Celebrity Watches

It seems I'm a little bit behind the times. A few years ago, when I stopped watching videos about celebrities' watch collections, "celebrity" meant "a person with too much money who has only heard of one watch brand." I got tired of seeing another Rolex, and another Rolex, and another Rolex, and so I started watching other things. 

 

But the situation has completely changed! Today, "celebrity" means "person with too much money who may have heard of as many as five different watch brands"! Today, although the next watch will probably still be a Rolex, there's a chance that it may be a Patek Philippe, a Richard Mille, a Cartier or an Audemars Piguet.

I don't know whether these brands are giving watches to celebrities, offering deep discounts, or whether the chumps are actually paying regular-people prices -- and I also don't care!

Now, there are blogs and YouTube channels and books which are each only about one brand of watch, and that's okay, if the author or creator knows a lot about that brand.

And to me, knowing which movie and music stars wear which of those five brands, does not constitute knowing a lot about those brands. I know that some people disagree. 

For example, some prominent men's magazines have full-time, high-paid staffers whom they call "watch experts," who don't know anything about watches except which movie stars or music stars wear Rolex, Patek, Richard Mille, Cartier or Audemars Piguet. 

At least -- they never SAY, or write, anything else about watches. Not even to mention Vacheron Constantine, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Breguet, Zenith, Omega, Grand Seiko, G-Shock, Hublot, A Lange & Soehne, Nomos, Glashuette Original, IWC, Piaget, Longines, Bell & Ross, Panerai, Parmigiani Fleurier, Vostok, Breitling, Citizen, Orient, TAG Heuer, Tudor or any one of the many, many other watch brands which are worth mentioning for some reason or other besides being worn by movie stars and music stars. 

You know what? When I want to know something about movies or music, I don't confine myself to asking watch aficionados about them. Call me crazy.

Seiko

More and more people are coming to the opinion that Seiko, a Japanese company, is the world's greatest watchmaker. 

 

For about a century, after the American watchmaking industry fell apart, Swiss watches have generally been regarded as the state of the art. Three Swiss brands, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantine, are often referred to together as "the Holy Trinity," reflecting the opinion that they are as good as it gets. Recently, however, Jaeger-LeCoultre, a fourth Swiss brand, has been mentioned as being equal to or even better than the Holy Trinity, as has A Lange & Soehne, which is not even Swiss, it's a German brand, one of several in the small town of Glashuette in the former East Germany.

And then of course are the many, many people who say that Rolex is the best. We laugh and pat them on the head and get back to what we were discussing before they interrupted us. Rolex watches are good. They're not the very best. And they're overpriced. And even if you pay full MSRP for a new and soght-after Rolex model, you're going to be on a waiting list. For years, sometimes. 

Why? Because when you ask most people to list off luxury watch brands, they'll say, "Rolex... Uhmmm..." If people literally don't know that your competition exists, you will outsell your competition.

And then there's Seiko, which is a bit different from all the other brands mentioned so far. All of them are exclusively luxury brands, offering watches for four figures and up. Some people are surprised to hear Seiko being compared to Swiss luxury brands, because they believe that Seiko make inexpensive watches.

And they do. The thing is, they make luxury watches too. You can get a Seiko for $50, or $500,000 or at every price point in between. That alone makes them unique. What makes them great is that they offer the best value at any price point. You can get a great Seiko watch for $200. By "great" I mean, quite simply: better than anything else on sale for $200. You can get one for $400. Or $1000. Or $5000. Etc. And in each and every case, the Seiko will be the best that can be had for that much money. 

Tissot says, "They say a high-end Swiss mechanical watch can't be had for less than $1000. Let's keep proving them wrong." Audemars Piguet says, "People who are willing to spend $10,000 for a watch look to us to provide the ultimate in horological luxury. Let's keep refining and deepening that experience." And both Tissot and Audemars Piguet are both accomplishing great things. But Seiko says, "Let's keep beating everybody at everything." They're not just in their own league. They're playing a completely different game.

How do they do it? Experts are mystified. Seiko don't skimp on materials. They don't run sweatshops. Their highly-skilled employees are compensated as well as they would be at other firms.

