This week we’re going to take a look at a pair of watches launched in 2015, but not just for their undoubted merits; we’re in pursuit of a wider point.
What makes these two special is what they represent in terms of how the watch market is changing, what’s driving that change and what it means for both manufacturers and, more importantly, you, the buyer.
To explain what’s happening though we need to go on a quick journey, and we need to start at your nearest Porsche dealership….
Image, if you will, you are interested in a new Porsche. You see something you like at the showroom and the salesman says: “And of course this model also contains an engine!”. Great, you say, and hand over the cash.
Unlikely, isn’t it? You’d want to know which engine, and how it performed. Yet this is exactly how most Swiss watches have been being bought at jewellers across the world for decades.
Many, perhaps most, buyers have no idea what’s inside that rather lovely and expensive thing on their wrists.
The bad news is that there’s every chance that’s what’s inside their £4,000 X is pretty much the same as what’s in someone else’s £500 Y.
This is because most, perhaps 90%, of Swiss mechanical watches are driven by “bought-in” movements from a handful of suppliers (one in particular, which we’ll discuss in a moment), rather than by movements created by the company whose name is on the dial. The quartz revolution of the 1970s made it economically impossible for all but the most exclusive Swiss brands to continue to research, test and build their own movements.
That’s not automatically a bad thing. The fact that a base movement might be shared by 30 or 40 other watches doesn’t make it a bad unit, in fact by definition it will need to be good to be so widely utilised.
Yet it is almost always the case that such a movement is unlikely to deliver the performance, or have the quality of something bespoke. Put simply that’s one of the reasons Rolexes and Patek Philippes cost so much.
The problem here is one of value, not performance; paying bespoke money for production line equipment. To continue our car analogy, it’s like roaring away from that showroom in your £75,000 Porsche, not knowing it contains the engine from a quick Ford Mondeo. It’s not a bad engine, in fact it’s probably a robust unit which is vastly better performing than the one in your neighbour’s Micra; but you didn’t pay Porsche money for that did you?
In watch terms though you might well have done, I’m afraid.
But change is coming to the market, arguably the most important in decades. It has led to a new generation of more discerning customers, a number of wonderful new watches and, if you understand it, you’ll be getting far more watch for your money when you hit the sales in January.
The company which has inadvertently brought this revolution about is not one of the grand names of luxury watch-making, it’s Swatch; that plastic fantastic available at every airport on Earth.
But the giant Swatch Group is far more than a manufacturer of budget watches. Throw something over your shoulder in an expensive jewellery shop and there’s a good chance you’ll hit a watch made by a Swatch Group-owned brand: Omega, Longines, Breguet, Harry Winston, Blancpain, Glashütte Original, Rado, Union Glashütte, Tissot, Hamilton and Calvin Klein, to name just a few.
What Swatch also owns is a company the average watch buyer has never heard of, ETA; and therein lies the rub.
ETA makes ébauches – incomplete movements for other companies to customise and finish assembling – and also complete movements. It sells these to “name” brands to put in their watches and has done since the mid 19th Century.
And they’re good too. Some are robust, reliable and workmanlike, some are high-performing, the best of them are both. There’s nothing wrong with any of them, nor with the watches which contain them. In fact ETA movements form the foundation of some very expensive pieces indeed, improved and customised by in-house watchmakers.
The most common ETA movements, usually versions of its most successful 1960s or 1970s offerings, crop up everywhere. The result is that very many Swiss watches are similar or sometimes identical inside, yet their prices might vary from low hundreds of pounds to many thousands.
Is a £4,000 watch with a tweaked £300 movement value for money compared to a £500 watch with a basic version of the same heart? Buyers are waking up to the fact that it’s often not. The reason why the cat is out of the bag is a mix of the sheer scale of ETA’s dominance and an unforeseen repercussion of Swatch’s attempt to flex its muscles.
ETA mass produces movements on a mammoth scale – perhaps three quarters of Swiss mechanical watches made every year, or between five and six million units, are ETA or ETA base driven.
This dominance is so total that when Swatch began warning that it would stop supplying ETA movements to competitors in 2002 the Swiss government stepped in, worried that the national industry would collapse.
Legal agreements have seen Swatch limit supply by more and more each year, (down 70% by 2018-19 on current plans). Swatch plans to turn ETA tap off completely, except to the favoured few, by 2020.
So the end of universally available, off-the-shelf ETA movements and ébauches has the potential to be the biggest game changer in the watch market for perhaps 40 years.
Competitors have had to make plans for an ETA-less future, and some have already actioned them.
The most immediate effect has been that companies which do what ETA does on a smaller scale, such as Sellita and Soprod, are gunning up to produce in vastly larger numbers.
But the secondary effect is the one that interests us today, namely that those companies which have chosen to invest in making their own movements have started making a song and dance about what’s inside their watches, and punters have begun to notice; and as more and more people become aware, more and more companies have to have in-house movements on offer. So it becomes a steep acceleration curve.
Suddenly the golf club bore with his new sideplate-sized piece of expensive bling is horrified to be met with “Oh yes, that’s got the same movement as my old £400 Tissot.”
A member of staff from an exclusive Bond Street shop told me this week that he has more conversations about movements in a week now than he did in a year a decade ago.
“Some customers are asking straight out about a watch’s movement,” he said. “That was rare a few years ago. What’s just as interesting is the level of knowledge now. I can explain a movement is the company’s Calibre Whatever and have people interrogating what exactly that means, how much of it is them and how much of it is ETA.”
