MBA Training Data

Grey market leaks: Richemont's serial number fix

MBA Training Data

Show Notes

Genuine Cartier and IWC pieces were surfacing in unauthorised Asian markets at 20 to 35 percent discounts, and the villain was Richemont's own distributors. The position taken here is blunt: anti-counterfeiting gets the attention, but the grey market is the larger financial wound, and distribution integrity is a data governance problem wearing a legal costume.

You get the sequence Richemont followed to build a product-level data layer where each serial number is a live record updated at every handoff, the 40-odd maison fight over one shared definition of a serial event, and why enforcement worked as deterrence rather than analytics. Referenced sources include dbt Labs on 18-month data modeling rebuilds, O'Reilly Radar and MIT Sloan Management Review on ownership failures.

0:00 Genuine IWC watches discounted in Bangkok 1:00 Why wholesale arbitrage is hard to admit 1:57 The governance cost of one serial schema 2:57 Deterrence beat detection in the grey market 3:44 Define the product record before buying tooling 4:25 Trace ten units of your top product

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