Officine Panerai

Jester
[RD Moderator]
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You're right...

Nothing new here.  In fact, I found this 'new' business model not only for Richemont but for general watch industry:   Established brands are all demanding huge retail spaces within dealer or opening their own boutiques.    They want to raise brand awareness via this huge retail spaces and will settle for nothing less.       In fact, around Asia, I would dare to say you can find the most obscure brands with their own 'boutiques'.

In the meantime, the dealers are having hard time defending their turfs while these boutiques pops up all around them.   Some of them chose to go w/ the flow by working w/ the brands and opening boutiques FOR the brands, while increasing their cost hugely.   Some smaller guys sees no future w/ watch retailing and simply get out of business.   

What does all that lead to?  For consumer like ourselves, I see higher & higher prices for sure.    Interesting thing is that I see this concept migrating to other products as well:  Boutique for rimowa luggage, boutique for leica camera etc etc.   Everyone's reaching out and trying to cut out the middle man but are we necessarily improving the efficiency MUTUALLY?  I'm not so sure.