I wear the Richard Mille RM 011 Felipe Massa Black Night NTPT Carbon watch every day while reviewing it over these past couple of weeks – much as how one would spend every last moment driving that convertible supercar parked in front of the house if finally given the chance… The irresistible force of sheer curiosity and excitement will not allow you to do anything else but make use of such fascinating circumstances. 
These couple of weeks have, finally, allowed me to get a better idea about what it is like to live with a $140,000-plus Richard Mille on the wrist, and to see if it was as remarkable an experience as I anticipated. Ups and downs, and all there is to know about it, let’s find out!
Because Richard Mille watches are notoriously expensive, fairly complicated, and also tend to feature some new, high-tech material, they make for a difficult review subject. There are numerous factors for us to consider – including those that will help us answer why Richard Mille’s watches demand the prices they do, and why they can keep on producing over 4,000 of them per year.
Since the dawn of the new millennium, Richard Mille has been the, and I mean the ultra-expensive, extremely successful avant-garde watch brand in the watch industry – that is just a fact. However, for anyone without oligarch predecessors or direct access to an oil refinery’s yearly turnover, comprehending prices Richard Mille watches demand will likely prove to be extremely difficult.
So that we can compare, here are the very basics of a normal luxury brand’s normal pricing procedure: generally, a company first determines its specific market segment, its target audience, as well as the respective price point these factors necessitate. Only after all this has been taken into account does it start to develop and finalize the product itself. Needless to say, this method levies restrictions on the product itself, as it will ultimately have to comply with these predetermined cost- and pricing-related requirements.
As Richard Mille himself explained, the process of pricing his watches is unlike most other pricing strategies in the sense that what they do is first come up with an idea for a product, then they develop that idea so that the final product comes in as close as possible to what he and his team had dreamt it up to be. And only once all this has been achieved and the cost of all these efforts are taken into consideration do they set the final price.
