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      08-09-2019, 11:05 AM   #150
GuidoK
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 1MOREMOD View Post
What do you mean by independent, I have an oris. They are independent.
yeah I know 'independent' is a shitty description I use (and some of the watch world uses).

I mean a watch manufacturer, usually a small company with 5-20 employees where its driven by the founder/fouders or relatives from, where everything is bespoke made, so movement is completely designed inhouse where no 'generic base design' is used so they have absolute freedom on how they want to design and make things. Annual production is very low. Usually way less than 1000 watches. (for example richard mille has I believe an annual production run of 3000-5000 watches so that is already a way larger brand0.

Obviously some of these watches are extremely expensive.
for instance FP Journe makes around 900 watches a year, which would be considered already a very large independant watch maker and I have no idea what those watches cost but I think around 300k for an average model.
But for instance near where I live (1 hour drive or so), you have these guys:
https://www.gronefeld.com/


And they start winning lots of competition prizes lately
They make I believe around 70 watches a year, so extremely exclusive.
I dont know what the exact prices are but I believe, when they started, some models cost around €35k, which is maybe comparable to gold rolex terratory.

And of course there are much more of these kind of highly bespoke, all manual labour watch makers. I have no idea who they are, I just know of the one above because they're relative close to me and I think I once read about them in local news so it grabbed my attention because the way such a company works fascinates me. Not that I'd ever buy a watch that expensive.
And there's another one even more close to me, less than 30min drive:
Christiaan van der Klaauw
http://www.klaauw.com/eng
I think they do around 300 watches/year, and are heavily astronomical influenced.
Started out making bespoke clocks.
Less in my interest designwise but I believe they are highly regarded, with honorairy memberships in swiss independent watchmakers clubs etc. whatever (although I dont know if all their models have bespoke inhouse movements, but they did some strange astronomical complications which put them in the spotlight.)


And I guess (I'm certainly not an expert) there have also been in the 70's/80's and 90's that are not around anymore but have produced astonishing watches back in those days.
I have no idea what the trade in such watches looks like, but I can imagine that when you want to resell such a watch (maybe relatives because they got it out of a heritage and dont really like it/are not into watches etc) it would be quite difficult because it doesn't have the name of patek AP and such (and the name isnt even around anymore....), so the price would drop immensely (100k watch only worth then 15k and such).
Obviously the time that such a watch comes up, not from in the market as an old used piece is of course rare, but if you're professionally into watches I can imagine that you look for such things more closely that the average joe would. The average you and me wouldnt even recognize such a watch or understand if it has horological significance or not.

So I mean those kind of watches.
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Last edited by GuidoK; 08-09-2019 at 11:20 AM..
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