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That's the bit I don't understand. You buy a Rolex, you have a Rolex. Yes, it's ridiculous that we are paying for the branding, but the whole aura of luxury goods is involved with the reputation for quality built up (and we saw the reverse with Burberry, where their reputation as stuffy upper class brand nose-dived once they started selling to chavs, though it seems their sales soared, so that's one example of where taking a brand downmarket paid off).
Buying a certificate that says "You own a picture of a Rolex" is what does not make sense to me.
Exclusivity is what makes luxury goods sell for such a high price, the reputation for high quality, outside of sometimes the very initial push that started the company, is a cope so that one does not have to admit they are that so vain and easily manipulated that they bought a technologically inferior watch (automatics are technologically inferior to quartz watches) at car prices just to keep up with the joneses. Expensive materials and manufacturing techniques are also a cope. If Burberry had kept the exact same quality and sold their products cheaper at prices chavs could now afford, upper-class people would still have turned away from the brand; they were buying because it separated them from people like chavs.
In the digital world, exclusivity is difficult. Digital data is freely copiable. The only way you could get exclusivity of a digital product is through a database; a company would sell you an exclusive digital product and would ensure its exclusivity through control over their database. But that requires that you trust these people when they claim their product will be kept exclusive and that you trust that they will still exist in the future. If you bought an expensive pet or mount in a MMORPG, that lasts until the servers shut down, and if someone makes a server emulator for the game then anyone can have the pet or mount.
NFTs enabled true exclusivity in the digital world; not only is the ownership of an NFT on the ledger not copiable, but you can also guarantee exclusivity through code; the code itself limits issuance, meaning that at no point the issuer can decide to make your NFT mass market and destroy its value. What Yugo Labs and other collectible people figured is that the crypto crowd is ironic enough that they would be willing to purchase exclusivity tethered to something essentially worthless (generated ugly monkey avatars), after it took off they started adding a marketing cope to keep attracting less irony-pilled buyers to drive up prices, that it was actually membership into an club, that it gave you access to unique experiences, etc...
Note that I'm defending monkey pictures here not in the sense that I think they're a good thing, but that they're no more vapid than luxury goods that sell on being purposefully exclusive, they just have less of a fig leaf to hide that vapidness.
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Yeah I can't defend the monkey picture application of NFTs, I'm talking about the underlying technology.
Burberry's sales have been cratering. It's just the lifecycle of the heritage brand. Lately they've been trying to reset to their "heritage" items, but the efforts have been flailing so far. You can tell, because I've read their puff pieces placed in the NYT and WSJ fashion sections, and they don't mention WWI, which is basically the birth of the brand. In WWI the iconic Burberry "Trench" coat existed for the trenches, and it was so good that while it was never issued British officers would buy them with their own money.
What I think could be a useful application of the NFT concept is if we manage to culturally tie the concept of owning an authentic rolex (and the utils that produces for people who own one) into owning the watch + the NFT associated with it.
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