I am a minor collector of old watches, and I follow developments in the watch field as well. As many of you may know, there are a ton of old watch firms that went out of business , many years ago. In many cases,the names were sold to other firms, which either produced under the old names, or had watches made by another firm-again using the old names.
Because this practice is so widespread, you have to be very careful-whereas a “Waltham” brand watch (from the 1930’s-40’s) is collectable (and certain models are quite valuable), a watch of the same name from the 1960’s may be close to worthless (usually a cheap swiss made watch, with the name on it).
In addition, there has been a revival (in recent years) of some barnd names that haven’t been sold for years.
One such a brand is “Vulcain” (Swiss). I remember seeing these watches-they were nothing special-in the 1960’s they sold mostly in low-end department stores. They seemed to be priced at less than $100.00, and (to me) they were nothing special.
As far as i know, they stopped selling (in the USA), sometime in the mid-1970’s.
Now, the brand has been revived-the current owner is selling these watches as high-end items (most are priced at $1000 and up).
this seems illogical to me-since the brand has been out of the market so long, it has very little cachet-why bother? Why not simply invent a new brand name?
So my Waltham from 1961 is worth the reasonably low price that was paid for it at the time? It was a graduation present. I knew nothing about the brand at the time.
After abot 1955, all Waltham watches were swiss imports-nothing in them was made in the USA.
Consequently, your 1961 watch is of little collector value, unless it has a 100% gold case.
Probably for no other reason than you can claim that the brand is old, and therefore market some nebulous association with a tradition of watchmaking. Most brands try to leverage this traditional element. It adds to the luxury component of the marketing. At a time when wearing a watch of any time is becoming unnecessary (given almost everyone has a mobile phone that contains a clock - and often a clock that is synchronised to the cell and can keep better time than any watch you will ever be able to buy) watches, and especially Swiss watches rely on luxury associations.
There is a nice article on the NYT right here about the fallout from the simple business of simple branding of watches. Many Swiss watch brands are nothing more than houses that assemble parts bought from SMH (Swatch - which owns ETA and Valjoux - which make the vast majority of the actual components). Indeed there are own brand assembly companies that will make a Swiss watch - mostly from ETA components, and then brand it for you. A mechanism by which a lot of well known designer houses produce their watch offerings. The big change is that Swatch have announced that they are restricting sale of components with the goal of ceasing supply to their competitors sometime in the future. Major Swiss brands are expected to start investing in in-house production. However the move will almost certainly kill off some brands. The very high end brands will remain, IWC, Patek Phillipe, Girard-Perregaux, Jaeger-LeCoultre etc, as well as brands like Rolex and Zenith - that also make most things in house. Brands like Breitling and TAG do a bit of both, and will adapt, but the brands that just buy in components, have some problems ahead. SMH’s own brands - Omega, Longines, Tissot, Bruget will do very nicely.
A lovely quote from the NYT article is this:
On feels that there was a business of simply buying an old defunct Swiss brand name, and then going to one of the assemblers to put together some watches with that brand, spending up big on marketing, then trying to make money. You may never have to touch a watch, in indeed set foot inside Switzerland to do it. This would appear to have passed its use by date.
I have my dad’s Vulcain Cricket. AIUI, the appeal of these watches was their exceptionally loud alarm.
Thanks for your response, Ralph.
Thanks for the link. It pretty much sums up my impressions.
That is the “dirty little secret” of high end Swiss watch makes (like Hublot)-that $5000 watch has a $2.50 Swatch movement inside.
In the case of Waltham, they made excellent movements, but by 1950, their American plant was so obsolete, that they could not compete with the Swiss makers-it was simply cheaper to buy a movement and put it into their case.
It isn’t quite as bad as that, but it isn’t real good either. ETA make a range of movements, in a range of price points. I have seen the prices on some of them (not that one is supposed to be able to find out) and the higher quality movements come for a few hundred dollars in quantity.
If you look at the SMH brands you can see the price points. Swatch, Tissot, Longines, Omega, Bruget. In that order. Swatch use the bottom end, Tissot use the basic reasonable quality, Longines good quality, and Omega the best of the production plus some exclusive. Bruget are very high end, and are not mass produced. The Omega chronographs use a reworked (the same parts, but refinished to a higher spec) movement as the Longines - which are Valjoux 775x. You will see that almost every Swiss Chronograph except the high end exotic ones use the same three Valjoux chronograph movements. (The obvious one is the version with the date hand that sweeps the full diameter of the face.) Quartz crystal watches are similar - with a variation in quality that includes things like temperature compensation on the high end versions - except that the high end brands don’t sell them at all. What you will see is a three to one, or worse, variation in price for watches that have the same ETA or Valjoux movement. Some of this is does come from difference in the quality or cost of cases, faces, hands and straps, which is of course where the visible differentiation comes in, but some is clearly down to what a brand thinks they can get. Those $5000 watches may actually cost $500 to make. Not that that is a huge comfort. But almost anything beyond basic quality you can buy is not a lot better. We are used to a life with an underpinning of very cheap low margin goods. Cars, electronics, much based upon very cheap labour and razor thin margins. Swiss watches are a very successful example of avoiding some of these pitfalls. Although there are holes in the definition of a Swiss watch that have allowed components manufactured cheaply in the East to make it into Swiss watches. If you consider that a full page glossy magazine advertisement costs some thousands of dollars, and look at how many adverts are placed in how many magazines. Then think about how many watches of that brand might be sold, you realise that for some brands the cost of the watch is exceeded by the cost of advertising it. Then add a margin for, manufacturer, distributor and retailer, that $5000 is easily reached.