David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Well, they raise prices slowly every year. It’s a modest price increase every year that sets the floor. Frankly, if they do it over enough decades, everybody just believes forever that these things are going to appreciate because it’s almost like they’re the Fed, and they’re guaranteeing a certain rate of return on these things. There is this really awesome New York Times article in the last couple of months talking about this dynamic, how all the other luxury houses over the past couple of years during the post-COVID craziness, really raised prices and price gouged themselves out of the market once the reset happened. Hermès didn’t, and Rolex followed this exact playbook over the last 10 years of not price-gauging themselves out of the market, but intentionally limiting supply, letting the secondary market go nuts, and then but keeping an even keel for themselves. Now that there’s been a bit of a reset, they’re stronger than ever I think. All right. This is a question I had on my list to ask you. A very, very common narrative about Rolex right now is they have burned all of their biggest fans. These waitlists have gotten out of hand, the authorized dealers are being disrespectful, they are intentionally limiting supply. Have they gone too far in their unavailability?…

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