
There is no such thing as a free watch [pdf] - tosh
http://www.jennyodell.com/museumofcapitalism_freewatch.pdf
======
Animats
Companies with fake back-stories are an ongoing problem on Wikipedia. There
were big headaches with the articles for Skyy (Vodka) and Hollister (surfwear
for people who don't surf).

Skyy was completely outsourced. Originally, the alcohol came from Midwest
Grain Products in Pekin, Illinois, which also sold ethanol to refineries. It
was shipped by tank car to the railroad sidings of Frank-Lin Distillers
Products in San Jose. Frank-Lin is an outsourcing firm and distributor for
booze products. They do some additional distillation to clean up the alcohol,
add de-ionized water and flavoring, and bottle. Frank-Lin makes about 2,000
different brands with a huge variety of names. "Whether starting from a
prepared prototype or simply a verbal 'concept', Frank-Lin can innovatively
create any distilled spirit and coordinate its effective production."[1] Skyy,
the company, was purely a marketing operation. Skyy management eventually
exited by selling out to Campari, which has their own production plants.

The Wikipedia article for Skyy was originally a puff piece copied from Skyy
marketing materials. That was flagged as an ad, and Wikipedia editors started
digging into how Skyy really worked. This resulted in frantic efforts by Skyy
promoters to change the article back into a puff piece. Didn't work.

Hollister's origin story is completely fake. So were their Robb Havassy
surfboards (used for decoration, not surfing), which got them in trouble.
Hollister's first store was in a mall in Columbus, Ohio.

[1] [http://www.frank-lin.com/production.html](http://www.frank-
lin.com/production.html)

~~~
seppin
> Hollister's first store was in a mall in Columbus, Ohio

lol

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN?

------
owenversteeg
So a few years back I started a watch company in a similar way.

I think I was actually one of the first to do it, since when I started I
couldn't find many competitors. I tried a million kinds of promotions, from
"free, you just pay for shipping" to offering people discounts and referral
codes.

I actually created my own watch designs (well, modifications of the face,
case, and strap with the same Chinese movement.) Some of my improvements
started to be used by the manufacturers.

I'm not at all invested in it anymore: I left the business after selling a
substantial, but not massive number of watches and finding that it wasn't
terribly profitable if you included the cost of advertising, shipping, and
(most importantly) my own time.

My own "watch company" was more real in a few ways: watches that I did in fact
design myself, shipped from my address in the US, and the quality of the
watches was actually quite good. To this day I wear a watch from my company
and it has held up to an incredible amount of abuse. I say this as someone who
(used to) collect watches. I also was upfront about the cost of shipping and
the watch itself - I might have, for example, a banner that says "Free 3-Day
US Shipping" and then the price of the watch would be clearly labeled as $20,
so people would know that they would only be paying a total of $20 for the
watch. The prices varied a lot over time, from $10 to $40 per watch, but
surprisingly my profit was never huge even though I only spent about $3 on the
watch itself and $7 on shipping.

If anyone's curious about the whole thing (and lives in the Netherlands) I
still have hundreds of these watches and I'd be happy to sit down over a
coffee, tell my stories from the business and show the watches.

~~~
Iv
Nowadays several Shenzhen companies offer to do the shipping directly from
China. Do you feel that this would have made your business a lot more
profitable?

~~~
owenversteeg
Oh, absolutely. My biggest expense was shipping, by a long shot. If I could
have shipped from China I could have been ridiculously profitable, which
explains the massive growth in these companies.

At the same time, shipping from China would have made the whole thing more...
fake, I guess. Like the author of this article found, these companies never
had any physical address. The quality of the watches from these companies also
seems much lower than the quality that I had.

That's one of the problems with dropshipping - you don't know the quality that
your customers are getting. I could take the 5 in 40 watches that would be
broken or had dings/scratches and toss them, but you can't do that if you
dropship. There's also the ridiculously long shipping times and lack of
tracking.

~~~
Iv
Interesting. Thanks.

A lot of things have changed in China. You now can have ISO-certified
factories and you can order quality control also. But I admit that if I were
to do something like that I would probably end up spending a few weeks in
Shenzhen to bootstrap it.

------
wyager
Fun article, but it suffers from the usual abject lack of understanding of how
markets work associated with this kind of critique.

