Racked:
It’s pure arrogance for Silicon Valley to imagine that it can make wearables cool by hiring a few fashion people, putting the product on a runway, or throwing money at “collaborations” with brands. This is a new game they’re trying to play, one with different rules. The rollout of the Apple Watch would look much different if it were orchestrated by a brand like Chanel. Instead of being released at $350, it would hit stores with a price tag in the thousands. Consumers would clamor to get their hands on one, only to be stymied by limited runs, which would further stoke desire. Only after a few years of artificial scarcity would it enjoy wider release.
I have the fashion sense of a hobo so I have no idea if this piece is an accurate portrayal or not but it is an interesting take on the subject.
“It’s pure arrogance for Silicon Valley to imagine that it can make wearables cool by…”
I remember these same words uttered by iPhone detractors… Apple can’t just walk in blah blah blah… This shows a complete lack of understanding by the fashion folks about Apple. Apple watch is no more a watch than the iPhone is a phone. They’re both (very) personal computers that happen to make phone calls and tell time. These people are in for a very rude awakening…
‘sfunny, reading that article reminded me of the Ed Colligan quote from 2007 when he was still running Palm:
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
The article misses the point… Apple doesn’t want to be exclusive in the sense of a Chanel item. They have zero interest selling 5000 Watches at $10k per. They provide affordable luxury, cutting edge design that almost anyone can afford. Do people want that? Look at their last quarter.
1) Chanel could not produce any product in the millions.
2) Apple does not need,or want to make 000’s of percent profit.
BS.
The way to make a lot of money isn’t too sell very expensive things to very few people. It’s too sell moderately affordable things to a lot of people.
Compare the revenue of Ferrari ($2.6 billion revenue, $338 million profits) to Toyota ($188B revenue, $23B profit). Or Tiffany ($33M, $1.4M) to Walmart ($484B, $15.4B).
What Apple is doing is the envy of every company in the world: They are selling products with high profit margins in very large numbers.
My point is, the advice to sell an expensive product and limit the number of people who can get it, might be good advice on how to be “cool,” but it’s not the best advice on how to make a boat load of money. Apple is doing just that, and they manage to remain pretty cool at the same time.
Now all that said, I’m skeptical myself about how the Apple Watch will fair, but I don’t think Apple needs much in the way of advice on how to make and market successful products.
If this is how people in the fashion industry feel, they’re in for a very rude awakening. Then again, the fashion industry has never occupied the same reality as the rest of us.
Alert John Gruber. Claim Chowder fodder.
How does a computer/software company think they’re just going to waltz in and make phones people will buy. We’ve been doing this for years. We know how to do it and what people want…..
Deja vu all over again? Fashion is for suckers. Style, art and function, I want to say last forever, but obviously a lot longer than last weeks fashions.
Maybe not so much as cool, but actually have a point or usefulness other than flaunting disposable income, the sport of a holes and other criminals.
If the point is to make boatloads of money, I would agree. However, end profit may not be the only calculus used in determining target markets. Using your examples, I would point out that the risk associated with being Toyota can be greater than being a Ferrari. Toyata’s and other “mainstream” company’s fortunes are tied to the income of the “chattering classes” whereas the fortunes of Ferrari et al are tied to their own designs, the super-rich don’t suffer economic downturns in the same way as the rest of the classes. From risk-profit standpoint, being Ferrari may be, in some ways, less risky than being Toyota.
I think the article is better at demonstrating what the fashion industry doesn’t understand about technology.
You can’t create a meaningful technology product like this without a strong ecosystem around it. You don’t get an ecosystem for super-premium items. You need certain economies of scale to build a vibrant ecosystem.
The author is, quite simply, so full of shit his eyes are brown. Angela Ahrendts’ morning dump has more knowledge of success in fashion than this clown will ever have.
Here are just a few of the problems with this article:
1. To try to portray fashion as monolithic is to completely misunderstand the nuances in branding and desirability. Just within the sub-category of accessories, watches have completely different market characteristics from shoes, handbags are different from jewelry, etc. etc.
2. The watch industry is quite different from other fashion accessories, and COMPLETELY different from haute couture. (it’s also obviously different from tech in general, which is why all other smart watches have completely bit the hairy pickle.)
3. The watch market is led primarily by MEN, since it is primarily the only culturally accepted male jewelry. Couture is led purchase-wise by WOMEN.
4. Biver was doing nothing but whistling past the graveyard when he made dismissive comments about the Apple Watch, because he feared it’d eat his lunch. He later realized his comments made him look like a total putz and backpedaled (and is now scrambling to come up with an Apple Watch copy..)
I have no idea how successful Apple will be with this product line, but its success or failure will have more to do with its ecosystem than its hardware, long term. If you want to point out that the tech world doesn’t understand fashion, you’d better know what you’re talking about and this asshat doesn’t.
