The Brand Age

>That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world.

This is a wild thing to say. Brand age watches don't look strange. They look beautiful. Incredible thought and care and intention is put into their design. The people who buy them love them. It's so funny to me to get this far into one of PGs blogs and sort of realise "Oh right, you don't actually understand beauty". It's very hard to read this as much more than a slightly autistic man not understanding that it's ok for people to like beautiful things. It is not worth it to me to spend £100k on a watch, but I don't deny it is to other people, I'm not going to pretend the watch is undesirable.

But it does make me wonder whether Paul things that YC is successful today because it has a better design than other startup programmes, or is it successful today because of it's brand?

He's omitting the most important bit. Data from the OECD shows highly unequal societies tend to be more status-obsessed, leading to higher spending on "positional goods" (items bought to signal status). These economies often have higher advertising expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) to fuel that competition.

"Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list."

Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.

I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother?

PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...

> Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol.

Sounds a hell of a lot like the diamond industry. Also, the top fashion houses, but both industries are taking a drubbing from artificial competition (artificial diamonds, and knockoffs, of various stripes).

I'm a believer in branding. I worked for many years, for a company with a "top-shelf" brand, and saw what it took, to maintain. But it takes a huge amount of discipline and "silly" stuff. Brand damage can come from a million different directions. I have found very few people are willing to do what it takes to maintain a top brand.

For quite a while, there have been "brand-only" products, like Von Dutch, or Life Is Good™. They are the two-dollar hat, with the twenty-dollar logo. Like Izod Lacoste or Members Only, in the last century.

Calvin: I wish my shirt had a logo or a product on it.

Hobbes: …

Calvin: A good shirt turns the wearer into a walking corporate billboard!

Hobbes: …

Calvin: It says to the world, “My identity is so wrapped up in what I buy that I paid the company to advertise its products!”

Hobbes: You’d admit that?

Calvin: Oh, sure. Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality.

Interesting historical anecdote: the Swiss became the world's best watchmakers because, in Protestant Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, jewelry was banned as ostentation. But you were allowed to wear a watch - it was important to get to church and work on time - so people starting wearing expensive watches instead of jewelry.

I watched the Macbook Neo launch video yesterday and while the product is not very exciting, the video has great production value and it showed this: People want to pay for marketing.

Not that Apple's only appeal is marketing, Mac laptops certainly have pros over the bottom and mid tier Windows laptops. But having seen that video, and knowing that other have seen it, are aware of Apple and its positioning, makes people feel better while using and owning their devices.

People absolutely want that feeling and they're willing to pay for it.

> Jaeger-LeCoultre's web site says that one of their current collections "takes its inspiration from the classic designs of the golden age of watchmaking." In saying this they're implicitly saying something that present-day watchmakers all know but rarely come so close to saying outright: whatever age we're in now, it's not the golden age.

not sure what tfa is trying to say here, but this is far from being an indictment of the current age. the term "golden age" is (from what I've seen) usually used for the time when an industry or field was taking the leap from niche to mainstream, and in the process defining some of the things that would later come to be considered characteristic. by that token, of course the golden age of watchmaking is not today - the field has already gone mainstream and indeed does retain a lot of the characteristic features that the golden age innovated upon and defined.

I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay suggests.

Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.

As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.

Naomi Klein’s famous book No Logo* does a great job diving into the expansion of branding that happened around the 80s and into the 90s. As someone who’s lived in the post-branding world my whole life, it reads like an anthropological text about my culture from an outsider. It’s fascinating the kinds of things we take for granted.

* https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-logo-no-space-no-choice-no-j...

His point of Omega doubling-down on the things that would progressively harder to establish a moat on made me think about what we have been seeing with higher ed. It seems the "smart ones" definitely read the book that making the "education better," in a world where it is mostly free, was a fool's errand, and now the margins that they all compete it stray far, far away from the quality of the schooling. I work in K-12, and see the same things happening here too.

P.S.: It is odd to me to have such a length pg essay been up for such a long time with just a handful of comments. Did something happen? I would've expected a wealth of discussion on a post like this by now.

Hoping to add to this perspective:

The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.

Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.

If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.

> "Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do. So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times."

Really interesting parallel between decidedly traditional technology and today.

Brand are brittle. It takes a single CEO associated to some pedophile network or make a nazi salute and it's ready to plummet.

If the business really mainly on the technical merits of the product/service, even blank brand is an option. Many brand as a façade to a single plant is a different tradeoff.

I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.

I petition to rename "feature" as "complication" on software teams.

Wild timing on this. Been seeing a huge uptick in people "trying to learn opsec" as they fumble around for ways to make money with openclaw and land on "selling fake bags/shoes/watches", seemingly emboldened by those who value these brands trying to use openclaw to secure mispriced items or snipe auctions.

