[XorNot]

But they don't sell $10,000 headphones direct. And Beats has the same model: "same as the stars use to mix their tracks".

Of course that's complete garbage, but its a much easier sell when the only headphones you sell are an affordable $200-400 range with "justifiable" reasons for it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Watch doesn't work as a Veblen product because it falls into the uncanny valley of not quite being unaffordable enough.

A $1,000,000 watch in a limited edition of 25 would do much less damage to the brand than a $17,000 watch in a limited edition of ????

Median buyers know that they can never afford $1,000,000 for a watch. So at that price it remains a celebrity fantasy product, and some the fantasy gets reflected onto the rest of the range.

$small-number,000 is - paradoxically - almost, but not quite, affordable. It's not any more expensive than many cars, and people buy those all the time.

But the only extra value is the case and the strap. So it looks a like you're paying a lot to pay a lot, and getting something very mass market for the money.

With a nicer strap and case. But people don't buy watches for the strap or the case.

Now you have an "exclusive" product that isn't producing the right exclusivity signals, but at the same time it's expensive enough to seem gratuitously and irritatingly unreachable.

There's nothing insanely great about this. I don't think Steve Jobs would have done it. (I mean - who knows? But historically, there's good reason to suspect this wouldn't have worked for him.)