A drawing made for a machine to repeat, against two brothers finishing movements by hand in a Dutch market town. The interesting difference is not the watches. It is that one of these houses will tell you the number before you are in the room.
Matched on
The austere, unornamented dial at each end of the market: a serial German watch drawn by a Bauhaus trained designer and still sold almost unchanged, against a two man Dutch workshop finishing movements by hand and publishing no price anywhere.
Junghans
Junghans publishes prices in retail. No euro figure is printed here, because none appeared on any Junghans page we could open
Junghans still sells the watch Max Bill drew for it, and the house's own note on the dial gives the game away. The numeral four looks like a chair turned upside down, and the rest of the numerals are squared to match. That is a designer's joke and a designer's discipline in the same gesture, and it is the reason this dial reads as one object rather than as a set of parts. Junghans calls Bill a Bauhaus student who worked without ornament, and says the design has gone almost unchanged for sixty years. A drawing that needs no revision for six decades is a rare thing to own and a very cheap thing to manufacture, and both of those are true at once.
Grönefeld, Oldenzaal
None published, anywhere. Grönefeld prints no price on any page
In Oldenzaal, Bart and Tim Grönefeld, who call themselves the horological brothers, finish movements by hand across nine collections. What their pages do is describe the work. What their pages never do, on any route we could open, is name a figure. That is a policy rather than an oversight, and it is the ordinary condition at this end of the trade: the price is a conversation, and the conversation is the filter. We have printed no annual production, because they do not publish one.
The verdict
Put the two houses side by side and the watches are almost a distraction. One is a drawing made for a machine to repeat, and the repetition is the achievement: sixty years of a dial that did not need improving, made in numbers, sold at a figure printed on a ticket. The other is priced by the hours inside it, and the hours belong to two named people who can only work so many of them. Both are honest ways to sell a watch and neither is a trick. But only one of them tells you the number before you are in the room, and that single difference explains most of what separates a serial market from an independent one. It is not craft against industry. It is disclosure against introduction.
The TGC view
This is the Thonet argument one section later, in a smaller object. A design made to be repeated by a machine can be worth owning for sixty years, and a movement finished by hand by two brothers can be worth more than anyone will print. Where we are useful is the second case, because a house that publishes no price is a house you reach through somebody, and that introduction is the part of this we can actually do.
Seiko owns a workshop that hand paints porcelain watch dials and almost nobody who owns a Seiko knows it exists. A man working alone in Tokyo makes a few watches a year. His steel prototype sold for several times what the corporation asks for platinum.
Read the review →An IWC pilot's watch against a Bavarian house that makes its own steel and its own movements. The usual story is that the independent charges a premium. Here it does not, and the establishment name is the one trading under list.
Read the review →Breguet patented the tourbillon in 1801 and puts the patent date on the dial. A twenty-something Frenchman on the shore of Lake Annecy makes twelve tourbillons a year by hand, and charges less. For once the independent is not the expensive one.
Read the review →