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Chapter 1: Why are people queuing outside Swatch stores?
Now, anyone on Dublin's Grafton Street last weekend may have noticed queues outside the Irish flagship store of the popular Swiss watch brand, Swatch. Similar scenes occurred in cities across the UK and Europe, with police being called in some instances, where crowd trouble broke out. But why were crowds gathering outside Swatch stores in the first place?
Well, it was all in aid of securing the newly released Swatch...
by Audemars Piguet Watch a collaboration between the two brands that has captured the attention of collectors and timepiece enthusiasts not the first product released to create a little chaos and no doubt not the last to explain this latest frenzy and tell us about some of the most exceptional sales scuffles in recent times I'm joined by Adam Maguire from the RT Business Desk Morning Adam How are you?
Apologies for butchering the name of that Swiss You did a better job than I'm going to do Tell me about this one.
Yeah, so as you say, a collaboration between two Swiss watch brands, Swatch, which people will know for the relatively cheap, high-colour timepieces, and Audemars Piguet, which are known for extremely expensive high-end watches. It was a collection of eight different pocket watches called the Royal Pop Collection.
So it's a combination of Swatch's pop art watches and Royal Oak, which is one of AP's iconic collections. Each one priced at between ā¬385 and ā¬400. So, Expensive for a Swatch watch, very cheap though for an AP watch. And they were made available in 220 Swatch shops around the world, including, as you say, the one on Grafton Street in Dublin on Saturday morning.
And demand was so strong, people were camping out for days in advance to get their hands on some countries, including England. The shops had to close because crowds were getting out of hand. There were reports of fights breaking out and at least one arrest as well. And Swatch, though, did tell BBC News that there had only been issues in 20 of the 220 stores around the world today.
I didn't think it went too badly. Okay, so those aren't bad odds.
But why would somebody shell out 400 quid on a swatch?
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Chapter 2: What is the Swatch and Audemars Piguet collaboration about?
Some reports of successful buyers being offered twice the price as they left the shop with their brand new watch. So clearly, at least some people queuing were more interested in flipping the watch than actually wearing it. But it is just as clear that there were people who wanted to spend that money in order to own the thing, maybe under the assumption it's a limited edition.
Although I can't actually find any mention in the marketing material of it being limited to a certain production run. Collabs like these do tend to be limited. That being said, Swatch on its own website says the collection will remain available for several months.
So a very good chance that anyone who wants to get a Rollapop watch will be able to get one at face value, even if they don't have one on day one. And a part of the reason why people might want to get one is because while ā¬400 is expensive for a Swatch watch, it's very, very cheap, as I say, for an AP watch.
Their watches tend to sell for thousands or more likely tens of thousands of euro each month. Some of their watches have been resold for millions of euros. So this is a brand generally out of reach for most consumers, especially young consumers. So here's a chance to get something that they were involved in making for cheap, in air quotes.
And we're seeing this happen more and more with consumer brands. It's what people are calling a high-low collab, where a very high-end brand or a designer partner partners up with a high street brand. We actually saw another example of this earlier this month.
People queued outside the H&M shop for hours, the one on College Green in Dublin, to buy some of the items from their collaboration with Stella McCartney. There's collaborations between Uniqlo and JW Anderson, the brand of Dairy Born designer Jonathan Anderson, who's currently the creative director of Dior.
The JW Anderson items tend to sell for hundreds of euro apiece, some going into the thousands, but you can buy some of their Uniqlo items for around ā¬30. And presumably the internet and social media contributing to the hype? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely playing a part in the way these things take shape now.
The Swatch AP collab was teased online at the start of the month, next to no details about what was being sold. And then they did that knowing that, you know, the fans and the fashion world would build a hype for them far better than any marketing campaign that they would put out, would manage to do. And then they unreleased the images of the products days before they actually went on sale.
