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Why do prices vary so much with Watch Cases?
This is a great question and for some time we were concerned about our low-end competition. So we started buying their boxes to look at them and we stopped worrying. Wal-mart and K-mart have done very well selling cheap goods to the masses, but 'cheaper is better' mass-market consumers are not our target audience. The cheap products we found online were just that --- cheap!
A cheap price for a seemingly attractive but very flimsy product is not a good buy. We were surprised since the pictures looked OK. The price was "too good to pass up", but a better cliché was "too good to be true", followed by "you get what you pay for!". OK, enough clichés! Most of the watch boxes we purchased broke within a short time if they were handled at all.
Plus we received an education in Fraud first hand from our own experiences and from customers who made the switch to our authorized dealer retail web site! Many of these
so called "retail stores or auction sites" are not real, they are simply "Identity Thieves and Credit Card Harvesters", usually based in a foreign country with a fake name etc...Many are not in the business of selling products, they are selling ads for search engines.
Why, aside from fraud, is there such a drastic price difference?
Several factors affect price and the rules are not "in stone" but here is a short lesson.
1. The Hinge, or lack of a hinge. The retail value of a quality hinge is about $10 ( $20 for 2).
2. The Pillow Construction. Cheap flimsy pillows or too hard pillows are cheap to make. Solid quality pillows that flex "just enough "cost more, much more! Retail of a quality hand made woman's size watch pillow is about $5.00 each, or $60 for a dozen pillows made in volume. Cheap, flimsy, fall apart, pillows can be had for less than $1.00 each.
3. The size of the pillow. A man's watch is about 3 times larger than a woman's watch. This means a pillow costing 3 times more! A case is useless if your watch does not fit and you have the inconvenience and cost of returning it. None of the cheap cases we bought allowed our larger watches to fit.
4. The size of the box itself. A big pillow means you need a big box to hold 12 of them!
5. The Quality of the materials used in construction. Leather versus faux leather. Cheap leather can cost as little as a few pennies a yard, while high quality Italian Leather can bankrupt you! Glass versus cheaper Plexiglas versus high end plexiglas. All three have their price issues. Glass is great but the potential breakage during shipment makes it cost prohibitive. Plexiglas of Glass Quality costs an arm and a leg!
6. A quality Lock or Latch or no locking mechanism at all. This can affect the price by up to $50 retail. The mechanism might sell for $5.00 wholesale, but the tools and skills needed to install the mechanism makes the price soar!
7. Simple things - like the shipping box makes a huge price difference.
8. Ironically. Expensive cases actually tend to have a smaller profit margin than the cheaper products, but we refuse to sell cheap merchandise! We neither apologize for nor cower about the value-based products we offer, simply put, the cases we sell are a good value for the job you need done. That job is to protect your valuable Luxury Watches from dirt, dust, and possible pilfering fingers!
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