When you go through 20 years of Wristwatch Annuals as a meditative exercise you pick up on things you wouldn't otherwise. Like the fact that Hublot was an also-ran with nothing really to say for itself until they hired Jean-Claude Biver in 2005, at which point they say "we hope for great things from Jean-Claude, fresh from Swatch" and then in 2006, instead of 24 models of assorted forgettable shapelessness they run six.fucking.versions.of.the.Big Bang. And just like that, they were Hublot. I wouldn't wear a Big Bang. But as of 2018 Hublot's 450 employees make 40,000 watches a year, none of them selling for less than $15k. And that, my friends, is the power of design and the power of marketing. And you can read articles about shit like that. It's another thing to track the footprints in the snow.
Swatch, alphabetically, is Blancpain, Breguet, Glasshutte Original, Jaquet Droz, Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, Tissot, Union Glasshutte and Harry Winston. It's worth noting that of that mess, only Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, Tissot and Harry Winston have anything to do with the companies they're named after. Blancpain, Breguet, Glasshutte Original, Jacquet Droz and Union were all reconstituted out of whole cloth in the past 30 years. But yeah. Swatch also owns ETA which means they're the heartbeat of a preposterous number of watch brands. What I find hilarious is the Omega boutique in downtown Seattle is now "Tourbillon Boutique" and while they carry Swatch, they don't carry Tissot because "tissot is a down-market brand" and I pointed to a glass case and said "that's a thirty dollar Swatch" and the tedious stuffed suit wrinkled his face up and went Because really, if you're manning the counter of a Swatch boutique in a Fairmont in Seattle you may think you're all that? ...but you're not. I've developed a general affection for Baume & Mercier (est. 1830, Richemont) and Universal Geneve (b. 1894 d. 2008, sort of the "Tudor" to Patek Philippe's "Rolex") because the Capeland Chrono is a lovely piece of Valjoux 7750 for not a lot of money (depending on the year) and because Universal Geneve managed to get weird without getting ugly and that, in all my studies, is a rare thing indeed.
The 2824 is in absolutely goddamn everything. I recently had to dissuade a friend from buying a watch since the "upgraded swiss movement" was a 2824.. It was a $200 option on top of a $1000 watch. I can't for the life of me remember what the brand was, I'll ask him next time I see him. That's a gorgeous Universal Geneve you linked. I love watching your journey through watchmaking and design.
One of the interesting side effects of going at the industry bottom-up is you develop new perspectives. One of which is that the "watch-o-sphere" is utterly and completely full of shit. Literally everything you see on aBlogToWatch or Monochrome is unsubstantiated garbage, opinion represented as fact, speculation parading as gospel truth. The first inkling of this was when the whole of Instagram torch'n'pitchforked the CODE Without paying the barest lipservice to the fact that the consumer press had done the exact same thing to the Royal Oak and the Nautilus. I have four years' worth of Wristwatch Annuals ingested. Now granted - the latest I've got is 2006. But I've got the movement of every single wristwatch every single company of note wanted to advertise and the ETA 2892 is far more popular than the 2824, and the Valjoux 7750/7751/7753/7754 is more popular than the 2892. Bell & Ross, that storied brand for adventurers that are made by Sinn and have heritage dating all the way back to 1997, charged an extra $1400 for a synthetic sapphire crystal in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Fuckers were selling a $2200 watch with a plastic crystal or for $3400 you could buy the same damn watch only it came with a $22 corundum crystal. And that's $22 to me. RETAIL. An 11 3/4''' Seagull is $20 at retail. An 11 1/2''' Miyota is $54 at retail. An 11 1/2''' ETA 2824 is $239 at retail. $200 upsell on the ETA is basically a pass-through cost. They're not making a dime on it.
Holy hell you aren't kidding. I'm extremely casual with watch news and research so I've somewhat just taken those blogs at their word. But the CODEs, goddamn. They look like something I could buy at Macy's... and that one is $70k. Huh, I didn't know ETA's were that expensive. At the same time, if you're buying a watch over $1k, I feel that a movement of ETA quality should be the bare minimum.
One of the points made by Michel Chevalier is that with fragrances, you can't test-market shit: you launch it onto the market and hope for the best. Which, really, works out because if 97% of the marketplace thinks your cologne smells like skunkshit but 3% think it's ambrosia, you're a success. You need 3% of the market to love your shit and the rest of the world can fuck right off. That's a Bulgari Assioma (or "assaroma" as a buddy calls it). It's... divisive. But considering the biggest buyers of wristwatches in Europe are Italian men, Bulgari has been successfully selling many variations of the Assioma for twelve years. I get the CODE hate. It doesn't look like a Royal Oak. It looks "generic" compared to a Royal Oak, which has been 70% of what Audemars has sold for 40 years. But at some point Audemars had to go "errrrrm that design is 40 years old" and do something else. And the CODE has a new font, it has a 3D case, it's got an aventurine dial and it's got a clean look. That's a Chronoswiss Opus. It's a very nice skeletonized chronograph. Chronoswiss has been selling them at a moderate pace for maybe 20 years. They sell new for between $15k and $50k and they're impressive. But That's an MB&F LM Perpetual. You're going to pay at least $125k for it. Thing is? The case on that CODE looks an awful lot like the Romain Gaulthier Logical One a buddy of mine is about to buy. I'm pretty sure the LG1 was made by APRP, AP's "skunk works" where they manufacture as an OEM for all these little tweaky brands. And the fact that Audemars has been making other peoples' tweaky brands for 20 years leads me to believe that they've got a better thumb on the pulse of where the market's going than, say, Patek. Yeah the design language is vaguely reminiscent of the cheap stuff in some ways. But I'll bet they sell a lot of them. And I'll bet everyone shuts the fuck up by next year. And I'll bet the blog-o-sphere will have no memory of how insanely they hated on that watch by the time it's been out for five years. It's the best version of that watch, and that watch is gonna sell great.
It's a bit fascinating to watch you go down the rabbit hole around building a luxury watch brand from learning the raw skills necessary to understand and build the ins and outs of a watch to learning luxury branding while researching the whole history behind watchs and doing market research. I'm impressed by your discipline to apply the "do not half-ass anything" mantra.