NTH: i sommergibili al polso

[DaniLao]

…e di streghe neanche l’ombra…

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[DaniLao]

Piove gelido a tradimento.
Tour per la piana campigiana rimandato.
Non mi resta che fotografare le chiavi…

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[DaniLao]

L’orologio merita attenzione

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…però anche lo sfondo era da tuffarcisi e fare come quando Paperone faceva il bagno nelle monete.
Noi non siamo così capitalisticamente veniali e pensiamo ad una corretta idratazione…

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[DaniLao]

Questa mi era rimasta in canna da ieri sera…

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[DaniLao]

Ho sbagliato… il Thresher deve andare di qua

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[zvezda]

Ho sbagliato… il Thresher deve andare di qua

Una foto così bella sta bene dovunque

[DaniLao]

E anche a questa settimana siamo sopravvissuti (beh, per ora…)

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[DaniLao]

Sembra un tipo così garbato…

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…ma basta un refolo d’ombra che si eccita, si trasforma, gli si accendono strane idee in testa…

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[DaniLao]

Anche lui fa con il sole come i gremlins con l’acqua

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[DaniLao]

Devo aggiornare questo topic con quella che è, per me, una brutta notizia: NTH chiude i battenti definitivamente.

:-/

La faccenda mi dispiace, ho avuto modo di incontrare virtualmente l’ideatore del marchio e mi è parso una persona schietta, apprezzabile, poco incline ai compromessi.

Già, sarà stato proprio quello…
Come sarà stato il fatto, ne discutevo qualche giorno fa con @ale9191 la bolla dei microbrand è andata avanti dai primi duemila per toccare lo splendore tra il 2011 e 13 e poi scoppiare.
Troppi te si son visti denudare da Aliexpress, troppi prezzi esosi, troppe liste d’attesa, da una parte.
E dall’altra il sistema economico, che a tutto l’interesse a stroncare le nicchie che possano dar fastidio o -comunque- a ridurre i ricavi in modo difficilmente pensabile per chi abbia l’intenzione di inventare di qualcosa più vicino all’arrigianale….

Ma -tornando a noi- la motivazione breve è che il Capogita, stroncato dalla congiuntura economica, non si diverte più a portare avanti il marchio (che ha deciso di non vendere).

Quella meno breve l’ha scritta su WUS e mi permetto di riportarla integralmente in calce a questo intervento perché credo possa essere di spunto per riflessioni interessanti sia sul mondo dei microbrand, sia -più in generale- su quello dell’orologeria e dei sistemi economici che lo sorreggono.

Ovviamente al netto del fatto che quello sotto riportato sia squisitamente il suo (condivisibile o meno, in tutto o in parte) punto di vista sulla questione.
Non credo proprio sia stata una scelta facile, anzi.

Detto ciò, ho diversi NTH e mi soddisfano tutti, quindi son dispiaciuto che l’esperienza sia giunta al termine.
Del resto il prezzo medio di un loro orologio nuovo era già di 725 dollari (con la possibilità di trovarne da reseller EU), spingersi oltre… Beh, credo sia riuscito a Zelos e non mi vengono in mente altri…

E poi, non so per voi, ma per me un orologio deve essere un’emozione; orma non sto più tanto dietro a ricerche che spellino la retina o dovere coleziinistico.
E dunque, spesso, il momento dell’acquisto di un orologio o una situazione particolare nel quale lo hai indossato si fonde simbolicamente con l’oggetto meccanico che la restituirà qualora ve ne sia occasione.

Gli orologi “inventati” dal buon Chris mi hanno dato e mi continueranno a dare nelle prossime decine di anni- buone sensazioni ed emozioni, un bel lascito che andrà certamente oltre la brutta notizia di questi giorni.

Da qua in poi è citazione dalla pagina menzionata sopra:

Only because I'm aware of the ongoing discussion and speculation about the why of all this...

I had hoped to be brief yet complete when I made the announcement. I cited global economic conditions and increased business challenges. I would think people would be able to infer what that meant, but it seems there's a lot of commentary that's strayed pretty far afield. So, here's a more detailed explanation...

Global economic conditions - uhm, we saw a global cessation of business in 2020, followed by 3+ years of high inflation and stagnating wages. It's hard to sell "affordable luxury" goods in that sort of environment. With scant few exceptions, all the retailers and other brand owners I've spoken to have agreed it's been a very tough few years for watch sales.

Increased business challenges - since covid, our production costs and lead times have gone up a fair bit. If watches were selling better, we could increase prices accordingly, but it's hard to increase prices to keep up with inflation and production costs when sales are down.

And even if we could raise prices, longer production times, combined with increased MOQ's, made managing production of a complex array of products much more challenging, and in some cases, impossible.

During and following covid, we saw vendors going out of business in China. Those which remained became increasingly difficult to work with, requiring higher MOQ's for the components they made, taking longer for production, and making the production timeline for some components indefinite, as in, we literally couldn't find out when we'd be able to get certain components.