I'm taking a guess here: maybe Seiko's prices are the best because they have a firm policy that their prices will be the best. Maybe, before a Seiko model is introduced, Seiko looks at the prices of comparable watches, and offers their for less, period, whether they're taking a big loss short-term or not, and it all comes out all alright for them because the prices are one of the reasons for Seiko's huge sales and extremely loyal repeat customers.

What's the Perfect Size For a Wristwatch?

 Are you already way ahead of me?

Grown men -- mostly men. Men are to watches as women are to shoes: the primary market, dwarfing the volume sold to the other gender. Or maybe an apter comparison is jewelry: there are many sorts of jewelry made for women, and for men, mostly one kind is made: watches -- spend a lot of time and energy debating whether this watch or that watch is too big or too small.

By far, most of the comments on this subject seem to be made by men with slender wrists. I don't know how many times I've read a comment saying "I have slender wrists" and going on to say that they're glad that the newest model of this watch is smaller, or that they're disappointed that that watch is so big. I can't recall one single guy saying that he had big wrists and that this or that watch was too small.

I've seen I don't know how many debates of this sort, over a period of years. And not just random guys on the Internet participate in the debates, so do the most highly-respected journalists who specialize in watches, and so do the most highly-respected watch designers. And among watch enthusiasts, you don't get more highly respected than the top watch designers. 

Let's take the case of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, one of the most highly-esteemed of all long-running watch models, designed by Gerald Genta, as well-respected as they come, introduced in 1972 and still, apparently, easily selling as many as Audemars Piguet can make. Royal Oaks are probably most well-known for being worn by several of the characters in the HBO series "Entourage." I haven't seen the whole series, but if I've got this straight, Ari Gold, the Hollywood  super-agent played by Jeremy Piven, is given a gift of a Royal Oak by a beloved mentor who tells him it's the best watch in the world. Ari is awestruck by the gift, and soon several of his friends and acquaintances are also wearing Royal Oaks.  

The thing is, there have been many different models of the Royal Oak made since 1972. The original one was 39 millimeters wide -- big for 1972, smallish today. It was just 7 millimeters thick: very thin, for any era. And its case and bracelet -- watch guys refer to metal watch bands as bracelets. Bands made of soft material such as leather or rubber are called straps -- were made of stainless steel. This caused a sensation In 1972, luxury watches usually had cases and bracelets of gold or platinum, and Audemars Piquet has always been a luxury brand. Now, steel is not unusual at any price point. The Royal Oak is the watch which made that change.

But today, you can get a Royal Oak with a case made of gold, or platinum, or titanium, or still other materials besides steel. And steel is also still available. And straps are available as well as bracelets.

In 1992, to celebrate the Royal Oak's 20th anniversary, Audemars Piguet unveiled the Royal Oak Offshore. The original Royal Oak, as I mentioned, is 39 millimeters wide. The Royal Oak Offshore, or the ROO, as fans sometimes call it, is 41 millimeters wide. 

Might not seem like such a big difference. I know of men's wristwatches for sale today as small as 33 mm and as big as 50 mm. But making a new variant of the Royal Oak in 1992 which was 2 mm bigger than the original was enough to cause the designer of the original, Gerald Genta, to storm Audemars Piguet's booth at the Basel watch show where the ROO was introduced, shouting that his creation had been destroyed.  

So. Yes. People not only debate about the proper size of watches, they sometimes even fight about it. Even about differences in sizes which might be barely perceptible to most people. Is Ari wearing a conventional 39 mm Royal Oak in that picture above, or a 41 mm ROO? I don't have the slightest idea.

And then a couple of days ago, it finally struck me that the debate is absurd. Few if any people, I'm nearly 100% certain, have ever earnestly argued that a certain size of shoe, or belt, is correct, and that other sizes are either too big or too small. No, we realize that people come in all different sizes and that one size does not fit all. Similarly, a guy with a slender wrist might look best with a watch which is 37 mm wide (considered smallish today), while a much bigger man with huge wrists might be best suited with a watch 42 mm wide or even larger. It's just about as simple as that. It couldn't be clearer.

And yet the debate will continue. I'm sure of that. I don't know why it ever existed at all, I don't know why it will continue, but I know it will. Maybe it's no more or less than sneakiness on the part of watchmakers, selling more watches by making the newest ones bigger or smaller the way fashion designers sell more clothes by making the fashionable hemlines higher and the lower and then higher again.

