Rolex's Manufacturing Facilities (2015)
hodinkee.com
hodinkee.com
We are shuffled into a secure room – we are about to see
the legendary Rolex automated stock system. Our guide
places his eyes to the iris scanner (no lie) the doors
slide open, and what we see is downright startling.
[...]
There are two 12,000 cubic meter vaults, spliced by a
network of rails totaling 1.5 kilometers, transporting
over 2,800 trays of components per hour between the 60,000
storage compartments and the workshops upstairs.
The view is straight out of Star Wars, minus the 1970s camp.
This is efficiency defined.
Even if you're not particularly into watches, Rolex is a really neat example of a suuuuuper vertically integrated company. They even make their own steel! Necessary? Probably not; I'm not aware that they actually accomplish some sort of magic metallurgy. But, that's no ordinary company.
In terms of things the average person can afford... if this kind of thing actually appeals to you but you can't imagine spending Rolex money...
Seiko comes close and arguably exceeds even Rolex in terms of history, innovation, and vertical integration. It's one reason why Seiko is a favorite of many in the hobby. Why does this matter? Well, for many, it's simply neat to know that every single piece of the tiny little miracle machine on your wrist came from a single slightly secretive company.
Timekeeping in general, and mechanical watches in particular, are a fascinating and vital part of human history.
(And as wristwatches are something of a solved problem, they're appealing to me on that level after fighting with the framework of the week at my day job.)
Is the engineering/logistics behind Mechanical watches really costlier than Oneplus phones ?
Is the engineering/logistics behind Mechanical watches really
costlier than Oneplus phones ?
Altogether, there are probably orders of magnitude more engineering involved in a mobile phone. But a lot of the "hard stuff" when it comes to a OnePlus phone is not done by them: they are not running their own chip foundries, designing their own silicon, researching their own battery tech, mining their own rare earth elements for the batteries, writing their own kernel from scratch, etc.
Which is not to say I personally find a Tissot to be worth $700, relative to other watches.
But! This stuff is all just "functional jewelry" anyway; even a Rolex doesn't keep time as well as a $15 quartz Casio. Could a Tissot provide $700 of happiness to somebody else, who isn't me? Maybe! Heck, I'm not even familiar with their whole catalog, perhaps they have a bunch of watches I'd love.
It's also worth noting you can get a perfectly nice mechanical watch from Seiko or Orient for $100-$500USD. For me, that starts to approach some kind of reasonable value. Not on purely functional terms, but as something I will wear and enjoy for hundreds and possibly thousands of hours? I can't justify it on logical terms, but there are worse ways to spend disposable income. Barring disaster a watch will also work for decades, which is not likely to provide much joy to the owner beyond five years or so.
(In fact if you don't mind buying from non-authorized dealers you can actually get a Tissot for cheap as well - I've seen them for not much over $100)
I'd like to second your Tissot recommendation. They're excellent quality for the price. I'm not a watch collector, but I am very fond of my Tissot Visodate, which replaced an Apple Watch that I found to be largely useless and quite annoying to wear.
There are a great number of manufacturers with a long histories of watch-making, for example Vostok from Russian, and Laco from Germany. (I have a couple of Vostok "dive" watches, which cost about €60 each, as well as a nice Laco pilot-watch for around €300). You could even go Japanese with companies like Orient.
Watch companies making their own steel is not a new thing. At least for balance wheel springs.
Here's one of those classic Jam Handy films about watch mechanisms, made for the Hamilton Watch Company.[2]
[1] http://rolexpassionreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/rpr...
That same photo also appears in the original article where it explains that it is not the “super secret” one from the Rolex Plan-les-Ouates location but the Bienne location’s “pared-down” version of the stocking system.
I hope I don't sound dismissive, nor do I not want to hold anyone from a nice hobby, but also, the timepiece hobby wouldn't really be what it is _without_ the storytelling.
But, it's always fascinating to me to see how they do things.
As an engineer, I really appreciate that level of engineering excellence. In a world where nearly everything is so ruthlessly cost-cut, it's kind of nice just to see excess on the technical side.
Maybe that's why I love reading about it. I'm a software engineer, and I literally do not have enough hours in a day to do my job. All I do is cut corners and I seldom love the result.
No, but helps give some allure to the process, to justify the 500%+ markup.
(I appreciate craftmanship of the Hatori Hanzo variety. But Rolex is crass commercialism with ridiculus markups and "faux" legacy).
However, their insane markups enable some serious engineering (please forgive the term) "porn."
As a software engineer I do nothing but cut corners all day. While I do not desire to own a Rolex, I love these glimpses into their utterly surrealistic world of engineering excess.
Collecting mechanical watches is especially bad in these last couple of years because the prices have gone up by a lot with little to none technical advances to back it up. It looks to me like a ponzi scheme supported by the watch media (hodinkee in particular [0]) as they try to push watches as a sort of investment - which they are not it you actually wear them. The manufacturers put out one overpriced limited edition after another where the only thing that changes is the color scheme.
