The Breitling Watch Source Forums

Just a question that I thought I would present to the group. Does anyone know what percentage of mechanical watches today are actually hand made vs mass produced?

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Jerome

what do you define as hand made?

as in assembled by hand. I know that this might not be realistic for companies that produces hundreds of thousands of watches per year.

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Jerome

do they have to be fitted and finished by hand? do the dials have to be hand guilloched or hand painted? I'm not sure what defines a handmade watch...

I think I'm getting your point. I guess the question is not as clear cut as I thought. What I wanted to know is are mass produced watches made exclusively by means of a automated (machine made) process from start to finish. Or is the whole idea of a hand made (either it be assembled, crafted, tested) something exclusive to companies that only produce a small number of pieces per year.

I was out shopping for watches the other day and was talking to a number of AD. In almost all scenarios they try to justify the high prices of some of the watches by the fact that they are not mass produced. In other words brand X only produce XY quantities per year because of their manufacturing process which is why they are more expensive and exclusive.

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Jerome

I doubt anyone makes the parts by hand. They can assemble the parts by hand though.

I'm sure no one hand files all the cogs in the mechanical movements, but what about hand and machine guilloche? Both are used

I guess with the help of the following might clarify my initial post. I'm curious to know if Breitling has the same or similar manufacturing process.

Jaeger-Lecultre website has a link under The Manufacture menu titled Professions. If you take a look at this it will show a video/slide show of their manufacturing process. The slides show has a number of chapters that is rather insightful.

One chapter titled Cutting and burning is a machine process which I can understand however, its interesting to see that the following chapters are extremely hands on.

Jewelling Process
Assembly
Casing up
1000 hour control (although its a machine process its interesting)
Watch decoration

Would be nice to know if your watch was actually put through such a rigorous process.

I also came across a posting on another forum talking about the Swiss wanting to increase the percentage of parts and or labour originate from Switzerland before the watch can be branded or marketed as being swiss made.

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Jerome