Swiss Watches

Geneva is in the easternmost corner of Switzerland, surround by France to the north, east and south. From Geneva the Swiss-French border runs about 100 miles, as the crow flies, to Basel, where the Swiss, French and German borders all meet. The area along this Swiss-French border between Geneva and Basel is quite mountainous, and was somewhat isolated before the invention of the railroad. In the early 18th century, most of the Swiss people living along this border were farmers. But snow prevented them from growing anything for about 6 months of the year. So they began to make parts for watches, to earn a little extra money. Many of them soon found out that they could make more money making these watch parts than by farming, and began to make watches all year round, and their descendants have been watchmakers ever since. That's why so many big Swiss watchmakers are headquartered in tiny little Swiss mountain villages.

At first, Swiss watchmakers mostly concentrated on making inexpensive products. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US was known as the place where the best watches were made. But by the mid-20th century, Swiss watches considered the best, and many of them had become quite expensive. Swiss watchmakers prided themselves in making their watches more and more accurate and precise.

Then quartz watches appeared. In the early 1970's, quartz watches made all over the world were more accurate than the finest spring-driven Swiss watches at a fraction of the price. In Switzerland, this time is called the Quartz Crisis.

Some Swiss watchmakers responded by making their own quartz watches. Many went out of business. Some of the oldest makers of fine watches were bought up by the Swatch Group, named after Swatches, the cheap, colorful, mostly quartz-driven watches which were a popular fad in the 1970's. As of 2002, Breguet, Blancpain, Leon Hatot, Jacques Droz, Glashuette, Omega, Longines, Rado, Tissot, Calvin Klein Watches, Union, Certina, Mido, Hamilton and Flik Flak belonged to the Swatch Group, along with Swatch itself, which is still around and still makes watches, mostly quartz but also some mechanical ones. How good are Swatch watches? I have no idea.

ETA is a Swiss company which mostly makes watch movements. A movement is the motor of a watch. ETA makes both quartz and mechanical movements. Many watchmakers both in Switzerland and in other parts of the world use ETA movements in some or all of their watches.

Some Swiss watchmakers have remained proudly independent, not being bought by the Swatch Group or any other corporate conglomerate, and making most or all of the movements for their own watches. (Watch afficienados and watch snobs have long and heated arguments about just how important it is for watchmakers to use movements they have made themselves -- also referred to as "in-house movements.") Three such companies, held in such high esteem that many people referred to them as the "Holy Trinity," are Patek Philippe (established in 1851), Vacheron Constantine (est 1755) and Audemars Piguet (est 1875). Although, these days, some would say that Jaeger-Lecoultre (est 1833) has become better than any of them. One thing's for sure: all 4 of those companies make very high-quality watches, at prices ranging from 4 to 7 figures per watch.

And new watch companies are springing up all the time, in Switzerland and elsewhere, some making cheap crap and others making very good watches, and some in between.

But not very many new pocket watches, which makes me sad. And most of the new pocket watches seem made for nostalgia, imitating old ones instead of trying to embrace being new, and that makes me sadder. As an extreme example: the new Omega pocket watches actually ARE old to a great degree: their movements were made in the 1930's. Recently someone found these 80-year-old watch movements in a warehouse, and Omega decided to refurbish them to make expensive nostalgic pocket watches. Make new watches which are proud of being new, I say, and don't insist that we wear all of them on our wrists! I can't be the only guy in the world who feels this way, although maybe I am.

What Does Audemars Piguet Have Against Platinum?!

PS, 27 Feb 2017: Since writing this post I have found a number of platinum Audemars Piguet watches. To be much more precise: just now I googled audemars piguet platinum and found a lot of them all at once. I apologize to Audemars Piguet and all of their loved ones and fans. So why didn't I google augemars piguet platinum before I wrote this post? Yeah. Excellent question.

They make huge heavy yellow and rose gold pocketwatches which sell for nearly a million dollars each.

Their celebrated Royal Oak --

-- comes in rose gold, yellow gold, white gold, stainless steel, titanium, and I've seen one Royal Oak encrusted with many, many diamonds and selling for OVER a million.

But I haven't seen any Audemars Piguet watch with even a tiny bit of platinum in it.

And that makes me sad.

And surely I can't be the only one.