The information one should take from this story is that watches on Alibaba are
undervalued, or that the user-unfriendliness of Alibaba imposes a high per-
transaction cost. By selling Alibaba stuff for 5x the original price, these
businesses are communicating valuable market information; namely, that there's
something wrong with Alibaba (could be accessibility/usability/trust/etc.) or
that these companies provide a valuable service that may not be obvious
(translation of descriptions to readable english, for example). If these
companies took the "moral" (emphasis on scare quotes) approach of selling
cheap watches at a smaller markup, this information would not be communicated
and the world would be slower to respond.

~~~
djrogers
You're missing the part where the watches pictured on the websites are
originals with the logos taken off, while the customer actually gets a cheap
knockoff...

~~~
wyager
Yes, that part is fraud, but the linked PDF spent vastly more time complaining
about the markup.

------
tedunangst
> Think about this: would you rather buy a $10 watch and pay $2 for the
> shipping or a “free” watch and $12 for the shipping?”

$10 watch every time. There's something to be said for price anchoring and
something for nothing and other dirty tricks, but this question seems to get
it all backwards.

Also, lol at the review complaining the watch wouldn't arrive in time for his
girlfriends birthday or whatever. Nothing says I care quite like free.

~~~
Fnoord
Nope, I want as low S&H as possible. In The Netherlands, the S&H is even free
by law (sending back is for the buyer though). Even though some shops
carefully hide that option.

Why I want as low S&H as possible compared to product price? Warranty. In the
EU you get 2 years of warranty by law. If your product cannot be repaired, you
can get your money back.

Now take the above example or take the example where you're unhappy with the
product (e.g. you figure out the quality is bad, or a production error you
notice) and want to send it back (in NL you'd have 14 days to do that for w/e
reason, getting a full refund). If the item was free with an S&H of 12 EUR
then you gotta send the product back for w/e S&H. It could be 12 EUR, it could
be less. After receiving the item (for which you let them sign or else they
claim they never got it back; verification costs extra) they'll issue a refund
instead, worth 0 EUR. Of course, 0 EUR is an extreme example but even if the
balance is out of the way the danger with relatively high S&H is that your
refund is worth too little compared to your S&H.

Result? High S&H items have high failure, and are of low quality.

Of course its GLHF getting your warranty if the store is in Asia. Then again,
I wouldn't buy directly from Asia. I'd buy from a shop I could verify is from
EU, pref old EEG (Benelux, UK, Germany, France).

Either way, its false advertising to exclude such ridiculously high S&H from
the total cost of the product. Customs calculates the price of S&H together
with the cost of product anyway so you can't use it to avoid paying tax.

~~~
Doxin
Shipping costs most definitely are not free by law in the Netherlands. They do
have to be mentioned clearly though, none of that nonsense of hiding it until
after you've entered your address info.

~~~
Fnoord
You're right, S&H is not free in The Netherlands (although many businesses
will if you buy for certain amount give free S&H, and if the company has a
volume package at say TNT Post then one package more or less isn't going to
cost them.)

However, if you are using Wet Kopen Op Afstand (which you generally are when
you're buying from a Dutch shop and have S&H to The Netherlands) and you want
to send the item back (for whatever reason, with a few types of products being
excluded like underwear, unsealed CD/DVD, download services, ...) then they'll
have to issue a full refund INCLUDING the S&H.

Here's one source on that:

[https://www.consuwijzer.nl/thema/koop-op-
afstand](https://www.consuwijzer.nl/thema/koop-op-afstand)

"Geld terug De verkoper moet uw aankoopbedrag terugbetalen, ook de
bezorgkosten"

And I guarantee you many shops don't refund S&H at their own discretion.

The costs on sending the item(s) back ARE on you btw.

------
GuiA
I very briefly (for reasons that will soon become apprent) dated someone who
runs a watch company exactly like that, while portraying themselves as a
"Silicon Valley entrepreneur". They buy watches from China, and using tactics
such as the one described, sell them at a premium. They even have the fake
humanitarian BS about how their watches are handcrafted by women in 3rd world
countries blablabla. Last I heard from them, they were planning a kickstarter
because they had it in their head that it was the logical next step.

When I tried to point out the arguable dishonesty of the whole venture, they
told me [verbatim from text messages] : "I'm selling a lifestyle brand. I just
want people to know my brand".

Heh. Charlatans have been a thing since humans have been able to grunt at each
other.

------
NicoJuicy
It's not always 12$ shipping, sometimes it's 2$ shipping for a 1$ watch that
is given for free

They use it to collect emails

Source: one of the marketing groups I'm in

------
fenwick67
This is an awesome write-up, this deserves to get into Adbusters

------
sabujp
tldr; the guy selling fake watches in chinatown has gone "high tech" with
online marketing and ads

    
    
        hipster: But I can find this exact watch for $2
        soficoastal: then why are you talking to us?
        soficoastal: have you ever bought a cup of coffee for 2-4 dollars? do you think it costs dunkin or starbucks that much to make? or do you think maybe they mark it up for a profit?
        hipster: I, a regular person has access to that watch right now for $2.
        soficoastal: you can make a cup of coffee at home for like 10 cents....it's called capitalism

