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Making Time With the Watchmakers
PreacherTom writes "In the age of watches that have more computational power than Apollo 11's computer, one would think that the watchmaker has gone the way of the cobbler, the blacksmith and the Dodo. Quite the contrary. With the rise in interest for mechanical watches (especially luxury models), Rolex has sponsored a new school to train horologists in the arcane art. From the article: 'We were facing a situation today where we needed to foster a new generation of watchmakers,' says Charles Berthiaume, the senior vice-president for technical operations at Rolex and the Technicum's president 'Thirty to 40 years ago, there was a watchmaker at every jewelry store. That's not the case today,' he notes. Included are some remarkable examples of their training, dedication, and intricate patience as they take technology in an entirely different direction."
to watch.
PreacherTom is an astroturfer for BusinessWeek magazine. Look at the URL in this recent Slashdot story and notice the campaign_id string. Now look at his user page. Scroll down to the submissions section. Notice how almost every one is a link to a BusinessWeek.com article containing the campaign_id string. Now look at the search results for "campaign_id preachertom". He's been pulling this shit on slashdot, digg, Fark, MetaFilter, and who knows where else. Check out this MetaTalk thread for the initial discovery.
Spread the word, perhaps?
This guy is steering you to BusinessWeek magazine and has been doing so for quite a while.
Like "reliability"? Count me in!
Fuck Slashdot
How much does the watchmaking business pay nowadays?
- Aetheral Research -
'We were facing a situation today where we needed to foster a new generation of watchmakers,' says Charles Berthiaume, the senior vice-president for technical operations at Rolex
Well, just make sure they don't develop telekinesis and go on a power-hungry killing spree.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
- Albert Einstein
Swiss watches, especially luxury ones are on the rise. 2005 it was a 10 billion dollar per year industry for the Swiss. It is expected to exceed 23 billion (with a B) in 2006.
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WSJ article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11667432128875716
Swiss Watches Strike Export Record
Surging Demand for Luxury Lines Has Makers
Like Richemont Thinking About Capacity
By MARTIN GELNAR
December 22, 2006; Page B2
ZURICH -- Swiss watch exports hit a record in November, suggesting that big watchmakers such as Swatch Group AG, Compagnie Financière Richemont SA and Rolex SA will see strong Christmas sales that will carry into the new year.
Switzerland's watchmakers exported 1.52 billion Swiss francs ($1.25 billion) of goods in November, the Swiss watchmaking association said Thursday, up 13% from the same month last year. The biggest gains were seen for luxury watches selling for more than $6,000 each.
Sales growth is so strong for Swiss watches that the country's watchmakers are facing a new problem: a lack of spare capacity, and especially of the highly skilled craftsmen that make each watch. Last month, Richemont said surging demand for luxury watches may lead to capacity constraints in some product areas over the next few years.
Swiss companies are leaders in the global watch market, which has annual sales of about $23 billion.
The country is by far the world's biggest watch exporter in value terms.
In 2005, Swiss watchmakers exported goods valued at about $10 billion, and accounted for about 9% of Switzerland's total exports. While Hong Kong and China export more watches than Switzerland, they lag far behind in terms of value. Last year, Hong Kong exported watches worth $6 billion and China exported $2 billion, respectively.
The concentration of the watch industry in Switzerland limits growth because production can't easily be shifted outside the country for branding reasons. And within the country, there are only so many people with the training needed to make a watch by hand.
In a recent interview with Swiss daily Le Temps, Swatch Group Chief Executive Nick Hayek said the growth rates of as much as 40% in certain segments aren't sustainable. He noted his company is looking for 140 qualified watchmakers for its high-end Breguet brand, and 200 workers for its watch-movements maker ETA.
But analysts say they don't anticipate serious capacity issues in the short term, and some suggest a shortage of watches may even benefit the industry.
"Production capacity may get tight in some areas, also on the components side, but I don't think this will be a major issue next year," says Zuercher Kantonalbank analyst Patrik Schwendimann. "In a way, scarcity value may also be a positive for the image."