It didn't help that Tudor trademarked the design for snowflake hands. While that presented a specific problem, it was part of a larger pattern and trend with ominous implications. I thought the AP v. SWI lawsuit was going to be bad for the industry. Then there was the Swatch v. Vortic suit, and the Rolex v. Kiger suit.

I viewed all of those suits as being an indication of things to come - big companies using the courts to stifle competition. The Tudor thing was pretty galling, in that my attorney said the USPTO should have never granted their TM registtration, and yet there was literally nothing we could do about it. The pattern casts a shadow over the future of small startups.

What's funny is that NTH (and Lew & Huey before it) has been copied relentlessly. The v.1 Subs case has been copied no less than three times (part of the reason we designed the v.2). As soon as we launched with the lumed crowns, every other micro followed suit. The DevilRay was knocked off twice. Two or three different L&H models were knocked off soon after we produced them.

The imitation is obvious, and yet no one cares (at least not when it's a small brand being knocked off). It's all just ordinary course of business within the industry. I rarely bothered to point it out, after seeing how indifferent most people were when it happened to other small brands.

Another brand owner attempted to steal our IP, and aside from some indignation expressed on this forum, nothing really happened, other than my spending a bunch of money to protect what was obviously mine.

When the Tudor thing happened, friends suggested that there might be some backlash within the community, and some rallying around my business in solidarity. While that would have been nice, I doubted it would happen. What I'd seen over the past decade is that most of the market is only loyal to their wallets. Some people might care a little about something which seems fundamentally unfair, but most people just can't be bothered.

It wasn't that the Chinese factory brands were taking sales away, no more than we were taking sales away from bigger and more mainstream brands. When people have less money available to spend on non-necessities, they spend less money on those things. As James Carville said, "it's the economy, stupid."

It wasn't that our product development stagnated. At least, not in the way it's been suggested. It's hard, if not impossible to rationalize investment in new product development in an industry and economic environment such as the one we've been living in the past four years. And harder still when the availability of some components becomes uncertain, and the specter of litigation looms over every idea.

If Tudor can claim TM over a handset design they didn't create, and Rolex can claim ownership of a trademark another company already had protected, and big luxury brands can sue competitors out of existence based on some vague resemblance, it's impossible to say with any certainty what we can produce that won't eventually come under attack.

It wasn't our pricing. Sorry to all the haters, but it just wasn't. The retail price on an NTH Sub when we launched in April 2016 was $625. With inflation, in July of 2024, the identical product should cost $821.64.

And the product ISN'T identical. We've improved it substantially in the past 8 years - better bracelet, better clasp, better end-links, tighter specs, tighter QC, higher quality, better support, faster shipping with more choices, a six year movement guarantee - those all add to our costs. If our prices kept pace with our costs and inflation, a Sub would sell for close to $900, not $750. Literally every product we sold was under-priced, forcing me to increase my retailers' wholesale costs on our last two releases.

There were many challenges that had to be overcome over the past dozen years. Before I really launched the business, PayPal froze our account during pre-orders, forcing us to use Kickstarter to finance our first production. Not too long after, using Kickstarter became problematic. We had a massive defect rate in our first model, creating massive returns costs. My site came under attack by credit card fraudsters. My bank account was hacked, and money stolen. We had over 100 pieces of inventory stolen from our warehouse, a loss of tens of thousands of dollars. We had a massive defect rate in the v.1 Tropics. I spent tens of thousands of dollars establishing, then defending our IP, and still more responding to Tudor about what was suddenly and inexplicably their IP. We had to pause production, as well as recall and re-assemble a lot of existing stock as a result. Just staying compliant with always-changing tax and import / export regulations has become a major time-suck. I have to file some sort of federal, state or local tax reporting over a dozen times per year.

Plus - all the people who directly support my business, none of them are all that young, or able to devote much more time when I need it. Rusty, Dan, Aaron - they're all part-timer independents, and as good as they all are at what they did for the business, we frequently found their availability to be limited when we needed it most. If any of them were to become permanently unavailable, I'd be pretty screwed.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the hurdles we had to get over. But in the last year or two, it just became apparent that keeping the business going was going to be more of a struggle than it was worth, with increasingly uncertain rewards, and potentially cataclysmic consequences.

So, yeah, it wasn't fun anymore, and any reasonable person who saw what I saw in the past dozen years would agree it didn't make sense to continue. So I made the difficult decision to shutter the business.

Another brand owner asked me if I'd do things differently if I could go back to the beginning. Sure, I'd avoid some of the pitfalls if I knew in advance where they were, but other than side-stepping those one-off problems, no, I don't think I would have done much differently.

I created a business that successfully launched two brands, had over a dozen successful product launches, had dozens of successful releases, developed hundreds of product variations, built a global retailer network, had customers on every continent (okay, not Antarctica), and helped more than a dozen other brand owners launch and grow their businesses, in one way or another. By any and every objective metric, our customers were very happy with the product and experience of buying and owning one of our watches, so much so that many customers own several.

Whatever anyone thinks I had to prove, I think I proved it. The haters can hate all they want. They're vastly outnumbered by the fans.