~~~
hellbanner
At the bottom, a yellow warning "Message could not be sent" \-- were they
blocked?

~~~
Rjevski
Yes - it's even said in the PDF.

To be honest I feel whoever was talking to them was a bit rude... whether you
like the products or not I don't see anything wrong with their business. It's
like blaming Apple for adding a huge markup to their products which in terms
of hardware are very similar to a Windows PC and even made in the same
factories.

~~~
carlmr
Apple at least contributes a very well working operating system on top of the
hardware. They have added value. Although when I bought a macbook for the
first and last time they shipped it directly from China. It took 4 weeks. And
when it arrived they announced the new generation of macbooks. I sent it back,
where they complained that I bought it before the new generation existed, but
I had the laws in my country on my side and could send it back within 2 weeks
for a full refund. I did then order the new macbook.

So in a sense, yes, they're pretty much the same. Although their OS is great,
their hardware business is based on the same model as Folsom & Co.

------
dgudkov
The same is happening with sunglasses. Bunch of websites (e.g. [1]) selling
"premium" sunglasses that are "discounted" from $350 to $50. The quality, as
you would expect, is extremely poor. The actual production cost is maybe $1-2.

[1] [http://www.aqsstore.com/sunglasses/](http://www.aqsstore.com/sunglasses/)

------
craigsmansion
There is a lot of chaff being produced and sold in the watch world.

For those who like the design of the watches I think the style is called
"Bauhaus", for further online searches.

For some more durable and genuine brands who prominently display Bauhaus
design elements, take a look at the collections of:

-Nomos

-Junghans (Max Bill)

~~~
bartread
Those are great brands, but the person who is going to drop £1500-3000 on a
(beautiful) Nomos is fundamentally _not_ the same as the person who's going to
spend $12 on a no-name watch, whether that's on the watch itself or on
shipping. No way.

I hate to recommend them because, as far as I'm concerned, they're on the same
spectrum as the scammers in some sense[1], but if you _do_ like that style of
watch and you're willing to spend maybe a hundred dollars (probably less,
used, or in a sale) MVMT might be the brand to go for. And I've seen ASOS
selling Bauhaus style watches for as little as £25.

[1] I don't love MVMT because in their marketing it's pretty clear that
they're claiming to be something they're not - i.e., a "real" watch company
with some actual heritage - as opposed to what they are, which is an
affordable fashion brand.

------
JBiserkov
Off topic: This was the first PDF I enjoyed reading in the browser.

~~~
carlmr
Really? I was bothered by the font choice, but I felt it was too entertaining
to miss out on.

------
tcmb
I think I found my source of passive income.

~~~
sabujp
don't forget to dropship

------
corndoge
I bought two of these and I wear one on each hand.

~~~
tcmb
Why not wear them on the wrists?

~~~
grkvlt
> It is difficult to put on and uncomfortable once you do; one online review
> conjectures that a person would need square wrists to wear it.

Lack of square wrists, I would assume, then?

~~~
carlmr
Luckily OP has square hands.

------
hellbanner
Great essay, thank you.

"Have paid for WHOIS protection - preventing consumers from finding out where
the website is based". That's not quite true. You can locate a website with
the IP address -- WHOIS protection protects the owner of the domain by
obscuring their registered physical address.

~~~
bdcravens
Sure, though IP address of server usually has nothing to do with where the
actual business is located.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, in this case you'd discover it was hosted wherever Squarespace runs its
servers, which is not exactly helpful.

------
nvr219
This was a great read

------
unwiredben
I don't get why the writer would format this as a PDF with a monospaced font
but have "fi" ligatures.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
Because it's _aesthetic_.

~~~
jstimpfle
æsthetic?

------
callmeed
If you're looking for an affordable, decent watch /r/Watches has a nice buyers
guide for watches up to $250:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/6wjrsv/rwatches_bu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/6wjrsv/rwatches_buying_guide_0250_usd/)

------
noja
Why is this a PDF?

