Gucci, Balenciaga, Tag Heuer, you name it. Many luxury brands are making the switch to accept crypto for their products. Now, another important brand from the watch world has joined in: Breitling. This is the latest brand to explore the possibilities of crypto as a payment method.
Collaboration with BitPay
Breitling recently entered into a partnership with BitPay, one of the largest crypto payment services. Some may know BitPay from its collaboration with Thuisbezorgd.nl, which allowed people to pay for their meals with crypto. This time, it’s not meals but watches.
This collaboration allows customers to buy watches and straps using crypto. According to the luxury watchmaker’s website, more than 10 currencies can be used for this purpose. The largest of these are bitcoin, dogecoin (DOGE), Ethereum (ETH), Binance USD (BUSD), and USD Coin (USDC).
This adoption by Breitling will not necessarily cause prices to rise immediately, but it will cause more ‘hopium’ that other companies will follow. Indeed, it was not long ago that three other major luxury brands adopted crypto. Gucci, Balenciaga, and the other Swiss watch brand Tag Heuer all dared to make the step.
Immediately available
The difference with Breitling is that they immediately start accepting crypto. The other brands wanted to run a test pilot in physical shops first (or only accept online payments for Americans). At the moment, you get to see the following when you want to checkout at Breitling:
As promised, BitPay is listed neatly in the bottom right of the payment options. You can then pay with crypto, and the watch will be delivered for free. But what if you don’t like the watch?
“The return process is the same as with any other payment option. The refund can be applied to another wallet, but the cryptocurrency must be the same one used for the original purchase,” says Breitling.
Fortunately, Breitling does not make an issue of that, but the question is whether they then use the value of the exchange rate at the time or whether they charge the actual value in crypto. It is plausible that they use the price at that moment, but if not, they will really see the value of crypto.