It's your company, Audemars Piguet. And doing things the way you see fit is part of what makes your company great. I hope you keep on doing it the way you see fit.

And maybe one day I will understand why you always do it platinum-free.

Sports Illustrated On LeBron James

"LeBron never owed Cleveland a debt, yet he repaid it anyway -- with backbreaking interest."

Yeah, the safety pin is good. I don't know him personally, but from some things I hear, LeBron James may be a Truly Nice Person.

The part about LeBron repaying a debt he never owed, "with backbreaking interest" -- excuse me, but you must give me a moment to look away and roll my eyes. The Cavs are paying him over $30 million a year. That's $30 million a year just from the Cavs. That's before we get to Audemars Piguet (a top-end Swiss watchmaker. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak is available in many different configurations and materials. I believe LeBron's wearing a Royal Oak on that Sports Illustrated cover. Wonder whether Audemars Piguet paid him for that. Ari Gold, the fictional character on "Entourage," could sometimes be seen wearing a Royal Oak with a gold case and a leather strap. The heaviest one you can get, with 18k gold case, band and bezel, is reputed to be one of the very heaviest wristwatches on the market. Almost one pound. About $60,000, unless you know a guy),

Coca-Cola, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Nike, State Farm Insurance, Samsung and other companies whose products James promotes. I don't begrudge him the cheddar. My point is only that he's hardly a self-sacrificing hero along the lines of, say, Joan of Arc. And the strange institution known as the salary cap means that other players are paying part of LeBron's salary, and isn't it interesting how sports teams' owners don't get their finances in the headlines as if it were actually someone's business? Great scam they've got going, the team owner billionaires, distracting people from their wealth by publicizing millionaire players, without whom they wouldn't have their lucrative sports business.

To be honest with you, I got completely sidetracked thinking about watches I can't afford. To be perfectly honest, I don't care all that much about anything to do with sports or Sports Illustrated. Not the way that I care about fine men's watches. An all-gold, almost-one-pound Audemars Piguet Royal Oak is not the one single wristwatch I would most like to have -- that would still be the platinum Rolex Daytona with the ice-blue dial, in case you're thinking of going all-out when you get me a Christmas present this year --

-- but the all-gold, heavy-as-possible Royal Oak would also be very, very nice. I'm approximately... let's see... I'm about $60,000 short of being able to get a Royal Oak like that for myself. The Rolex costs about the same.

Hey, an Omega would be very nice. They're much less expensive than Rolexes and Audemars Piguets and Patek Phillippes of comparable quality and material.

Patek Phillippe, Bell & Ross and Tissot all make very nice pocket watches which I can't afford. I definitely prefer open-face pocket watches to the kind with a metal lid which snaps closed, making the watch unreadable. A new top-end pocket watch -- top-end -- will have a crystal made of sapphire which is very tough, in addition to the watch's movement being very accurate and precise (they're two different things) and reliable and tough, which is especially nice for a butterfingers like me.

No pressure!

Vatch Ze Vatch!

As I was about to check my overnight earnings from this blog, it occurred to me, assuming that I had become filthy rich overnight, that I might paradoxically have to have a watch custom-made for me which looked very conventional. I say that because so many new high-end watches seem to have weird "contemporary" faces which I don't like and find hard to read. Then there's the Roger Dubuis Excalibur, which I had to look at for a very long time before I could see that it has an hour hand and a minute hand at all. (Still haven't found the second hand, if it has one, or any other dials. There are some round things there which if they are dials I don't know how to read. $13,000.)

The watch Liam Neeson gave to Diane Kruger in Unknown looks like it might be more what I want, and it looks like what t3 half-disparagingly calls "big and clunky" and soooo 2 decades ago. Neeson's character says you can tell by the weight that the watch is "the real thing," which to me suggests gold and/or platinum, in the case and maybe in the metallic flex band as well. Maybe the watch snobs at Forbes and t3 snicker behind their fists at the taste in watches of Neeson and/or the other makers of Unknown. On the other hand, maybe Liam and the boys laugh right in the watch snobs' faces. A part of me sort of hopes they do. Maybe what I want is much easier to find than you'd think by reading the watch snobs.

Then again, maybe that watch Liam was wearing isn't what I want at all. Maybe it has 5 dials on the front and 3 more on the back and they all blend into their backgrounds so well that I'd never find half of them, let alone figure out what each one meant, and maybe the watch snobs all cream when they see that watch in that movie.

