Litmus
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yes. let's ban everything from China.He’s hawked gold sneakers, commemorative coins and even a cryptocurrency venture in recent months, so Donald Trump’s latest retail effort — to sell a pricey gold watch emblazoned with his name — should surprise no one. But timepiece experts aren’t impressed.
On Thursday, Trump debuted a pair of watches available for sale: a dive model dubbed the “Fighter” that is limited to 1,000 pieces and retails for $499 or $799 depending on style, and a seemingly high-end tourbillion design that is depicted as being crafted of 18-karat gold and embellished with diamonds on the bezel. Limited to 147 pieces, that model is listed for an astounding $100,000. All pieces display Trump’s name prominently on the dial, while the more expensive model features a sapphire caseback with his signature.
Word quickly spread among the status-watch community, which was overwhelmingly unimpressed. “This is cobbled together, patently unoriginal and vastly overpriced,” says Ariel Adams, founder and editor of A Blog to Watch, one of the industry’s most popular sites for timepiece information and education.
“It’s very clear he’s working with a white labeler, which is nothing new. Anyone can go to a white labeler and say, ‘I want a watch with this case, this bracelet and these other details,’ and a white labeler will Frankenstein it together, put your name on it and sell it to you. But the price you sell it for is up to you. That the markup came from someone on Trump’s team is obvious here. Even the $500 piece from another brand would go for maybe $200.”
A marketing director of a well-known Swiss brand, who asked not to be named to keep his opinion separate from the company that employs him, agreed. “I belong to a collector group that maintains an ongoing group chat, and the initial reaction was that it had to be fake. After that, everyone was laughing,” he said of the more expensive piece. “When you look at all of them, they scream Chinese-made watch. None of them is worth the asking price.”
Indeed, even though the website touts “Swiss-made” when describing the watches, it’s not uncommon among manufacturers of lower-priced designs to manipulate that designation by purchasing some Swiss-made parts and assembling the watch in another country. By Thursday afternoon, several experts across social media pointed out that the more expensive watch’s tourbillon, a mechanism designed to improve accuracy and typically found in pricier timepieces, seemed to be sourced from both Switzerland and China. “Those blue screws on the tourbillon cage are a dead giveaway that it was partly made in China. You won’t find blue screws on a tourbillon made in Switzerland,” noted the marketing director. “And you can pick up a Chinese tourbillon for $100.”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/trump-vastly-overpriced-100-000-195620734.html
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