How a watch is actually made

A simple automatic wristwatch is a couple of hundred components, made by several different companies in several different countries and brought together by one of them. The photograph of a watchmaker at a bench with tweezers is real, but it shows the last few hours of a process that is otherwise machining, stamping, plating and testing at industrial scale.

None of that is a criticism. Industrial production is why a well-made mechanical watch costs what a good bicycle costs rather than what a car costs. Understanding the chain tells you which claims mean something and which are decoration.

The supply chain, in outline

Work backwards from the finished watch and you find four layers.

1. Raw material. Bar and sheet stock of steel, titanium, brass and gold; synthetic sapphire boules; synthetic ruby for jewels; specialist alloys for springs; rubber and leather.
2. Component makers. Case, dial, hand, crystal, bracelet, gasket and strap makers, plus the specialist firms that produce mainsprings, hairsprings, jewels and screws.
3. Movement suppliers. Firms that assemble complete movements, or supply an ebauche: an unfinished movement kit of plates, bridges, wheels and a barrel, without the regulating organ or the finishing.
4. The brand. Which may do anything from designing and manufacturing most of the watch to choosing a case from a supplier's catalog and printing its name on the dial.

Movement blanks, and the firms that make them

The ebauche trade is the oldest form of specialisation in watchmaking, and it still explains most of the market.

In Switzerland, ETA, part of the Swatch Group, is the dominant supplier: the 2824-2, 2892A2 and Valjoux 7750 are the reference movements of the modern industry. When ETA began restricting deliveries outside its own group, the Swiss competition authority became involved and the supply arrangements were unwound in stages over more than a decade. The practical effect was to create competitors. Sellita, which had spent decades assembling movements for others, launched its own family closely comparable to the ETA calibers it had been building, and now supplies much of the Swiss mid-market. Soprod occupies similar ground.

In Japan, Miyota, the movement arm of Citizen, and Seiko's movement operation supply brands worldwide, from the inexpensive and utterly reliable to high-accuracy calibers. Chinese suppliers, including Hangzhou and Seagull of Tianjin, cover the lower end and increasingly the middle, and the gap has narrowed considerably.

What "in-house" actually means

There is no legal definition of in-house. It is a marketing term used to mean at least four different things:

• The brand designed and manufactures the movement, including hairspring and escapement. Very few companies do this.
• The brand designs and assembles the movement but buys escapement, hairspring, jewels and screws from specialists, which is normal even at the highest levels.
• The brand commissions an exclusive movement from a third party and calls it in-house because nobody else may use it.
• The brand takes a standard supplier caliber, adds a module or a decorated rotor, and gives it a private caliber number.

All four appear in marketing in the same words, and our in-house movement glossary entry unpicks the term further. The related vocabulary is worth being precise about. A manufacture makes a substantial share of its own movement components. An assembler buys components and movements and builds finished watches, often to a high standard. A brand in the narrow sense designs, specifies, markets and distributes, and outsources production entirely.

None of these is dishonorable. The dishonesty is only ever in the description.

Cases and bracelets

A steel case starts as bar stock. It is usually cold forged or stamped into a rough blank first, which aligns the grain of the metal and reduces how much has to be cut away, then finished by CNC machining: computer-controlled turning and milling that produces the case profile, the bezel and crystal seats, the gasket grooves, the crown tube hole and the lug slots.

Then comes the part that costs money. The machined case is covered in burrs and tool marks. It is tumbled in vibratory bowls with ceramic media to deburr it, then finished surface by surface: satin brushing with abrasive belts, polishing with felt or cotton laps and progressively finer pastes, and hand work on the transitions.

Crisp lug edges are expensive because polishing is subtractive and indiscriminate. A polishing wheel removes material fastest where pressure is highest, which is at the edges, so the natural result is a rounded, slightly melted shape. Keeping a sharp line between a brushed lug top and a polished flank means masking, fixturing, careful hand technique and a rejection rate. That is why two watches in the same steel, at very different prices, look different across a room. The alloys are covered in our case materials guide.

Bracelets multiply the problem: every link is a small case with its own machining, finishing and tolerance stack, plus pins, screws and a clasp.

