Ben Clymer

If you go to the Rolex boutique in Singapore, it's either the Hourglass or another authorized dealer.

So they're not selling watches.

They're selling them at wholesale to retailers who then make between, we'll say, 20% and 50% on every product they sell.

And imagine you're Rolex.

You're thinking that you've got more demand than you could possibly ever supply.

And you're thinking, man, I'm giving away 20% to 50% of everything I sell.

Why don't we just do that?

And they don't change because they know that, first of all, everything's cyclical.

The watch market is going through a boom unlike I've ever seen in 14 years of doing this, unlike the markets I've ever seen at all.

That may or may not last.

We've reached a shift where like things will never go back to the way they were before, but things are softening up a little bit.

And they realize like, hey, we make watches, we don't sell them.

And to have the control, the self-control and the wherewithal to basically walk away from 20 to 50% of retail sales at that scale globally, when the demand is just capacious, is just so admirable.

And because they know that in a hundred years,

maybe things will change or maybe in 10 years, things will change.

It wasn't really Rolex, but in 2014 or 15, around the same time that I went to go see them in Geneva, something called the Apple Watch came out.

And Rolex is Rolex, like they're going to be fine.

But a lot of the other brands are like, man, is this going to eat our lunch?

And to be clear, it did.

If you want to say apples to apples, the Apple Watch is a bigger watch than Rolex by quantity and by revenue.