sdandrea1 No worries for L.A.B. anyway. There's PLENTY of buyers in the USA and elsewhere that will pay full price no matter what.
Yeah, in most cases any high end / luxury brand that is not a counterfeit will come with a high price tag.
There’s one exception I can think of. Diamonds. For years if you wanted a real diamond you had to pay a premium price controlled by a cartel. Debeers. Or buy a cubic zirconia look-alike. lol
Back in the 1950’s some engineers at GE figured out how to grow a diamond. Fast forward to today. A LAB grown diamond. Which is indistinguishable from a natural diamond.
Both are 100 percent carbon using high temperature / high pressure to make a diamond. One takes thousands or millions of years in the ground and one takes weeks in a lab.
One analogy is one couple conceives a baby the natural way and one couple conceives a baby using in vitro fertilization (used to be called test tube).
9 months later both have a 100 percent baby which are indistinguishable. lol Can’t tell which was naturally conceived and which was laboratory conceived thru science.
Back to diamonds. A Lab diamond is a fraction of the cost of a natural diamond. Yet thru marketing people believe the natural diamond is better.
When in fact you can get a better quality Lab diamond for a much lower cost. But again thru marketing DeBeers has controlled the price of natural diamonds.
There is no shortage of natural diamonds. DeBeers being a cartel controls how many are on the market.
So again, yeah high end luxury items generally come with a high price tag. Some items can be counterfeited close to what the original is. Which may be the case with L.A.B. putters and some like a Rolex watch are nowhere near the original.
Still, no one should pass off a counterfeit as the original. Even Lab diamonds have a number on the girdle that has LG 123456789 etc. for example to distinguish naturally grown from lab grown.
Bottom line is we’re all susceptible to Madison Avenue branding / marketing.