There's a lot to talk about and I'm sure I didn't do a good job of presenting my case in such a short post, but at least keep this warning in the back of your head.
[0] https://thetruthaboutwatches.com/2020/12/ben-clymer-hodinkee...
Right now these are missing from my collection:
- Seiko SCVF-009 "Red Alpinist" with green dial - I already have the cream dial (SCVF-007) and the black dial (SCVF-005) counterparts.
- Citizen 67-9356 Octagon chronograph, in both white dial and black dial configurations; I find this one interesting because it was like the only inexpensive hi-beat (28,800 bph) chronograph, complete with day-date and flyback mechanism, ever produced in the history of Japanese watch-making.
- Grand Seiko 6186-8000 VFA, in both blue-dial-and-long-hands, and white-dial-and-short-hands configurations. A ridiculously accurate Grand Seiko with a dial design that (I find) really stands the tests of time. Legend has it that the Seikos performed so well that the Swiss eventually gave up inviting them to the chronometer competition (because Seikos kept coming out at the top). I consider this model the pinnacle before Seiko resorted to "cheating" with the SpringDrive.
Curiously, I'm not really interested in Swiss watches.
I think having a list of "vintage grail watches" you just "need to have" is more curious than that :)
Establishing this list at least ultimately caps how much money I’ll waste in a certain kind of things. In contrast, I’m unable to establish such a list about books and video games. At this point I don’t even know how much money I’ve spent buying my hundreds of books and hundreds of games (although “fortunately”, the vast majority of them were bought at heavy discount).
And indeed, you can easily fall into this trap of buying a never-good-enough better one.
By “digital,” I assume you really mean quartz?
In some ways you're right, there are brands out there that put out short-lived special editions. But equally there are a lot of cheap and readily available pieces which are becoming much more well-known and accessible.
All my watches have been bought used, and if ever I reach a point where one of them no longer makes me smile when I look at it then it will be resold. Sometimes watches appreciate in value, but it is a gamble and I think suggesting somebody buy a watch as an investment has got to be bad advice almost 100% of the time. If they go up, great? If they go down? Well if you enjoyed it for the time you owned it that shouldn't matter so much
When it comes to keeping time, potentially underwater, etc, there are no extra returns, diminishing or not, functionality-wise to going from a $300 to a $3000. A $80 G-Force will do all of that and better.
Now, if we include "sociatal value" (seen as rich, sophisticated) there are also not much returns from going above $300. At that level people wont know what you wear and wont care.
If you want to make an impression to those who do know, and can tell, you'll need to go above $10000. And if you have that kind of money, you probably don't need to make an impression.
A friend of mine got a watch for his birthday (or Christmas I don't remember), he showed it to me and I told him: "Oh nice, it has a transparent back to display the 'automatic' mechanism, just like my $60 swatch from the 80s"
Turns out his watch costs more than $4k... You're so right, unless you're in a social circle who knows as much as you do about watches, you can have a $30 copy or a $30k original, it doesn't really matter, all people will see is "a nice watch"
A friend of mine got a watch for his
birthday (or Christmas I don't remember),
he showed it to me and I told him: "Oh nice,
it has a transparent back to display the 'automatic'
mechanism, just like my $60 swatch from the 80s"
That's not to say one's better than the other. Most of my watches are quartz. Quartz powered watches are something of a modern miracle and are more accurate than any mechanical watch.
But, why did you feel the need to rain on your friend's parade? Mechanical watches are really fascinating little machines.
A friend of mine got a watch for his
birthday (or Christmas I don't remember),
he showed it to me and I told him: "Oh nice,
it has a transparent back to display the 'automatic'
mechanism, just like my $60 swatch from the 80s"
That's not to say one's better than the other. Most of my watches are quartz. Quartz powered watches are something of a modern miracle and are more accurate than any mechanical watch.
But, why did you feel the need to rain on your friend's parade? Mechanical watches are really fascinating little machines and some people find them really enjoyable.
Simpler maybe, but it's 100% mechanical: https://www.fratellowatches.com/tbt-the-original-swatch-auto...
I made a mistake though, not from the 80s, but from 1991.
> why did you feel the need to rain on your friend's parade?
That's the point, I didn't know there was a parade to begin with
That's the point, I didn't know there was a parade to begin with
Although, there are vastly divergent ways to tackle this hobby.
Lots of people focus on cheap quartz watches and affordable mechanicals from Seiko and the like. Personally, I am head over heels for Casio as well. You can have a great Casio collection (MDV-106 Duro, G-Shock, A168) for under $100. Casio has sold their original black G-Shock virtually unchanged for decades; you can pick one up for $45 at Amazon or WalMart and a lot of folks consider that watch as important as anything Rolex has ever done.
While I admittedly was quickly "addicted" to watches, climbing the ladder of luxury watches held zero interest to me. It was just so obvious to me from the beginning: you can literally spend as much as you want and you'll never be happy. Cars, hi-fi gear, it all works that way.
