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There are two watch markets - utilitarian, and jewelry. The utilitarian market was all people wearing cheap Casios and Seikos just to see the time. These peopl

There are two watch markets - utilitarian, and jewelry. The utilitarian market was all people wearing cheap Casios and Seikos just to see the time. These people stopped wearing watches when they started carrying mobile phones (not even smartphones, this happened in the 00's). The Apple Watch brought these people back for utility - either seeing notifications on their wrist, or health/sports tracking. People still don't really need to see the time on their wrist, phones even have always-on OLED screens now. Now that you've decided to wear an Apple Watch, of course you're going to choose a band that looks nice, sure that part is jewelry, but not any more than a smartphone case. But nobody goes "oh wow that Apple Watch band is gorgeous, I'm going to buy and start wearing an Apple Watch for it" I don't think there is much to glean from the industry revenue because there's so much noise going on (the massive growth of the Chinese luxury market from zero)

dangus 3y ago
It’s still jewelry. Like I said, it’s not just the bands, Apple changes the device finishes every time they release a new product. And yes, I would argue that a smartphone case is jewelry. I would argue that the phones themselves are also jewelry! The fact that Apple brought back people who had stopped wearing watches just shows that there was demand for that sort of thing, and it was being unmet by traditional watches. People still want to see the time quickly but they now demand more than that. Yes, we segment out the luxury watch and commodity watch markets. Both of those markets are growing as a whole.