What is this "what I want" I'm talking about? Lots of heavy metal: maybe a combination of platinum and rose gold, (Is rose gold the leisure suit and sun-dried tomatoes of the 2010's? Will people shake their heads in dismay at rose gold in 2025 and ask what people possibly could've been thinking? I'm guessing: no, because I always hated leisure suits and never particularly liked sun-dried tomatoes. Which may indicate that in 2025 people will look at these unreadable dials on luxury watches being made now, and shake their heads and ask what people possibly could have been thinking.) big thick heavy case, perhaps heavy metal again in the band, in short: go ahead, TRY to make it heavier than I'd like.

And of course, a dial that's extremely easy to read. Maybe only one dial on the face. I'm still weighing that. It might actually be cool even to me to have some sort of multi-dial chronometer set-up. Just: not at the expense of the readability of the hours, minutes and seconds where I am at the moment. People should be able to read the time on my wristwatch across a crowded and dimly-lit ballroom while I vigorously do the monkey.

Of course, this is all assuming that I don't concentrate exclusively on pocket watches after becoming rich. (Didn't happen overnight last night.) But the choice of new high-end wristwatches is vastly greater than that of new high-end pocketwatches. And I'm wondering how high the high end in new pocket watches is. So far, I've found exactly 2 count em 2 makers of new luxury pocket watches: Audemars Piguet, a solid-gold variety of whose Royal Oak wristwatch t3 mocks as big and clunky and soooo 1990's ($69,200), and Patek Philippe. A new 18k-gold Patel Philippe pocket watch will set you back $35,000, give or take. Audemars Piguet is currently offering 1 new pocket watch, a hunter's watch, which is not the style I'm looking for. (A hunter's watch is a pocket watch with a cover which must be sprung open in order to read the time. Then the cover is snapped shut again before the watch is pocketed. I don't want that cover. I don't know why a hunter would want it either. I'm not a hunter, but it seems to me that the last thing a hunter would want would be little springing and snapping sounds to scare away the game.) I don't know how much the Audemars Piguet pocket watch costs. Looking for that info on the Internet, my search is swamped by depressing things like "replica" (fake, but honest enough to come right out and call themselves fakes) Audemars Piguet watches. And it seems to me it would be tacky somehow to call up a Audemars Piguet boutique and ask. (I'm afraid to call, okay? I came right out and said it.) I'm guessing that their hunter's watch is very low 6 figures, or 5 figures. There are quite a few wristwatches which sell for 7 figures, and probably some which sell for 8 figures. Up there at the top end of wristwatches, some watches are custom-made to order. Would the makers of such timepieces be at all interested in making new pocket watches? You know, you pay that much, you want the craftsmen to be inspired, not just drudging along for the sake of the money alone and then sneering at you behind your back after you've bought the ugly white elephant you made them attach their name to. (Their NAME!)

Does it make any sense at all to spend over $10,000,000 on a watch? It seems that many of the boutiques of luxury watch brands today are located in the same places where the most numerous and tallest skyscrapers are going up. And that aint Switzerland, or LA or SF or anywhere in Germany or England or Russia, or anywhere in the Western Hemisphere south of Miami. Perhaps an Audemars Piguet or Greubel Forsey boutique in some place like Dubai would happily quote me 7-figure prices on their finest items. Perhaps making ridiculous rates of consumption as conspicuous as possible is one of the absurd points being made by whoever shops in boutiques like those. It's a bit different from me going to Kroger's or Meijer's, or, on a special occasion, Plum Market or the mall.

For $30,000, give or take, depending on the price of gold that day, I could just buy a 20-troy-ounce ingot of 24k gold and carry that around in my pocket. It wouldn't tell time but it would be nice. A conversation piece fer sher. What's that you say? Eccentric? I wear a cheap pocket watch. Sometimes, at the same time that I'm wearing the cheap pocket watch -- at this very moment, for example -- I also wear a very old self-winding Timex wristwatch which I got at a yard sale for two bucks. That man who recently said to me, "You can only wear one watch at a time anyway--" that guy doesn't know me very well. The eccentric ship sailed a while ago. I like who I am, and that really is the main thing.