“They all tell the same time” is often what you’ll hear from those people who don’t quite fully grasp the concept of luxury good such as timepieces. You can talk about what a timepiece is over what a mere watch is until you’re blue in the face and yet they just don’t seem to get it, but there is indeed a reason why certain types of watches cost a lot more than those casually on display in any clothing and accessories store you can walk into.
I mean why is it that you might have to fork out up to £5,999 for a luxury Breitling Navitimer if it tells the same time as a watch you could have bought for less than £100? Even if you’re perhaps more of a minimalist in terms of your taste in timepieces, why does something like a Logines cost all of £2,200 and on top of that would probably require watch insurance in case of theft or loss?
It’s simply because of what it takes to make what is referred to as a luxury timepiece versus what goes into the making of a mass-produced watch a few dozen people can all get their hands on with the change in their pockets.
Priceless Man Hours
This is the type of unique technology which simply cannot be reproduced by any modern day machine, no matter how good the programmers and engineers who created that machine are. There is some priceless value in the amount of man hours it takes to produce each individual cog that goes into a luxury timepiece, value that shows up as nothing less than being completely unique when the timepiece is viewed under the watchmaker’s loupe.
That’s why timepieces are often engraved with the recipient’s name when they’re set to be given as gifts and that’s why you might have to wait a few hours up to a couple of days or so in order to officially take up possession of your luxury timepiece after you’ve already completed payment for it.
Nano-Scale Tech
Now this is where it gets interesting because really if you compare mass produced watches with those that fall into the luxury goods bracket, what you’ll find is that they don’t indeed tell the same time. They sort of tell similar time except the luxury watch is a lot more accurate. The scale of accuracy may appear to be really small at surface level because we’re talking mere milliseconds here at best, but as you know it all adds up and that’s precisely the reason why mass produced watches run on batteries and need to be reset every so often, while some of the best in luxury timepieces make use of nano-level technology such as the quartz atom to maintain dead accuracy in the time they display.
Now the best part is perhaps that in as much as the intrinsic value of a luxury timepiece is very much dependent on an implied future demand for its purchase, that luxury watch generally holds appreciative value in any case, purely on the basis of the technology which keeps it ticking like the gold it uses as a conductor.
