I’m still waiting for my new office to be completed so I can start putting books on shelves and behind glass doors.
But since my Control Center here in the office is up, complete with two big 19″ monitors, I couldn’t resist the urge to do a little online surfing.
What I just found surprised me.
I like luxury. So do others, apparently. In my curiosity about what common items could be made expensive, I stumbled across a gent in Austria who makes luxury cell phones.
That’s right: Cell phones.
He adds gold and diamonds to them. He makes them heavy. He makes them gaudy. He made his first one in 1998 and the media did all the promoting for him.
His site reflects his uniqueness (typos and punctuation errors are all his):
each fantastic aloisson diamante phone is a rebel of todays pace.
the industry says – we are making the phones lighter and smaller – i make my phones heavier with gold
the industry says – we are making shock- and waterproof phones – i completely encrust my phone with magnificent diamonds
the industry wants us to replace a perfect working phone every 3 – 6 months with a new model – i make these maginificent objects for eternity.
if a product swims that much against today’s trends and fights that hard against a whole industry’s order – it cannot be just a simple product or a commodity. it must be an object of art.
And each item of art he creates for you will cost you about $20,000.
Twenty thousand dollars.
He’s looking for investors, too, in guess you’re getting excited.
I think too many of us forget that people have money for what they want (not always for what they need).
And people often spend money easily on things the rest of us think is unnecessary.
But the people doing the spending think their purchase is necessary. To them, it’s rational.
They need to do it to feel unique, to reward themselves, to stand out in a crowd, to make others jealous, to feel the thrill of owning something rare.
So maybe you and I aren’t thinking big enough.
And maybe we’re not thinking counter-intuitive.
Maybe we’re too logical in our marketing.
Maybe we’re too intuitive in our marketing.
Maybe we should just be charging more for our goods.
Add a diamond to what you sell and see how much you can get for it.
Or paint it in gold and multiply the current price by one hundred.
Just how far can we go here, anyway?
PS – See the luxury cell phone artist’s site at http://www.aloisson.com/
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