Thinking about buying a Swiss watch you’d be forgiven for hesitating after all it is an awful lot of money for such a small thing it wouldn’t be unreasonable to look at a typical watch brands glossy ads celebrity endorsements and boutiques in prime retail destinations and conclude that only a
Small fraction of the cost goes towards making the watch itself but you’d be wrong so why do they cost so much that starts with the beating heart of every mechanical watch the movement even the simplest movement is made up of over 120 tiny parts each machined to tolerances
Within a fraction of a hair’s width some are then polished by hand before being tweezer together again by hand then painstakingly fine-tooth most movements are sourced from white label suppliers like esse or Selita but the finest are made entirely in-house and that comes with a hefty price tag the machinery
Needed to make one a cool 10 million euros the R&D an extra four to seven million all this has to be recouped in what sales there are economies of scale and play to the custom machine a single gear wheel for a watch produced in the tens of thousands will be relatively
Cheap but what if you are only producing a few hundred it’s no wonder the costs quickly pile up and that’s before you’ve considered the case the dial the crystal dome protecting it they all demand an extraordinary set of skills rarely found beyond the valleys of the Swiss Jura
Mountains and herein lies the crux of the matter Switzerland a large portion of the money you spend on a watch goes to ensuring that the country’s watchmakers earn a decent living and the cost of a decent living in Switzerland is among the highest in the world but look at what
You’re getting in return something that’s far more than the sum of its parts never obsolete always repairable and potentially with the best cost per wear of your entire wardrobe call us biased but that sounds like money well-spent
