SJX Watches
Insight: Fine Watchmaking Market Map in 2022
For almost as long as I’ve been interested in watches, I’ve tried to find an objective way to visualise the stratification of the various luxury watch brands. I’m as fascinated by the process of watchmaking as much as the products themselves, and I wanted to find a way to differentiate brands based on the production techniques they employ, yet do so objectively. I believe you can tell a lot about a brand’s values and capabilities by looking at their methods, but it can be difficult to penetrate the smoke and mirrors of luxury watch marketing to see what’s really going on behind the curtain. An objective measure: watchmaker-hours per watch In my review of the Saxonia Thin last year, I used the metric “watches per watchmaker” to illustrate the economics of A. Lange & Söhne. While this is not a perfect metric, it is simple and quantitative, and crucially, it can often be derived from publicly available information. Taking this analysis one step further, I added Swiss, German, and Japanese national statistics for working hours to calculate the maximum possible number of watchmaker-hours per watch for more than 50 luxury watch brands. The start of the map, the Saxonia Thin How to interpret this metric The watchmaker-hours metric is not the number of hours that a watchmaker spends on every watch. Rather, it’s the theoretical maximum number of hours that a brand’s watchmakers could possibly spend with each watch. This workrate can be viewed as a simple proxy fo...