Jon Cox of Kepler Equities expects the "supercycle" in luxury goods to continue. Global demand for expensive jewelry and watches has been boosted by new customers in emerging markets, he says, but he also notes a surge in demand from previously sluggish markets such as France.
"So long as financial markets continue to move up, demand for luxury items will likely remain high," he says.
Any capacity problems may have an impact on the number of watches sold but shouldn't hurt revenue, he says. "To offset any shortage, the companies could simply hike prices," Mr. Cox says.
Write to Martin Gelnar at martin.gelnar@dowjones.com
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
there was a watch repair booth at the grocery store and an old man (as I remember him) sat there all day with his loupe repairing watches. My mom would drop me at his booth and I would just stand there, fascinated.
I thought that was so freaking cool, to work on such tiny things like watches.
I had a Mickey Mouse watch that broke and I got to watch him repair it.
I was inspired by him (and other repairmen) to take stuff apart and see "what makes it tick"..
Another thing that was common when I was a kid, there were handymen repair shops where you took just about anything that was broken and the nice man would fix it. Toasters, vacuum cleaners, TV's, radios, whatever.
That's what I wanted to do when I grew up, be a handyman, to just fix broken stuff.
Now I'm older, have arthritis in my hands, my eyes aren't so good anymore, there's just no way I could do this sort of work anymore. That sucks because that's what I love to do more than anything, fix things, work on stuff..
My favorite TV show is "How it's Made"
I am fairly young (35) when I was growing up my Grandfater (a watchmaker by training) a boilerwelder by trade (it paid MUCH better) taught me how to clean and repair a watch from a young age.
When I was 15 I lived with him to help on the farm since my Great Grandmother moved in with him. I asked for him to take me as an apprectice as a watchmaker (hey I lived there why not and I was good with guns, clocks, etc) besides my bedrrom was the "Watch Room"
He said he wouldnt mind at all and thought I could make short work of it but he warned me he saw no future in it, as all the watches were going electronic and I could probably never make a living at it.
Investing 8 hrs a day for 2+ years and not having it be a viable profession made my mind up , I decided not to
Last year I was in L.A. I REAL WatchMAKER (not watch repair man, hack, etc, but WATCH MAKER, who can from nothing but raw metal make a watch from scratch command UPWARDS of 250,000 a Year.
DOH ! I have my Grandfather last watch he wore every day, a Seiko, he loved it, it never needed cleaned, and kept perfect time.
The article is about as dead on as it gets......I wish I wish I wish......
Considering they still keep accepting stories from Roland Piquepaille, another known shill, it's doubtful the editors will do anything about this guy.
I have some very nice mechanical and quartz Swiss watches. I used to be able to go by a local master watchmaker to have them serviced or fixed. Then he retired and there was literally nobody else around to do it. Now I'm supposed to ship everything back to the manufacturer. Nobody in town will even replace the batteries on the quartz ones.
Check out this blog for some of the weird and wonderful watches out there. Some of them costing 200K or more. (yes, two hundred thousand) One of my favourites is the TAG Heuer V4, but I doubt I would be able to afford it.
Sigh.
A similar thing might well happen to analogue electronic engineers I suspect, with everything going digital these days. Why have a filter circuit composed of discrete components when you can program a DSP to do the same thing?
Or maybe not.
Trying to associate Microsoft with "fun" is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy. -Tycho
but the idea of having a miniature machine-shop in my apartment appeals to me on some level.
Don't tell the government this, because you are obviously a terrorist.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
A terrorist who builds really small bombs, right?
Small enough to fit in a... I know - a WATCH! Soon airlines will ban all timepieces on flights. Remember, it's not the size that counts.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's what I wanted to do when I grew up, be a handyman, to just fix broken stuff. (...) that's what I love to do more than anything, fix things, work on stuff..
This gets rather personal, so I'm ACing it: Be glad that you didn't. My dad worked for IBM for 40+ years. He repaired computers (and before that, typewriters). He started back when you would measure radio tubes for defective bits and replace them, all through the way to replacing defective chips on IC cards.
Today, nobody does that. You're a glorified "replace these cards until it works" or worse yet, a glorified delivery boy replacing the broken box with a new one. The circuitry is so small and integrated, your hourly rate so high compared to just pushing out another at the assembly line, it's just not worth it. One of his colleagues sucidied over it, my dad retired.
