Massive Luxury Market Contraction

Industry insiders across a broad range of so-called 'luxury sector' products are reporting that there have been deep cut-backs in production numbers implemented by the top-end brands.

Rolex, for example, has cut its total production almost in half, according to knowledgeable sources. And this mirrors the huge drop-off in exhibitors at this year's Basel World trade show for high-end watch makers.

I have been saying here for quite a while now that it has been my own personal impression that there was a sudden implosion in the high-end market co-incident with the commencement of the last US Presidential cycle - before the actual rise of Donald Trump even just as a leading contender. You could see that one by one all the high-end glossy magazines were being bought out or just quite obviously declining in the quality of their presentations and also in the standard of the journalism within the magazines themselves.

It isn't the Rolex that is the truly great product here,
it is the Swiss Super-Luminova lighting ceramic pigment

Now the thing I can't understand about what is going on is - what happens to the remaining numbers of high-end customers, do they get to have to live with absolute rubbish for content or product? I mean to say presumably they still have plenty of cash so how do they get serviced? Do they have to live down in the dumps along with everyone else because Hillary lost, do they? And how come this all started BEFORE she lost, anyway?

No. Frankly, I'm a little bit 'weirded out' by what has been going on.

You look at what happened to Volkswagen for one thing - they got into trouble over their supposed deceit concerning the company's claims about fuel efficiency of some of their engines, and so because of that, the whole company has gone to hell overnight, has it? I think not. 

Even if you accept the narrative that the fuel efficiency claims were wrong - and I don't, because the whole argument was made on the strength of actual driving conditions in America, versus factory test parameters, and everybody knows that American roads were in serious disrepair (my god, I was shocked when I drove there compared to what I had been experiencing in other countries) - there was never any basis for suggesting that other performance parameters were not outstanding. And yet, from my perception of things, you could tell that there was a hole punched in the morale of everybody associated with the brand...

A rare pic with a meaningful shot composition
in terms of the particular product as a modern urban culture item 

I have never seen a worse set of professional photo compositions for the outstanding 'world vehicle' package, namely the Golf R or GTI -  I mean what happened to the brains of the photographers?

Just look through any Google Image search for 'Golf GTI's' and you will find a consistently bad bunch of images and photographs; weak backgrounds, terrible angles, utterly careless, indeed mindlessly poor shot compositions with ugly backgrounds or just plain careless backgrounds.

This car is an outstanding product, an outstanding design package for what it is meant to do for the driver and the owner. And the company has completely let the product down in their marketing standards and brand selling.

There is room for all kinds of opinion when it comes to expensive high-end items, and I am not the sort of person who parrots slogans for a dumbed-down public: at 25,000 dollars, the cheapest entry level Golf is not the same price as a loaf of bread! And at 60,000 dollars the Oettinger Sportsystem aftermarket tuned version or the factory 'Wolfsburg Edition' Golf R is a very expensive piece of merchandise.

This is a truly beautiful car,
and this is the only pic I could find with decent shot composition

VW's are not poor people's cars.

The point about 'luxury market' stuff is that they represent two entirely different sets of values and propositions - there is the technical one, that is to say 'scientific excellence or advancement,' and 'performance parameters,' and there is the poetic, 'design intelligence, and aesthetics' proposition. And sometimes the two even meet in the same final product, but that is rare and not necessary at all for the application of the classification 'luxury product' or 'high-end' item. 

The world's best mechanical watch is not a Swiss watch, with a Swiss style of mechanism, it is a Japanese watch, with an entirely different type of mechanism - a spring-drive mechanism with a MEMS passive quartz component regulator which provides 50,000 beats per hour mechanics that vastly out-guns even the Rolex for smoothness of movements, and the world's most accurate mechanical time-keeping. At almost 8,000 dollars the thing is not by any means 'cheap.'

Seems utterly old-fashioned conventional - the GS 'snowflake.'

As we approach a new 'Roaring Twenties' era in financial markets (oh yes, no one else is predicting this but I am) I laugh at the way in which 'experts' are dealing with the high-end of things in the consumer markets...

Trust me, you think you are broke, perhaps, or less well off than you desire to be, with not a lot on the horizon to inflame your enthusiasm - but...

...you simply cannot imagine where the world is heading over the coming ten years or even more from here.