It's About Time.

Up until New Year's Eve, I've never, ever, purchased a watch.

I've had a couple as gifts. The best one was stolen from my gym locker back in college.  The replacement, another gift, was a perfectly serviceable Bulova that I always disliked.

I recently found a watch at work.  I turned it in to my boss.  It was a huge, clunky model that looked like it had been ripped from the dashboard of a jet plane. It's from a company called Bell and Ross, though it was later revealed to be a fake.  I looked it up online, and the real ones are very expensive.  I found myself engrossed in Bell and Ross's corporate story of aircraft pilots/engineers looking to build the ultimate watch.

I read on. And on. And on.  I spent most of the New Year's holiday weekend learning the intracities (pun intended) of the watch industry.

Remember when quartz watches became all the rage?  Super-accurate, and cheap to make.  It about killed the Swiss, who for centuries built mechanical clocks, and later watches, with elaborate movements of gears, balance wheels, and a hundred other parts all carefully crafted to, well, run like a Swiss watch.

The fallout of this was that many of the companies that built watches and the parts that go inside either closed, or merged with one another.  Eventually, to make the story short, the Swiss watch mechanical movement business ended up with two eight hundred pound gorrillas, and not much else.

One gorilla is, of course, Rolex. Everybody in every corner of the planet knows the name Rolex.  The other, well, we'll get to that in a minute.  Rolex doesn't sell its parts to anyone else.  They build all their stuff in-house, (except for their Tudor brand, so I understand) and the rest of Switzerland, be damned.

That's not to say there are not watches for sale every bit as good as Rolex, and a lot more creative, styling-wise, if you ask me. The irony is that since almost all the other watch manufacturers must buy from Gorilla Number 2, there's a lot of similarity inside.

It's possible that you could buy an expensive Swiss watch for $10,000 (or more!), and a lesser watch for under a thousand, and find out they both have essentially the same guts.  The manufacturers freely admit that.  They differ, they say, in the assembly of the parts, the dynamisism of the design, the exclusivity of the brand.  OK. I guess.  Maybe the $10,000 watch is assembled by Vogue super models in lab coats, while the cheapo is put together by former actors, laid off when Ricola (REEE-COAL-AAAA!) cut back their ad budget.  Somehow, though, I doubt that.

Now, back to the story of Gorilla Number 2.  This watchmaker has systematically bought up the designs of many famous movements, cornering the market so well that it came to the attention of the Swiss government.  They've been forced, beginning two years ago, to reduce their domination of the movement market in order for others to compete.  Watch manufacturers like Breitling are investing millions so that they won't be short of parts from the gorilla.

So who is Gorilla Number 2?  Supplier of 90% of Swiss watch parts to nearly every luxury brand that still uses traditional mechanical movements?

It's Swatch.

Yeah, that Swatch.  I shit you not.

And the watch I bought? It's a Swatch.....