I've seen that happen to more and more small electronics - just making an estimate of what's wrong exceeds the cost of buying a new cheap device. Shops that used to fix things like that have closed up. Cars are the same - my dad would understand simple engines well, today you need a computer to tell you what's wrong - and probably a computer to fix it.
I must admit, that's just the way it is. Even if I compare it to a "flip the burger" McDonald's rate, you have a very narrow window of oppertunity where an expensive piece of equipment needs to be fixed in a very short time. Ever tried to debug "Well there's some wierd race condition that only happens under load on release builds", it's roughly as bad as "Well the hardware locks up under some wierd conditions". Many times, even if you found an expert of the subject, it's just not worth it or he'll conclude "scrap it, buy a new one". Sorry to rain on your parade but it's just not as glorious as it sounds.
PreacherTom is an astroturfer for BusinessWeek magazine.
BusinessWeak magazine? Come on, it is tabloid business journalism at its lamest; entertaining yes, informative sometimes, but rarely if you want in depth information about the topics it purports to cover. I have an MBA and while I could cite some monthly business periodicals in the papers I wrote for classes, Businessweek was rarely one of them.
The WSJ is much better, more accurate, and more insightful and has far more interesting articles in any given week than BusinessWeak does in a typical month. I guess that is why BW needs shills...
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
What you wear says a lot about who you are.
And wearing a Rolex is the only thing I can think of that trumps driving a Jaguar for saying "I'm very rich and very stupid".
...you can tick that joke off the list. It has clocked too many miles as it is, though I must hand it to you for chiming in with it, though to judge from the number of replies, it didn't wind up too many people. Mind you, with effort, we might yet get this thread to go round and round.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No, I don't care about Roland, I'm just pissed off by the whiners in EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ARTICLE. You see, it's one link. You can barely see it. But what you can see much more clearly is a bunch of self-righteous whiners. But apparently if I don't agree with your anti-Roland cult I'm an astroturfer.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Why? I'd much rather work on nice stuff, even if I personally couldn't afford it, rather than work with cheap stuff.
Think about it, would you rather work in a shop turning out finely crafted watches you couldn't afford, or be on an assembly line cranking out plastic watches for Wal-Mart buyers?
I regularly write software that I can't afford, but I enjoy it, and it's a nice living.
What would really suck is working to create a product that you need but can't afford.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
At least clock making in the U.S. history..
Around 1700, it was very rare for a person to own a clock or a watch - something on the order of 1 in 35 prominent white males owned one. By 1800, most cities in New England had clock makers. These clock makers could produce only around a dozen clocks per year and they never did so preemptively. They would wait for an order to be placed and then take their sweet time to produce a clock. There was an old saying about the craft.. "No two clocks tell the same time," indicating their accuracy. An interesting fact was that most of these clock makers could not live on making clocks alone: they had day jobs to support them. Clock making was merely a bonus.
Then good old American manufacturing kicked in and production blew up to 1000 clocks a year made by one skilled worker, requiring nothing but ordinary laborers instead of master clock makers. Prices dropped around 1820s and it seems like the market was for once flooded with clocks. Some speculate that this cheaper price and wide availability created a market demand for clocks. Otherwise- why weren't they producing more of them?
These are of course, clocks.. not just watches. Around this time (1750-1850), the clock stopped being a measuring device. Instead, it became a control device. Entire lifestyles changed - masters were replaced with factory workers. Time discipline became heavily monitored and for the first time ever the society went from an ephemeral lifestyle to one controlled by a machine.
So here is an interesting question to ask Slashdotters:
If a clock changed way of life in the 19th century, what is happening with our lives in the 21st century?
Will we ever go back to a relaxed setting of working at our own pace or will we be slaves to the clock for some time to come? Why would we need a clock (or a watch) anyway? It seems like we have plenty of other semaphores to regulate our lives.
Just something to ponder..
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Agreed. Roland has a tremendously weird name, and a fairly lame website, but he often submits interesting stories, and he apparently spends a lot of time doing it. I don't why we should care that a story is from him as long as it's interesting...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
He's dyslexic, so found schooling especially hard. However, he's excellent with mechanical things, so studied to be a horologist.
