Right About Now with Ryan Alford - How Premium Brands Create Demand Without Cutting Their Prices | Tom La Vecchia

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Ryan Alford sits down with Tom La Vecchia for a smart conversation on what luxury brands are really selling now — and why modern brand strategy is less about pure exclusivity and more about cultural participation. Using the rumored AP x Swatch collaboration as the centerpiece, Tom explains why giving more people a way into the brand does not necessarily weaken the grail product. Instead, he argues that it can strengthen long-term demand by creating nostalgia, recognition, and early emotional attachment before the consumer has the budget to buy the flagship version. Ryan brings the operator and brand-builder perspective, challenging the idea from the standpoint of old-school scarcity and luxury signaling. Together, they unpack why some watch brands stayed culturally relevant while others missed the shift, and why owned media, borrowed interest, and patient brand seeding matter more than ever. Topics Covered The business logic behind AP x Swatch Why exclusivity is now emotional as much as financial How culture and hype feed brand aspiration Why sneaker culture changed the luxury playbook The difference between premium, luxury, and grail positioning Why some legacy brands adapted and others stalled The value of owned media and controlled distribution Ryan Alford and Tom La Vecchia on playing the long brand game Links Right About Now https://www.ryanisright.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford Ryan Alford https://ryanalford.com/ https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford/ Tom La Vecchia / X Factor Media / New Theory https://xfactormediagroup.com/ https://xfactormediagroup.com/about/ https://newtheory.com/ https://newtheory.com/author/tomla/ https://www.youtube.com/@NewTheoryMagazine

Exclusivity nowadays is emotional. It's not just financial. And then what happens is recognition actually increases that desire. Swatch, it's a win. It elevates their brand. AP gets them out there inexpensively and people want it even more. A family member of mine has a Royal Oak. I asked him right away joking around.

I said, great, I'm going to get mine for 400 bucks. And he laughed and he goes, hey, absolutely. It's going to be a few beautiful watch. But there's still only one Royal Oak. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts.

This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now. On today's episode, Right About Now, we're using the rumored AP and Swatch collaboration is a live case study into how modern brands strategize and use borrowed attention. Tom Lavec is the founder of X Factor Media and New Theory Magazine. And he spent years working at the intersection of marketing, media sales, customer behavior, and brand positioning. And this conversation is not just about watches.

It's about attention, exclusivity, and cultural relevance. Tom, welcome. It's right about now. What's up, Tom, how you doing? Great, Ryan. Pleasure to be here. Hey, man, good to have you. Hey, the X Factor.

You had me at X Factor. Good name. I like it. Got my attention. And more importantly, so is all the headlines that have been happening lately. I know you've got a lot of opinions on them. We'll get at it. Where's home today?

I live in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. That's Union County, New Jersey. Anybody from that area? Westfield, Elizabeth, the area. Not too far from Newark Airport. Yeah. What is X Factor? What are we doing?

X Factor Media is a full service digital marketing company. We've been around for 12 years. We do media marketing, et cetera. We own some media properties, New Jersey Digest, Social Life, Lifestyle Magazine, and then take certain buy-in-wide-only retainer clients, plastic surgery space, some other spaces. We do a lot of branding, marketing, et cetera, but we also do stuff for ourselves as well.

A lot of guys are marketing companies. And it's like, well, what have you done? Well, we do it for ourselves every day. And then we try to do it for our clients as well. Yeah. That's the key. And that's the difference. A lot of times the cobblers, is it the cobblers children have no shoes, something like that?

Yeah, a plumber with a leaky pipe. Yeah, exactly. And I always sounded interesting, the social media agency that has three posts. Yeah. We do social media marketing. We, our largest account on Instagram has about 162,000. followers at NJ Digest, and everybody wants check it out. We do all on TikTok, my YouTube, separate podcast, separate property, about 104,000 subs. So yeah, we walk to walk because again

at the end of the day, if you can't do it, how do you do it for the people? Yeah, exactly. One thing that may not have been directly what I will talk about with some of the things, we're going to talk about a specific story. That thing's interesting with crossover brands and things like that. You bring up the fact that you started publications. You're an agency, but you started your own distribution for attention. I heard local and sort of national concepts it almost sounded like. I'd love to talk about that a little bit because that's pretty fascinating to me. And I've experienced that, you know, doing podcasting, which is, you know, the form of media.

Talk to me about what you've done there. I'd love to say it started out at some great MBA strategy driven type activity. It's just we were doing local media buying for our clients. And I was terribly under-impressed, small email list, not a lot of engagement, bought engagement, etc. So I said, well, wait a second. Why can we do this ourselves? New Jersey Digest actually was an acquisition. I acquired it in 2019.

It's been around in the Jersey area, super hyper-local and Hoboken. Not a good story, but a funny story, if you will. Now it's funny. Is both the publication late 19, three months later, COVID hit. All the advertisers dry it up, but the loan didn't. It was literally a local, small publication. After kind of the Reader's Digest, you put in your release or your jacket,

we had a clear publication, which ran an abandoned. We said, you know what? We're digital guys and guys. Let's go digital. Let's go Jersey wide. And we just struck the right core. Somebody was home. We got a huge amount of leadership. And we just got to never look back. We didn't make me one or two print since, but we stuck it digitally since. And now we reach about a million and a half people a month. But the idea really was to have an agency owned asset that we own. Don't get me wrong. I love our agency clients. And we're there to increase the revenue and we're there to trade time for money.

And we do it and maximize their return the best we can. But it's about equity and ownership. And when you own the bricks, it makes it a little bit. easier to function as an agency because you have more resources, frankly, as well. Yeah, it's interesting. Playing both sides of the fence. Selling the ads, coming up with the ads, and then owning the distribution point. But if you've got the eyeball, I mean, it doesn't really matter.