Montblanc unveils a luxury watch strap with an activity tracker and vibrator for notifications, available in June for about $425
Roberta Naas / Forbes :
Context & Ripple Effects
Montblanc is taking a different path into wearables than most of the Swiss industry: instead of building a smartwatch, it embeds activity tracking and haptic notifications into a strap for existing watches, priced around $425. That puts it nearly head-to-head on price with the Withings Activité, which reviewers had just flagged as too expensive for the mass market but viable for watch enthusiasts — exactly Montblanc's customer base.
The rest of the coverage shows the field splitting into two strategies: full smartwatches like TAG Heuer's roughly $1,400 Android Wear model due in November, and collaborative moves such as Swiss watchmakers adopting a shared open platform for embedded activity tracking. Montblanc's strap is the minimal-commitment version of the same bet.
First-order effects
- Montblanc owners can add fitness tracking and silent vibration alerts to watches they already own for about $425 when it ships in June, without replacing the timepiece itself.
- Withings faces direct competition in its niche: Montblanc targets the same enthusiast buyer at nearly the same price point, but with a heritage luxury brand behind the product.
Second-order effects
- Razer's move a year later to sell the Nabu Watch with similar tracking and notification features starting at $150 shows the accessory-plus-notifications formula getting commoditized downward, squeezing the middle of the price band.
- Full-smartwatch players like TAG Heuer must justify a more than threefold price premium over Montblanc's strap by offering capabilities a strap cannot deliver, pushing them toward richer software rather than basic alerts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the luxury watch market settles into a tiered structure — cheap hybrid bands, mid-priced hybrids like this strap, and high-end full smartwatches — culminating in offerings like Garmin's later $1,500–$2,500 Marq line aimed squarely at premium buyers.
- Swiss brands' adoption of a common open platform suggests the industry treats smart features as a shared commodity layer, with brand and materials, not technology, becoming the basis of differentiation.
The trend: Wrist-worn tech is stratifying across the entire price spectrum — from $150 hybrids to $2,500 premium smartwatches — forcing luxury watchmakers to decide whether to bolt smarts onto tradition or replace it.