I don’t doubt at all that Apple will sell 5000 at $10K, but they’ll also sell 10s of millions at $350-1000…
I think it’s more arrogance on their side to think that the fashion side has a lot more than all that. That there is a secret element that only people currently in the fashion industry has and no one else outside the industry can ever understand and comprehend nevertheless utilize.
On the same note that’s probably the same reaction as what the animal husbandry industry felt when automobiles were first invented. Owning a horse is very personal – each and every one of them are very particular and gives you a lot of sex appeal. And people using them look silly as well… bah… steam drawn carts! Its so hard to feed them while we have grass and hay readily available… you need to feed you automobile every 2 hours… horses can last for six hours or longer!
Depends on your metric. Ferrari has under 2,800 employees ($120K profit per employee). Toyota has about 340,000 employees ($67K profit per employee). And you are way off (like two orders of magnitude off) on the Tiffany numbers. Tiffany has revenues in the $4B range and profits in the $400M range ($180 last year because they took a bath on half a billion of unusual costs).
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATIF&fstype=ii&ei=frfiVOnCFs71sQfI5oHoDg
Excellent post.
“But as The Verge reports, it was Apple fanboys who lined up to view the watch at Colette, not the fashion cognoscenti. “
Err, Apple isn’t counting on the “fashion cognoscenti” for the success of the Apple Watch, whatever the fuck that even means. The Apple watch is meant to be visually inoffensive, as well as visually customizable. Both goals which it achieves.
Google Glass is not “failing to be cool”, it’s failed to be useful.
Talking about “fashion” is like talking about “technology”, very broad industries with lots of players at many levels. The problem with this article is that it’s all over the place, and actually contradicts itself:
“Fashion is, by its very nature, exclusive. It’s about creating an identity, a brand, that is so cool that people will spend thousands and thousands of dollars to acquire a tiny piece of it. If you make that identity widely available, you risk diluting it.”
OK, that’s a valid point, especially when you consider couture, which is almost literally one-off designs that are nearly custom-made. But then in the same sentence the author talks about purse charms that Fendi “keeps churning out” making “millions” on the $600-900 item. So how are you NOT “diluting” something you are “churning out”?
As for the rest about fashion not liking technology, go to Style.com and look at the crowds lining the runways of any Milan, Paris, London, New York fashion show, note the number of iPhones and iPads. Or better yet, go to Saks.com or NeimanMarcus.com and do a search on iPhone iPad case and see how many of the same brand names mentioned in the article.
Spot on!
The problem is, the author thinks Apple Watch will not cost thousands or be subject to scarcity. $350 is the starting price, probably for the aluminum version. What’s the gold Edition going to cost? When’s the last time Apple launched an iPhone that wasn’t subject to early scarcity or restrictions on carrier availability? If the author’s assessment of how Chanel would launch the Apple Watch is accurate, then Apple should have a successful launch.
I’d say you’ll find a lot more “Style, art and function” in fashion, even last week’s, than in technology. Which likely never had it to begin with
First of all, it’s not “how people in the fashion industry feel”, technology has been a mainstay in fashion for decades. Il Maestro Valentino may not use a computer and Nuclear Wintour may use a flip-phone (which is itself no longer true, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2748250/The-iPhone-Anna-Wintour-upgrades-cell-spotted-15-flip-phone.html plus she’s SIXTY-FOUR years old) but I can guarantee you that almost everyone else in their organizations use computers and smartphones, very likely mostly macs and iPhones. More importantly, I’m not sure who you mean by “the rest of us”, but I’d say the fashion industry has been far more in tune with general society than the technology industry EVER has. Although tech has closed the gap some in the last 5 years.
Jean-Clauve Biver, the president of LVMH’s watches division, then: “They are making a few fundamental mistakes. The watch has no sex appeal. It is much too feminine and too similar to the other smartwatches on the market. Frankly, it looks like it was created by a first-year design student.”
Jean-Clauve Biver, now: “It’s a fantastic product, an incredible achievement,”. “I’m not just living in the tradition and culture and the past, I also want to be connected to the future. The Apple Watch connects me to the future. My watch connects me to history, to eternity.”
“Oh, btw, we’re going to make a TAG HEUER smartwatch, LOL”
I’d say Apple is pretty much disrupting the watch market… XDDDD
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-19/tag-heuer-casts-aside-swiss-made-label-to-take-on-apple-watch
All excellent points, although I’d quibble with the last paragraph a bit. The fact that Apple has been, so ahead of the curve in, hiring non-fashion Fashion Industry execs*, may support the author’s point, or at least a corollary to it, that there more than a little that tech can learn from fashion.