And of course, Social media means that, you know, there's no extra currency to being the first to own... There is an extra currency to being the first to own an exclusive covered item, not to mention how digital technology has made it easier for people to resell items at a profit. And all that being said, though... consumer frenzies are nothing new. They certainly predate the internet.
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Chapter 3: How does the pricing of the Royal Pop Collection compare to typical watch prices?
For a while, they were kind of just something that botanists were interested in. Then it was discovered they tolerated the Dutch climate well. They began to grow in more and more places around the country.
And because they were quite unlike flowers where people are used to seeing in Europe, they had much more vivid colours, they suddenly became a highly sought after item and a luxury item among rich Dutch people. And that saw that the price the flowers and bulbs were selling at skyrocket from around 1634 onwards. OK, so even without social media, they managed to get themselves into a frenzy.
Yeah, there really are reports at the peak of tulip mania. One particular variant, the Semper Augustus, which had a striking white and red stripes on the petal, sold for 10,000 guilders, which would have been enough at the time to buy you a very nice canal house in Amsterdam at the equivalent of around 140,000 euro in today's money.
And it actually turns out the Semper Augustus wasn't actually a unique variant. It was just a bulb that had a virus that caused a split into two colours. And apparently the virus also weakened the bulb, made it less likely to divide into new bulbs, which is why that type doesn't exist anymore. But of course, one of the issues with tulips is that they only bloom for a week or two.
So you have this frenzy developing around something that's essentially dormant for most of the year. That led to people starting to... build forward contracts. They were saying, I'll buy bulbs off you next year, I'll buy flowers off you next year. That led to a speculative market where those contracts were being sold again and again in the months when there were no tulip flowers.
People were kind of willing to pay a premium to get their hands on more flowers. And that continued into early 1637. So you have about three years of this frenzy and then it collapsed suddenly because people just weren't able or willing to spend crazy prices on these tulips. Everyone who had contracts panicked and tried to sell up. And of course, that pushed the price down even further.
Now, all of this happened kind of on the fringes of the Dutch economy, so it didn't really have an impact on the country as a whole. But a lot of people did ultimately lose a lot of money because they were holding these expensive contracts for flowers that just weren't worth anything like what they paid for them.
OK, so these buying frenzies, it can be tulips in more recent times, more likely to be toys.
Yeah, some will remember the Cabbage Patch dolls, which blew up in popularity in the early 1980s. The fact that they weren't made to look like other dolls or human babies seemed to be part of the appeal. They had this backstory that the company Colco had built around them, you know, their origin, the fact that they insisted people were adopting them rather than buying them and so on.
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Chapter 4: What factors contributed to the chaos during the Swatch launch?
By 1986, sales fell to $800 million. By 1988, when the company went bust, sales had practically fallen to zero.
OK, I want to move on to big kids toys. So we have the iPhones.
Yeah, this is probably one of the most hyped products in living memory. Unveiled by Steve Jobs in January 2007. It didn't hit the shelves in the US until late June of the same year. Consumers in Europe didn't get their hands on it until the end of the year. And in Ireland, it was actually March 2008 before you could buy one.
Part of the reason for that was Apple was trying to keep it under wraps, so they couldn't start manufacturing it until it was unveiled. But it did build up anticipation. Many people queued for long periods to get one. Many, again, flipped onto this new thing called eBay to try and make a profit.
The Frenzy did give us one classic YouTube moment, which is a US News report from a queue in Dallas where a woman arrives with $100,000, very proudly tells a reporter of her plan to buy as many iPhones as she can that she's going to then sell on eBay. She pays $800 to the guy who's first in the queue, who happens to be a young Mark Rebillet who's gone on to be a successful musician.
When she gets into the shop, though, she's told it's only one item per customer. Ah! So she's down her 800 euro. Mark is able to queue anyway, get a phone, which at the time cost $500. So he's able to buy that and all the accessories for free, essentially, with that woman's $800. And she walks away with at most one phone to sell on eBay.
Oh, dear. OK, Adam McGuire, thank you so much for that.
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