bbattle wrote: ↑September 26th 2019, 1:54pm
I take it this Daniel Mink character works for Invicta?
Nope. Back in the halcyon days of TeeVee wartche sales, Mink ran a company called Renato (or, as we call it here,
Renatoe.) The word was that ShopNBC (now Evine, or ShopHQ, or some fucking thing) bankrolled him, and Renatoe was the house brand of the network. Before that, Mink worked with his dad at Daniel Mink Watches, which was a pretty well regarded small Swiss brand.
Renatoe, alas, wasn't very Swiss. They used mainly Swiss quartz movements, but bunged those movements into garish, vulgar and tasteless cases, and gave them names like the T-Rex and (not kidding) the Sporgenza. Mink himself used to appear to shill his watches on Shop, and he was a very greasy bastard indeed. However, the watches sold well, and even Oprah Winfrey liked them, and shilled them when she was on TV. Like anything else that Oprah liked, sales went up.
Unfortunately, like most greasy bastards, Mink's reach outstretched his grasp. He decided that he could sell his watches online without ponying up the usurous margins that Shop demanded, and he broke with the network. That's when things started to slip. When chink tourbillons started showing up like mushrooms on the TeeVee wartche shitpile, Mink decided that Renatoe too would sell a tourbillon. Unfortunately, the Chinese, being pretty smart businessmen, didn't ship Mink his movements when, apparently, his check bounced. No Renatoe tourbillons ever appeared on the market, save perhaps a single one-off.
By this time, Mink was in, as the Brits say, Queer Street regarding his finances. He put out word for some admiring Geek to pick up the lease on his Audi; this was a big turning point, because a greasy bastard in an Audi might be mistaken for a big shot, but an Audi-less greasy bastard is just, well, a greasy bastard.
Other grifts surfaced too, like the Black Card scam, where a Geek could cough up a large amount of dough--I think it was a grand, but I might be wrong--and get a
lifetime warrantee on all his Renatoes, as well a free Renatoe sometime in the future, probably. Another con was a weirdly Amway-like grift where Geeks (for a price) could host Renatoe parties in their homes, which would hopefully include Mazola and Viagra. None of these ever came to anything, and Mink left the Florida Wartche Triangle for the more salubrious climes of New York City, where he became involved in the real estate business, where there's plenty of room for greasy bastards.
Today, Renatoe is an off-brand owned by a shit wartche company that supplies crap to lower-end department stores to load up on an endcap without bothering with Spiderwrap or other EAS tags. And Daniel Mink? Maybe now he's got an Audi again.
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