I caught some of the latest watch show featuring more watches I’ve never heard of - just before the ‘remade’ (Simon Peter, a can of Mane, a box of screws and a Swiss Army Knife round the back) Apple iPhone parade extravaganza. These timepieces appear to be knocked out at around £150, but have RRPs of £700/£800 pounds Assuming Ideal World buy them for significantly less than what they are selling them for, a £600 or so mark down seems very unlikely. Are these RRPs just picked out of the sky? Or are the watches actually being sold at those prices elsewhere? Surely the ASA should demand this to allow the ‘ad’ to stand?
There are places where they are listed at and sold at the RRP prices, how many they sell at that price god knows, but I doubt it’s many. Heritor web site is one and Amazon, although it’s not Amazon themselves that is the seller, it’s different folk (Heritor are one of them) selling through Amazon market place But there are also places elsewhere selling at lower price ranges.
The CEO of Resultco, owner of the Heritor and 19 other watch brands, admits they use an inflated RRP to let their distributors give discounts as the public like discounts.
“We accept the consumer’s psychology of never buying a product at retail regardless of brand. Today’s consumer needs to satisfy their mental state to want a discount when making a purchase. To aid the retailer we enhance the retail price with an expectation that the dealer will discount at purchase. We allow the dealer to promote Heritor based on design and cost.”
The prices IW sell at; IMO is close to the true value of these watches. They are nothing special, certainly not to warrant the high RRPs, you can find thousands of these Chinese watches on Ali express, same quality at similar or lower prices. There is nothing wrong with them, but they are definitely not watches you would be passing down from one generation to the next, well I suppose in theory you could, being automatic and if properly looked after and serviced it should last, but the cost of servicing and maintaining would be significantly more than it originally cost, so unless it’s had some real sentimental value, it would be a bin job.
They probably source their watches from somewhere like here.
http://wholesale-watch-and-clock.hktdc.com/manufacturers/Wholesale-Watches-Manufacturers/en/14129-1/
One of the companies on that site are Solar Time (Hong Kong), lot of the watches you see on IW come from them. At one time I thought they just supplied these brands with their watches, but they are in fact the parent company of all these brands, Earnshaw, Ballast, AVI-8, Swiss legend, Swiss Eagle, Duxot, Nubeo, James McCabe, Spinnaker etc.
http://www.stylewatch.com/CompAboutUs.asp?CID=1846&PID=