*It’s important to note that Apple hasn’t hired ANY design types from the fashion world. All these “fashion” hires have been logistical, operational, and retail focused execs. Granted they came from fashion companies, but they’re bean counters and salespeople, not markers and Bristol board or needle and thread people.
The Edition Apple Watch will be an interesting thing to, uh…watch. It’s the first time Apple is going super high-end with a product (30th Anniversary Mac notwithstanding). Up to now, the iPhone you carried was not any different than the iPhone you saw a celebrity carrying in a paparazzi shot (other than Apple may have sent it to their publicist for free).
What the fashion world doesn’t understand is that if Apple is correct everyone will want one of their watches. The rich might be interested in a fashion watch, too, but that idea will shortly be competing with the Apple watch they already own.
http://nypost.com/2014/02/28/apple-has-biggest-slice-of-profits-per-employee/
First-place Apple’s $460,772 in profits per employee was followed by 21st Century Fox at $277,344, Google at $270,123, Facebook at $236,705 and Viacom at $230,000 per employee.
Rounding out the top 10 were Microsoft at $221,212 in profit per employee, Discovery Communications at $188,597, Time Warner at $108,824, CBS at $96,460 and Netflix at $55,589 per employee.
The final eight included Comcast at $50,000 in profits per employee, Disney at $34,857, DreamWorks at $25,045, News Corp. at $21,083, The New York Times Co. at $18,447, AOL at $18,118, Gannett Co. at $12,310 and LinkedIn at $5,312 per employee.
Oops, I was looking at per share data and really fubar’d the Tiffany numbers pretty badly.
True, but I’d quibble a bit with your quibble. I would never claim that Apple has nothing to learn from fashion, in fact the lessons they’ve already learned have separated them from the more tone-deaf tech world. But, while most of their full-time hires have, indeed, been from the ops end of the fashion biz, I’d suggest they’ve been extraordinarily open to input from the design side, regardless of headcount, and Ahrendts’ turnaround with Burberry was more due to her ability to design an experience than count beans, and Ive and Newson certainly have the requisite bona fides…
I have to really disagree about Angela Ahrendts. She DID NOT turn-around Burberry. The resurrection of the house of Thomas Burberry was almost completely the work of her former boss, and predecessor as CEO, Rose-Marie Bravo. Ms Bravo is the one who started killing those awful license deals (including the buyout of the Spanish franchisee), hired Chris Bailey as CD and Kate Moss as Face to bring a, much-needed, infusion of youthful style, drove the build-out of the US network of retail stores, and hired Angela Arhendts to replace herself. That being said, Arehndts made some very shrewd moves as well, but almost all were business/opertational/retail-oriented. I will certainly agree she knows the importance of designing an experience, but the fact that she elevated Mr. Bailey to “Chief Creative Officer” pretty much shows who wears the design pants in that family.
Bottom line, I think we all agree that Apple is the exception to the rest of “tech”, in almost every way including their approach to the lessons fashion can teach them.
This article is wrong in so many ways. By its own admission, a number of fashion executives went to work for Apple. That alone proves that fashion and technology are not two disparate worlds as described. There is in fact an intersection that is quite healthy and growing. Lest we forget, technology is a major force behind both design of new fabrics.
Indeed. I should have qualified that as “only sell 5000 at $10k”.
The fashion world doesn’t claim that people don’t want Apple watches. This writer is simply taking the opinions of a few and applying them to the whole industry.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
The more things change…
Beat me to it. I deleted my comment.
That is the exact sentiment on display here. The natural hubris of relatively successful companies convinced they have a deep understanding of their customers by virtue of surviving to this point.
Apple has already proved you wrong.
The feminine critique was hilarious. The sales critters around my office with a penchant for the currently fashionable watches wear grotesque monstrosities of metal angles and protrusions that are “masculine” in the sense that strapping a metal dildo that fires 9 mm rounds to your wrist is masculine. Anything remotely subdued or understated looks “feminine” next to these weaponized status symbols.
Hardly. If anything Apple has proven me right. Surely even you can understand that Apple is the exception, and far from the rule, when it comes to “Style, art and function” in the tech industry. Whereas for a fashion house, that’s their raison d’être.
Jonny Ives is certainly a design talent on a par with Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, and Donna Karan (although more akin to Issey Miyake, Jil Sander, and Rei Kawakubo), but name two other designers in tech even close to his stature. Hell, name two tech companies where design isn’t a complete afterthought or a mandate from the head of product to “do it in brushed aluminum like Apple”!*
*Nest doesn’t count since they’re, not only, a direct descendant of Apple, but, more importantly, haven’t released a product since their acquisition by Google.
I see you your point and concede. Apple’s achievements certainly don’t point to any intrinsic understanding of fashion by tech companies in general and actually highlights said lack.