Apple Hires Away TAG Heuer's VP of Global Sales 67
An anonymous reader writes With Apple rumored to be entering the wearables market this Fall, the company's string of notable hires continues. CNBC is reporting today that Apple recently poached Patrick Pruniaux away from TAG Heuer where he served as the company's VP of global sales for the past five years. TAG Heuer, in case you're unfamiliar, is a Swiss-based manufacturer of luxury watches. Word of the Pruniaux hire comes just shortly after it was discovered that Apple hired the lead software engineer away from Atlas Wearables, a company working on a fitness tracker capable of measuring a plethora of exercise related data.
Re:What's next (Score:3, Interesting)
This. I have been saying this for years.
Apple is, and day by day, more and more - a boutique brand. Their pricing is incompatible with all but a handful of wealthy nations, and within those nations, upper income consumers. Their market share is very, very small.
They make high quality, beautifully designed, well thought out products that include luxury differentiators that are unnecessary for most users' needs. Billeted unibody aluminum cases in a world of plastic. Very high resolution laptop & desktop displays in a world of commodity 1920x1080. High speed SSD in a world of SATA spinny hard drives - that now, with RAM caching on-drive, are almost as fast as SSD. And the list of "luxury differentiators" goes on. And, most people who buy their products use them to do exactly the same work as the commodity Windows machines costing half the price.
And, Apple makes virtually nothing themselves - they design, and use a slew of Asian contract manufacturers to build their products - making them something of an analogue for European high fashion clothing brands. Design Studio to Runway, email the patterns off to Vietnam, container ship the fall dresses to the stores in a couple months. Design Studio to emailing the schematics off to FoxConn, container ship the phones for fall launch in a couple months.
Apple has probably resigned itself to the fact they will never move the marker significantly either direction for market share. Like any premium consumer brand targeted at upper middle to upper income consumers - Bose, BMW, etc. - There exists at any point in time a percentage of the population wanting those differentiators. And by adding a few tiny, special wrinkles to your products, the margins can be increased handsomely.
"Sapphire display glass." A Red Herring. The Corning "Gorilla Glass" product currently available is incredibly scratch resistant and costs 1/10th the price. The entire issue is obviated by the phone chassis being machined of aluminum, which is extremely soft and will scratch or dent badly from foreign objects in your pocket or hard surface drops, so the first thing most iPhone owners do is entomb their device in exactly the kind of design-hiding, ugly plastic case that makes Jony Ive bolt wide awake at night in a cold sweat.
But, another luxury differentiator that looks fantastic with a stylish Keynote slide transition, and a cute bar chart boasting of comparative surface hardnesses.
Luxury differentiators, small boutique brands, huge margins, discriminating consumers - all of Apple's recent executive hires have been from clothing & luxury wearable companies. It would appear they've made peace with their position in the world.