how fine timepieces will be sold in the future as it is about the online sales of luxury goods between two industry giants.
Chris Malburg set out to buy his wife a watch. After many happy years of marriage to a lovely woman it was time. He knows enough about her and her tastes to take the leap. Or does he? If you’re a female reader you probably already know this ends badly. If you’re a guy, keep reading. Showing up is 80 percent, and you just showed up.
People buy everything – from toasters to cars and, of course, timepieces – for every kind of reason. In this article, Chris Malburg consults three of the savviest watch retailers he knows to help explain the behavior patterns of customers considering a watch purchase.
How many years before we even start to recognize what the most popular timekeeping devices over the last 70 years were? Another 20 years? Forty? Who will use timekeepers? And for what purposes? What will they look like? I posed these questions to a few top watch industry professionals; their replies were perhaps surprising.