Feature: 10 Ways Watch Brands Cheap Out
We’d all love a watch that does everything for nothing, but that’s just not going to happen. To make our watches cheaper, watch brands need to, well, they need to find ways to make their spend more efficient. Here’s ten ways they save money when making watches!
Folded Link Bracelets
Milling solid metal into complex shapes is very expensive. It’s far cheaper to simply take flat sheets of steel and just sort of fold them into a 3D shape. Sounds incredibly rudimentary, turning what is essentially tinfoil into watch parts, but it wasn’t just the cheaper brands using this technique to save money—the expensive ones did it too.
This Timex uses the process to make its Q Timex Reissue available for less than $200, and that seems fair, even if the folded metal links in the bracelet do wish prickly death upon your wrist hair. Believe or not, however, Rolex—and many other luxury brands besides—used the same technique. The so-called “rattly” Rolex bracelets with hollow folded links were still in service all the way into the early 2000s.
Machine Finished Movement
The most expensive part of making a watch—and therefore the opportunity to make the most saving—is the finishing of a movement. Skilled hands born and bred in Switzerland are as expensive as you’d imagine. It’s all part of the allure of a watchmaker like Patek Philippe, nurturing crafts that exist just to excel.
Not so great if you’re a brand that doesn’t have Patek Philippe budgets. You could just leave the raw movement unfinished and put a solid case back on it. Or you could take the middle road and get the watch finished—not by a person, but by a machine.
After all, it’s the machines making the blank parts in the first place, whether it’s Patek Philippe or the Baltic here. So, instead of handing off at that point to humans, you speak to the machines nicely and get them to do a little overtime. Sure, the finish isn’t as precise or as high quality, but it’s better than none at all. Bevelling, striping, polishing, turning—it’s all doable. Just not as good, or expensive.
Laser Cut Parts
Those machines we were talking about that manufacturer the raw parts, to be honest, they’re not particularly cheap either. The companies that do that work require minimum batches, skilled operators and machine hire time that can start to rack up.
It used to be that CNC machining was the latest and greatest technology, but the times are changing. There are new processes, like 3D printing, for example, that can enable smaller companies to have full autonomy on prototyping and production with a smaller spend.
Christopher Ward specifically uses laser cutting not just to quickly and easily prototype in-house, but for production parts as well. Doesn’t work for everything, but not only does it save time and money, it also allows the creation of more complex shapes like the gong here that would otherwise be very difficult.
Machine Cut Skeletonization
The art of cutting whacking great big holes in a watch—better known as skeletonization—has long since been practiced by watchmakers who don’t feel their work is being properly appreciated. Seriously, that’s how it started, when royal clockmaker André Charles Caron thought that King Louis XV wasn’t quite getting just how impressive his work was. Show, don’t tell was the principle Caron stuck with, opening up the clock to reveal the complex works inside.
As you can imagine, the process—especially on a tiny little watch—is very painstaking. For each piece of material that wants gone, a hole is drilled, a saw fed through and the material cut away by hand. That also leaves a lot more raw edges that need finishing too, also by hand.
At least, that’s how it used to be done. These days, machines can whip those bits out no problem. There is a catch, however: the cutting bits used in the machines are limited to a radius of themselves, so inside corners are often rounded rather than crisp angles.
Buying In Movements
It’s said that developing a simple, hand wound movement from scratch can cost upwards of a million dollars. That’s a lot of money to make the same thing people have been making for centuries. You don’t see each car manufacturer developing its own tyres and seatbelts and windscreen wipers from scratch, and so you really don’t see watchmakers developing their own hairsprings, jewels and wheels either. Unless you pay a lot of money of course.
The cheapest and easiest way isn’t just to source some components, but entire movements. Carmakers do it too with engines, even the fancy ones like Zonda. If there’s a business down the round that churns out sturdy, reliable watch movements for not a million dollars, that makes life a lot easier.