There is such a demand for horologists at the moment it's crazy. Not just for watches, mind, but also for mechanical clocks.
Too many kids are soft courses at uni (art/media etc etc) that we're being left with a dearth of people who have useful skills..
"would you pay $100,000 for a Jaguar with a Ford engine?"
Who owns Jaguar these days?
I was faced last week with the choice of either having my Rolex repaired, or throwing something with a replacement cost of $8,000 in the trash. Since owning one is considered to be a sign of stupidity to this crowd, I chose the stupid path - I ran for Congress. No, I decided to have it repaired.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (Japan), I decided to check the Rolex website for information. It turns out that Rolex is light years ahead of most global companies. They are already embracing a new paradigm: Web 4.0.
Web 4.0 you say? Yes, indeed.
Web 4.0 is retro. The master site for Rolex has no email addresses. None. No email for the headquarters or any office in all their offices flung far throughout the world. No email for you today. It's pure genius. It took me back to my work-a-day world of the 1980s. We used to have businesses back then that managed to survive (and even thrive) without "IT guys." We used to talk on the phone, send letters, send telex or even use those new fancy FAX machines. We could just give the new guy a desk, a phone and some pens.
Think about it for a minute. Which is more frustrating: not being able to fire off an email, or not getting a reply to your email? Or, heaven forbid, a nonsense non-answer or automated "empathy mail like, "We are sincerely interested in your customer service experience and are commited to providing you blah blah blah blah..."
Nip that customer frustration in the bud instead of prolonging the agony of no, or nonsense answers, since you're only going to tell the customer to get lost anyway. The first thing it does for a comapny is eliminate the angst of having to read customer complaints. Who needs that first thing in the morning? It weeds all but the most determined whiners and complainers.
It also eliminates all the IT guys running around without ties having meetings in strange "geekspeak" going frantic about needing the latest version of ComExpRo 9000 version 23.01 beta ($24,000 license fee) and a new Sparkmaster Database Servoserver ($72,000) with 128 Megagoobers of chrome plated exhausts. Or something like that.
No internet. No email. No spam. No security problems. No spyware. No upgrades. No Vista!
And no maps to the office in Tokyo on the web site. If you can afford a Rolex, you shouldn't be sending emails or need maps anyway. Get your secretary to call and get directions. Bingo. If you don't have a secretary, get a casio. No, you should have enough smarts to figure out how to call and get directions.
Off I went to the Tokyo office. It just so happens that I was there about 8 years ago, so I vaguely remembered where it was. It was just a short walk from Tokyo station. Since I'm a guy (internal flawless GPS system installed), I asked my girlfriend to "confirm" my GPS at the station with a random person.
"Oh, the Rolex building? Sure, it's blah, blah, blah..."
It turns out that everyone in Tokyo has been to the Rolex service center since everyone bought several back during the bubble and they all need servicing eventually. I found it easily. I walked directly to the counter after being offered a friendly smile by one of the many friendly-looking counter ladies, only to be handed a plastic tag with a number. I turned around to see about a dozen Rolexers lounging around in leather chairs waiting for their number to be called. All reading Rolex catalogs and Rolex magazines (some were even post Y2K - Rolex had no Y2K problem...). They check your watch as you wait, then present you with an estimate to repair it.
When my number was called, I presented my cold, dead watch to the woman. She was holding it when she asked my if it had stopped. I said something to the effect, "Yes... see?"
She then asked me when it stopped.
Now, this is Japan and all interactions between strangers/customers/gods is formal and exceedingly polite. I formally and politely smiled as I pointed to the watch face and read off the time and date. Grin. Wink.
What's more, the argument can be made (and probably should) that PreacherTom and those like him are doing Slashdot a favor by pointing out articles that are more interesting, more relevant, and more informative to the slashdot readers than what they themselves are able to contribute. Would it be better if slashdot readers simply remained ignorant of everything that businessweek et. al publish? I think not. Is there some fundamental problem with someone making money for performing a service that benefits the readers? Nay.