What the wild journey of a $100,000 watch can teach us about global markets
The Swiss take their watches very seriously. Strolling around Geneva, Switzerland's watch-making capital, there are Rolex, Patek Phillippe, and Tag Heuer stores on nearly every block, usually with a little gathering of people standing behind velvet ropes waiting to get in... like a club.
A very expensive club. These watches (or time pieces, as everyone in the industry calls them) traditionally appealed to older, wealthy collectors--connoisseur types who were willing to drop thousands of dollars on a watch.
This was a small, sleepy, very select industry.
But a couple of years ago, luxury watches got swept up in a strange combination of global events and market fads that took it on a wild ride. Fueling that wild ride — something one would probably never associate with an artisanal industry dating back more than four centuries: cryptocurrency. More on that later.
Watchmakers at Work
In the small Geneva-based workshop of luxury watch brand or MB&F, a row ofloupesat tiny networks of gears and springs.
