The E-Commerce Micro-Edition

From Panerai -

Courtesy of Panerai

It would seem that the debate as to whether or not people will buy expensive watches online can now, pretty much, be put to bed.

Panerai is now offering a limited edition that will only be available through their online store.  100 of these will be up for grabs.  I have absolutely no idea how well the sales have gone, but if it's in your wheel house, you might want to move "sharpish".

Courtesy of Panerai

Here are the pertinents:

MOVEMENT Automatic Mechanical, Panerai OP XXX calibre. FUNCTIONS Hours, minutes, small seconds, date, calculation of immersion time. CASE 44 mm, polished AISI 316 L stainless steel. DIAL blue with Arabic numerals and applied luminous hour markers. Date at 3 o’clock, seconds at 9 o’ clock. POWER RESERVE 50H. WATER-RESISTANCE 30 bar (~300 meters).

Influencers, Click Farms and Millennialitis

Now maybe about five years ago (sounds like a nice round number so I'm going with it), I was invited to participate in a group of what was then referred to as "watch experts".  The concept was (on the surface) pretty straight forward - a major watch magazine / publishing company wanted to band together a group of bloggers from different countries and share press opportunities with them, with the bloggers then benefiting from potential shared advertising revenues.  And in fairness, it seemed like a pretty good deal.  How this finally worked out I am not sure because I opted to remain a solo artist.  But that was perhaps one of the first moments that maybe digital was being taken seriously in the watch world.

Now about this same time, the idea of the "influencer" began to bleed into the watch industry.