This is the movie that Gwyneth Paltrow has chosen over Titanic. I liked this movie and I often wondered about its premise, how missing two seconds of an event had changed the course of Gwyneth’s character forever. One scenario is that she was able to catch the train and the other was the train’s doors shutting on her face, making her miss the trip. Just a difference of two seconds, her life had forked.

I wouldn’t know which two seconds of my life would have been the turning point but I can tell the exact moments that certainly would have been pivotal. Like for example, what if I decided to cancel that initial meeting with J at Westin Singapore? I was supposed to cancel it because I was still in a meeting with my manager and my team mates. I was flying later that evening back to Manila and I didn’t want to be harassed going to the airport because it was already late. The meeting was supposed to be earlier that day but he forgot to put it in his phone’s calendar because I also forgot to RSVP. So we moved it to 4 pm.

If I cancelled that meeting, I wonder how my life would have been. I think I still would have moved to our apartment in QC even if I hadn’t met him and then I would still eventually move here in my hometown. I still would have built my home. But I think what I would have missed are the lessons from that painful experience. I would not have taken that long and arduous road to learning how to love myself.

But then, I always believed I am put in a place where I am supposed to be. I am meant to be here. It doesn’t matter if I took the circuitous route or the straight path, I will always end up here.

Just like when Gwyneth’s character in Sliding Doors. She missed the train so she wasn’t able to catch her boyfriend in bed with another woman. When she didn’t miss the train, she was able to catch her bf in flagrante delicto. She broke up with him and in the throes of her grief, met a better guy.

However, in the multiverse where she missed the train, she still ended breaking up with the bf. At the end of the movie, the other guy was just in the background but you can insinuate that eventually they would have met, even if it would have been a different circumstance. Gwyneth would still have ended with the better guy.

We are where we’re supposed to be.

Speaking of Singapore, I just watched this video by Tanner Leatherstein that showed how he tried to expose the deception being perpetuated by bag maker Aupen.

Given that Singapore is one of the top 3 most expensive cities to live in, there is no way that bags sold for USD 300, competing with mid-level luxury brands (think sub-USD 1,000 bags like Kate Spade, Tory Burch, Coach, and Michael Kors) are being made there. The margins would have been too thin. Even the homegrown brands like Charles & Keith and and Tocco Toscano (which I like and have two bags from them) aren’t made in Singapore (*whispers in mainland China Mandarin*).

What this video exposes is that mainland Chinese companies use Singapore as a front to appeal better to the broader public. Aupen claims on their website that their bags are made in Singapore but there are no tags that state where they are really manufactured (as per requirement by WTO). Tanner traced the shipment of the bag that he ordered and saw it was shipped from Guangdong, China where bulk of the world’s bags are made. He said it doesn’t make sense to manufacture bags in Singapore then ship to a warehouse in Guangdong. That would have eaten the very thin margin that may have left after paying the expensive wages Aupen would have paid its hypothetical Singapore-based workers.

Yeah dude, Singapore to Guangdong is five to six hours by air. Shipping from Singapore to Guangdong to ship all around the world is nuts. Who is Aupen kidding?

So what’s my point? Chinese companies like to pass themselves off as companies from somewhere else other than China because there is wide belief that goods manufactured in that country are of low quality. They’re also circumventing some trade embargo to be imposed/being imposed by Western countries.

Once luxury brands are bought by the likes of LVMH and Kering, manufacturing is moved to China to have wider margins. Yes, Louis Vuitton and Chanel are made in China, hence, the anecdotal evidence that quality of the products by Kering and LVMH are much more inferior than years past.

Some speculated that Aupen is secretly being funded by these luxury conglomerates to create a new brand that would appeal to Gen Z. These Gen Zs aren’t buying the goods from well-established brands because they feel like they’re sooo old—something that mommy or auntie are buying.

Established brand aren’t appealing to the generations anymore.

The gameplan is to make them trend on social media, create artificial shortage to make the brand more desirable and less accessible, and then when the brand becomes established among the younger generation of consumers, the brand gets “acquired” by these luxury conglomerates. It’s basically these conglomerates are cannibalizing their own market to get a bigger share in the consumers’ wallets.

And just like that, Aupen announced the collab with LVMH, even if it’s still plastered on their website that they’re closing down their operations because the founders wanted to take a break. 😉