Funny thing is, I'm not sure anyone is actually doing either thing successfully. Every time I've looked into an openclaw success story it's ended up being complete fiction.

The question in the zeitgeist is whether coding agents will be to software engineers as the quartz revolution was to expert watchmakers.

Commoditized software is here. Will there be a market for high-end, luxury software? Becoming an artificially scarce veblen good is unlikely to work for digital goods the way it has for watches.

EconTalk from last month on the topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/seiko-swatch-and-the-s...

Obviously not the main point, but I've been reading watch media online for over a decade now, I've read or heard this "Quartz Crisis" story hundreds of times and never ONCE read about the coincidence with the Bretton Woods agreement. Makes sense though, its basically oral history.

software is becoming like the fashion industry. you go to Prada vs Hermess because you think one does better shoes and the other better bags. But is not because neither could do better shoes or bad it isb ecause your mind positioning is set.

Software. everyone can do it now. but you still buy lets say Crowdstrike for security, because is in your brain for years as security software.

Also explains why German cars look the way they do today. Emphasizing the brand, so everyone can see it.

> One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand.

Wow, that is… not what I would recommend. Brand is one of the few things that will give you pricing power in the age of AI.

https://www.econtalk.org/seiko-swatch-and-the-swiss-watch-in...

I'm still not really clear on what the point PG is driving at.

However swatch group(omega was force merged in the 80s to form the swatch group) has 3x the turnover of Patek.

More over Swatch caters to both high end and the poors + kids. So brand is.. good? so long as you only cater for the rich? I'm not getting that really.

"When our time traveler peered into the windows of these shops, the first thing he'd notice was how large all the watches were."

My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from???

"Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.

I expected this essay to end with a note about software's golden age.

Sounds like pg is trying to justify an expensive new hobby :)

“Why is the Patek Philippe Nautilus so expensive?”

If you have to explain why your product is expensive, maybe it shouldn’t be.

> So the only thing distinguishing one top brand from another was the name printed on the dial

Respectfully disagree.

Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist.

Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here.

I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.

warren buffett always said brand was the only moat. only IP can be protected. Everything else can be replaced, rebuilt.

finally, a new essay. and coincidently, its about something i have been thinking about all week.

Because he focuses in the story of luxury watches, Graham sees only the brand tricks that work mostly for rich people.

There are brands for non-rich: Linux is a very strong brand but virtually free and non-exclusive at all (think Android phones). Patriotism and country reputation might also be thought as brands. E.g. would Portugal's tourist boom happen without the Portuguese tarts popularity?

Edit: my watch is a Pebble.

Somebody's getting into watch collecting! Quartz watches were also developed in Switzerland: check out the story of the Beta: https://goldammer.me/blogs/articles/beta-21-history-guide

I'm struck by the utilitarian mindset of this essay. What Paul so disparagingly refers to as "brand" can also be referred to as "art". People _want_ art, and will indeed pay good money for it. Said differently, people _value_ art enough to differentiate it from "optimal design", and indeed a subset of people will pay top dollar for a suboptimal but artistic design.

It is possible to view the fact that capitalist markets can turn a desire for art, individuality, and "something special" into a business as a bad thing. I'm not entirely convinced that's particularly interesting, though... it seems just a localized restatement of a generic "capitalism is bad" take.

Chinese models are indeed cheaper!

In almost every category meaningful differentiation is a myth. It sounds nice to tell yourself you've got it and talk about moats or whatever, but it misses the point.

What people usually mean when they talk about differentiation is distinctiveness [1]. Design isn't a differentiator for these watches it's about being distinctive. At the end of the day when telling the time is commoditized, and expensive watches are just a status symbol it's all you've got.

[1] - https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/differentiat...

Is it just me or are an increasing number of (high profile) people in the tech industry into luxury watches these days?

> That turns out to be a profitable business though.

He does not disappoint. Also, not buying the watch industry parable.

Nike is a useful test case (1) here. Brand was the whole competitive moat for them and once athletic gear commoditized, then management spent five years cutting the things that sustain it: athlete relationships, premium positioning, product development. Each cut looked (somewhat) rational on its own but none of them were, taken together.

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/nikes-crisis-and-the-economi...

EDIT: Nevermind comments are apparently just a pg meta discussion..

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I can't respond to tzury's comment because it's already flagged and dead but I honestly don't think that's quite fair on this board.

The very same people who would be flagging that comment wouldn't bat an eye at saying they won't read or support anything by folks like DHH, or a hundred other prominent tech figures who have committed some ideological-wrong.

It's just a similarly heavy-handed reaction from the other side of the divide.

I don't find anything wrong or downvotable about people voicing perfectly valid criticisms about pg, his opinions, who he associates with and signal-boosts...unless these standards you all want to apply wrt cancellation are "for thee and not for me".

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