Dials, hands and lume

A dial usually begins as a thin brass blank, stamped to shape with feet on the back so it locates on the movement. The surface is then built up in stages: galvanic treatment, which is to say electroplating, for color and corrosion resistance, or lacquer, or a sunburst brushing applied before plating.

Text and minute tracks are applied by pad printing, where a silicone pad lifts ink from an etched plate and presses it onto the dial. This is the best single tell for quality at the budget end: look at the smallest text under magnification and see whether it is sharp, evenly inked and correctly registered. Applied indices are separate metal parts with tiny feet pushed through holes in the dial and riveted from behind, which costs more than printing and catches the light very differently.

Luminous material, usually a strontium aluminate compound sold under names such as Super-LumiNova, is a powder mixed into a binder, applied by hand with a fine needle or syringe, then cured. Neat, evenly domed lume plots are hand skill, and our lume guide explains what the grades mean.

Hands are stamped from thin sheet, the fitting hole is broached to size, the edges bevelled, and the surfaces polished, brushed, plated or heat blued. Fitting them is delicate: a hand fitted too loosely slips, one fitted too hard can damage a pivot or foul the dial.

Assembly, casing up and testing

Movement assembly happens in temperature and humidity controlled rooms with filtered air, because a single fiber in a gear train will stop a watch. Parts arrive cleaned, are often treated with epilame, a coating that stops oil spreading away from where it is wanted, and are lubricated with several oils and greases chosen by application: thin oil for the escapement, thicker grease for the barrel wall.

Assembled movements are run in, timed on an electronic timing machine in multiple positions, and regulated. Serious brands time over several days rather than taking one reading, because rate on day one and rate at low wind are different questions, as our accuracy and chronometer standards guide sets out.

Casing up is where dial and hands meet movement and case, gaskets are seated and the back is closed to a specified torque. Every watch claiming water resistance should then be pressure tested individually rather than sampled, generally to ISO 22810. Beyond that, a serious regime includes condensation testing, function testing of every pusher and crown position, power reserve verification, aging and shock simulation on batches, and a final visual inspection under magnification.

The stages, and what good looks like

Why 500 pieces cost more each than 50,000

Most of the cost of a component is incurred before the first good one exists. Tooling, dies, machine programs and the engineering time to develop them are fixed costs, spread across whatever quantity you order.

• Suppliers hold minimum order quantities, so a small brand often pays for more parts than it needs, or pays a premium not to.
• Machine setup time is the same for 500 as for 50,000, and setups are a large share of a short run.
• Yields are worse early. A long run gets past the learning curve; a short one is mostly learning curve.
• A large group buying movements, sapphire and steel by the container pays less than a firm buying by the pallet.

This is the honest explanation for why small independent watches often cost more than better-known watches with more elaborate specifications.

Where the money in the retail price goes

At a high level, the retail price of a watch has to cover, in rough order of appearance:

1. Components and materials, from movement to gaskets.
2. Assembly, regulation, testing and packaging, including labor and the facility.
3. Brand costs: design, development, tooling amortisation, warranty provision, after-sales capacity, marketing, sponsorship, retail environments.
4. Distribution margin: the gap between what the brand receives and what you pay, which is real work (stock financing, premises, staff, returns) but is a substantial share when a watch passes through wholesale and then retail.

We deliberately publish no percentages: they vary enormously between a directly sold microbrand and a group brand in a traditional retail network, and any single figure would be fiction. The structural point is enough. On a heavily marketed watch sold through third-party retailers, a large fraction of the price is not the object.

What this means when you judge value

Component cost is a poor guide to what you should pay, but a good guide to what you are looking at.

• Judge the finishing you can see. Case edges, dial printing, hand fit and bracelet tolerances are where money genuinely goes and where cost-cutting shows.
• Treat movement origin as a serviceability question rather than a status one. A widely used supplier caliber is cheaper to maintain than an exclusive one.
• Discount claims you cannot inspect. "In-house" is not verifiable from the outside; a decorated bridge under a sapphire back is. And the price you pay and the value the object holds are different questions, dealt with in our guide to value and depreciation.