This Hanhart, for example, a reissue of a classic watch that looks every bit as good now as it did back then, wouldn’t be financially possible without the Sellita movement inside. It’d just be too expensive and no one would buy it. It’s a trick watchmakers—even the best, like Patek Philippe—have been using for centuries.
Stamped “Guilloche” Dials
You’re probably noticing a trend here, where it’s often easier to replace a traditional, complex, skilled craft performed by a bloke sat at an old wooden table with a machine. It’s sad in a way, but you can wipe away your tears with the money you’ll save by embracing it. Take the textured dial of this Tissot here. This is a watch that costs less than $1,000.
Do that the traditional way, for example with the similarly styled Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, and you’re looking at a very different—and far more expensive—process. Guilloche, performed on a rose engine, is an incredible thing. It’s like an old-fashioned Spirograph for engraving things, only if you get it wrong you’ve wasted hours of your time. Everything from the speed to the pressure of the engraving tool is controlled by a person, and so very good guilloche is very hard to make.
If you don’t want that final bit of resolution and would rather spend less, you can instead have a big old machine just smash the pattern into the dial instead. It’s not as finessed—it’s certainly not as elegant—but it’s at least affordable.
Quartz Movements
It’s very possible to save money by switching out an all-singing, all-dancing, in-house mechanical movement with one you sent away for, but there’s even more money to be saved by ditching the idea of mechanical altogether. After all, times have moved on! Our cars aren’t pulled along by horses anymore and our watches don’t need powering with springs either.
I mean, it’s still kind of nice to have, but if you want to buy a complicated watch like a chronograph but don’t want to splash out the cash to have a mechanical one, at least quartz gives you a cheaper alternative. That’s battery powered, crystal regulated watchmaking. It might not be glamourous and traditional, but it gets the job done.
Except, it can be glamorous and traditional, because even watchmakers like F. P. Journe, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Grand Seiko still turn out a pretty tasty looking quartz.
Made In China
Okay, so you’re ditching people for machines and you’re still not saving enough money. What next? Well, what if those machines weren’t in one of the most expensive places in the world to machine watch parts, Switzerland? What if they were somewhere else, like, say, China?
Funnily enough, the title “Swiss Made”, whilst heavily protected by law, still only requires a maximum of 60% of the movement’s value to be made in Switzerland. Producing the rest somewhere cheaper, therefore, makes a lot of sense. Or indeed, if you’re not bothered about Swiss made at all, producing the whole lot in China makes even more sense.
It’s not just about cheap movements, though. China is starting to compete in the arena of proper, high-quality watchmaking. It’s early days, but the signs are promising.
Stamped Hands
These cost-saving measures extend right down into the nitty-gritty details. I mean, a mechanical watch is 90% nitty-gritty details anyway, but you know what I mean. Every component presents an opportunity for cost saving, and that even includes tiny details like the hands.
Hands are actually one of the trickiest components to make. Even watchmakers like Rolex still outsource them. The very best watchmakers handcraft them from raw material, taking days and even weeks to make a single pair, but that’s just not going to work for anyone looking to spend this side of $100,000.
Most hands are cut by machine in some way and then finished by hand in batches, cleaning them up and making the edges nice and crisp. You can just skip that hand finishing part entirely, however, stamping them from a sheet to simultaneously cut and shape them all in one go.
Use Simplified Movements
Of all the ways to save a bit of money making a watch, I think the one I mind the least is the one used by Breitling in the Premier B25 Datora. On first glance it, would appear, thanks to all the fancy dials and windows, that this watch is a perpetual calendar, one that can adjust the date correctly through long and short months, including February, and even leap years.
Perpetual calendar watches are hideously expensive however, so that can leave a buyer who likes the complex look but doesn’t have the cash to back it up a bit lost. Not when the complications are produced a little less complicatedly!
Instead of a clever perpetual calendar, it’s simply a calendar. You have to adjust it at the end of every month. Sure, not quite the same mechanical wizardry, but at least more people can own and enjoy it.