All of this brings us to this week’s watches, because it was in to the middle of this swirling mass of change and uncertainty that Tudor dropped a bomb earlier this year.
The North Flag – a new watch and a new movement for Tudor
The mid-market arm of Rolex had thought about the problem of losing its bought-in movements and come up with a simple, but significant, solution.
At the Basel World expo Tudor unveiled a genuine, fully in-house movement called the Cal. MT5621 which would power the new generation of Tudor’s classic Pelagos diver and a completely new watch, the North Flag (named to reference the British North Greenland Expedition, members of which wore Tudor Oyster Princes in the early 1950s).
A view of the Cal.MT5621 inside my very grubby North Flag
The first in-house movement in the brand’s history didn’t stop there though. The new movement wasn’t only 100% Tudor, it was also a fully COSC-certified chronometer. Just as people were grappling with how the hell Tudor had managed that, they read down the spec sheet and noticed a few other things more associated with Tudor’s big brother like the full balance bridge with a free-sprung Microstella balance wheel and a silicon hairspring (something Rolex itself only managed to offer for the first time last year). Add to this a 70-hour power reserve, hacking seconds, any time date adjust (not even common to all Rolexes) and a ceramic bezel ring and the MT5621 is a serious piece of work by any standards, never mind mid-market ones.
Which is why a lot of other watch makers operating in Tudor’s space lost their Swiss breakfasts when they saw the price: 4,900 Swiss Francs on a bracelet – or about the same cost as its ETA-powered pieces.
Now, there are a few oddities here which must also be taken in to account. Tudor is different to a lot of other mid-market watch brands. It is part of Rolex and always has been, which means that the Shield has always been able to share some technological and quality benefits with the Crown, traditionally the quality of its case finishing and bracelets, although the new Tudors are made entirely separately to their Rolex brothers.
Today’s Tudor, under its ambitious boss Philippe Peverelli, has read the swirling tea-leaves of change better than most. The signs were there from 2009 with the launch of “heritage” watches referencing Tudor’s wonderful 1970s automotive and oceanic pieces. Vintage-inspired watches like the Black Bay and Heritage Monte Carlo were not only very beautiful, but also very successful. Moreover, they began to move Tudor away from simply being cheaper versions of the Rolexes on which most have always been based.
The new Tudor-powered watches are another leap forward though.
Whilst the 40mm North Flag’s style conjures thoughts of the 70s, most clearly (and deliberately) the Tudor Ranger of the period, it is unquestionably a modern piece. The bright yellow highlights to the second hand, the power reserve and the outer dial (and the matching stitching on the optional black leather strap) are consummately contemporary. It’s beautifully made and the brushing throughout feels less like an avoidance of expensive detailing which would have pushed at the price point than an adherence to the values of a tool watch, which the Flag certainly is.
In keeping with the best of modernity there’s a ceramic ring between bezel and case which highlights the comparatively simple matt dial with its mildly oversized markers rather nicely. At 6 o’clock the Flag also carries the movement’s COSC certification. The bracelet feels as substantial as all Rolex and Tudor bracelets do. The case has a very well engraved display back (a classic Tudor, and indeed Rolex, Oyster back with its fluted edging) to show off the new movement.
The 2015 Tudor Pelagos, in black, on a rubber strap
The Pelagos, meanwhile, maintains the core dynamics of its own history; long admired by watchies. Unlike the Flag it is now of titanium construction and feels feather light on the wrist. The five-line dial is not to everyone’s taste but I think it gives the watch a neat symmetry it previously lacked. There’s also a helium escape valve for anyone who intends to actually test its 500m water resistance, and it comes with a rubber strap option as all good dive watches should. The lume on both the dial and ceramic bezel makes the Pelagos look better in darkness than just about anything except Schofield’s innovative (but three times as costly) Blacklamp too. Tudor have injected superluminova into the ceramic of the bezel itself, making it far deeper and brighter. It looks wonderful.
The new Pelagos’s helium release valve discretely placed below its 9 o’clock
Integral lugs mean neither watch lends itself to aftermarket straps, perhaps unusual in today’s market and something which may put some off, but both are clearly so much a part of the design it’s not an issue for me.
So what does the North Flag’s display back reveal of the MT5621?
Simplicity and lack of unnecessary adornment are the point as much as the consequence, in my view. These are a tool watch and a dive watch, not for Mayfair lounge lizards but people who want a high-quality, robust performance time piece to use anywhere.
I like the movement’s looks very much. The perforated rotor reveals sand blasting on plain and workmanlike components which are, as we’ve explored, extremely high performing but unfussy. The North Flag in these pictures is my own, which is why it’s so filthy, but that’s what tool watches are supposed to be.
And that brings us sort of back to where we started. I think what Tudor have made with the North Flag is like the early BMW “M” cars: brilliantly built, understated in style, by no means cheap but also not as hugely expensive to buy as the higher-end exotica which was previously the only place that level of performance was typically available.
Tudor aren’t alone in all this, others are following suit, beginning to add in-house movements to their range. Ironically that includes a number of Swatch brands, particularly Omega, who are now themselves reacting to the direction taken by competitors in this mid-market price point in the wake of reduced ETA supply.
And we haven’t even touched on the Germans, who have been quietly getting on with making their own movements brilliantly forever; but in the North Flag (£2,500) and the new Pelagos (£3,020) Tudor are perhaps the first big name to offer this level of in-house quality for these prices.
The consequence is that both offer excellent value for money or, back to our automotive analogy, a Porsche engine – but in this case for fast Ford money.
The North Flag has heritage roots but is a contemporary watch