Their beauty combined with their flaws puts people on
the never ending, wallet destroying quest for the holy
grail. And the diminishing returns from jumping from a
"budget" watch of 3-500$ to a "nice" one of 2-3000$ are
ridiculously small.
The average person just sees that you're wearing a watch, unless you're wearing something super gaudy.
Watch people... well, they're kind of like car people. The prices for truly top-end stuff are so astronomical that nobody can afford it anyway, so folks just focus on little niches that interest them. Your average car nut has a collection that is more "quirky" and "surprising bang for the buck" than "this is the ultimate car, bow down to me." Similar with watches: it's generally not like a pecking order where people with $5000 watches look down on people with $500 watches. People who really like this stuff tend to just appreciate cool watches, whatever "cool" means to them.
Watches are considered "men's jewelry" so I think there is something ongoing in the jewelry industry, either a hop to find new markets as the women's one might be saturated for a while (I think in the same sense of the tobacco industry targeting women through the 1920s to 1960s, men were captured early on so the female demographics was a huge untapped market).
I feel that some friends the past 5 years have started more and more to talk about mechanical watches, it definitely feels like an artificial demand pushed by marketing.
I feel that some friends the past 5 years have
started more and more to talk about mechanical
watches, it definitely feels like an artificial
demand pushed by marketing.
All of us are more influenced by marketing than we'd like to admit and certainly more than we realize. No arguments there. However, it's not like I've seen any sort of marketing push for mechanical watches. I just don't see any marketing for them whatsoever.
The question for me is, is it because the marketing situation has changed? Or is it because watches are kind of an "old guy" thing and we're all five years older than we were five years ago? Personally I feel it's the latter.
But, I can think of two indirect possibilities from the marketing side of things.
1. There has been kind of a marketing push from newcomers like Daniel Wellington and MVMT on Instagram. That's all overpriced trashy quartz stuff. But, I suppose it gets people thinking about watches.
2. Much like the rise of Starbucks got a lot of new people thinking about coffee 20 years ago, I think the success of smart watches got a lot of new people thinking about watches.
I like mechanical watches and you can get an excellent automatic watch with Swiss parts for 500 USD. Possibly 300 USD from China if you don't mind China made.
A Rolex for USD 7500 is manufactured for around USD 1000
https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/4wlla1/rolex_how_m...
The rest? Profit and Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. The Thread opener is part of the marketing.
How do you compare technical artistry? E.g. the article describes testing water resistance in a strict way; is it possible to say whether it’s brand markup, or technical artistry?
[1]: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/tale-of-two-isos-what-wate...
They tell the time and sometimes the date. I find that quite useful.
Yes, buying something is irrational if you "subtract" all the reasons people buy it, but I don't think your conception of those reasons is accurate. I like my mechanical watch for many reasons that have nothing to do with status and scarcity.
It looks good and I appreciate the quality of workmanship. I find the mechanism's complexity and delicacy beautiful. I like that it has a glass back and I can watch it work. I like that it is entirely powered by my own body's motion, and I never have to charge it or change its batteries. I find its ability to keep time through purely mechanical rather than digital processes fascinating, and a useful balance to a life that would otherwise be dominated by ones and zeroes. I find the history of the watchmaker and watchmaking interesting, and like that I wear an item that is part of a centuries-long story. I like that, if maintained well, my watch will work when I am 80 years old and I can give it to my son—something that cannot be said of an Apple Watch. I like that it doesn't have notifications and doesn't track me: it only provides useful information to me and not to the company that made it.
It is less accurate than a quartz watch, but I neither need nor want atomic precision from a watch. You conflate "rational" with "utilitarian" or "practical" but they aren't the same thing at all. Even if people bought mechanical watches solely for the status and looks, that would not be "utterly irrational" because those are values of importance to them.
The way I see it these are just self-deceptive rationalizations. You don't need to __own__ an expensive or complicated mechanism to "appreciate it". It's enough for it to exist in the world. I appreciate the ingenuity of ITER, I don't want to own it.
Also, it can be argued that pointless mechanical complexity (mechanical watches are truly pointless today) is immoral profligate decadence, and misallocation of human labor. Some grand complication watches cost obscene money.
>I find its ability to keep time through purely mechanical rather than digital processes fascinating
The price ceiling for a well crafted relatively complicated mechanical watch minus the status, prestige etc is $1000, and automatic mechanical Seikos start from around $100. Doesn't explain the $7000 for cheapest steel Rolex, or most watches interesting to an average watch nerd.
>when I am 80 years old and I can give it to my son
Modern quartz watches can also do that, and won't require any part swapping due to wear.
>You conflate "rational" with "utilitarian" or "practical"
rational is defined as "based on sensible practical reasons rather than emotions" in MacMillan dictionary for example.
[1]: https://www.watchmaster.com/en/journal/news-en/rolex-waiting...