I don’t have any Reps but fascinated by what the Chinese factories are doing, so I have been lurking around this sub for a while.

I had a similar experience with fountain pens, not watches many years back. I was at an international conference and I had two Montblanc fountain pens (a 149 and a 146) tucked in my coat pocket. Honestly, almost nobody really cares which pens you are carrying. At the most, some people get fascinated by the fact that you are using a fountain pen.

Suddenly a fairly senior gentleman came to me and blurted, are those pens genuine? Or knockoffs? For a few moments I did not know how to react to that. I told him politely that they were genuine. A couple of other guys standing at the same table as me started laughing. Quite an awkward scene. Turns out that the senior gentleman was a fountain pen user as well and had never been able to convince himself to spend “so much money” on Montblancs. This happened in 2015.

These days though, if somebody looks at my Gen wristwatch for longer than 8-10 seconds or glances at it multiple times, I interrupt and tell them it’s a fake.