In any given issue, I struggle to decide what to filter out and where to let the chips fall as they may. Most of the time, it is not worth the column inches, as they used to say (look it up), and pictures might be a pain to find. Then I watched the Dubai Watch Week discussion between YouTube maverick and watch dealer Nico Leonard and WatchPro Editor Rob Corder… I recommend you watch this exchange if you read this because I am intent on only one point: that new watches are planned years in advance and that is somehow bad…because it might be.
Of course, this excludes special pieces like the Blancpain Grande Double Sonnerie but not only these. It could also be anything that includes a new function or case, and certainly anything with an improvement in existing basic functions, like the power reserve for example. This was certainly the case, no pun intended, with the BR-X3 and X5 series from Bell & Ross; one cannot expect something like this to emerge in just a couple of years.
Before I get into this, most of the conversation between Leonard and Corder was not about this, and I wrote multiple responses to many different points but those all went on too long and would have filled up another entire issue. Besides, this development matter is the only succinct point that I think was a missed opportunity. Broadly speaking on the other points, it is vacuous to take apart another person’s opinion because you have a different one so I will try not to do that.
And now, why do I want to address how long brands take to develop watches? There is an honest critique to be made here, and a discussion to be had. Neither Leonard nor Corder tried that, and the line was a throwaway remark that allowed Leonard to name-drop the Tudor CEO and Corder to say that watch brands all proudly claim it takes them years to develop their watches. Now, if either of them said that brands take an ungodly number of years to produce anodyne products, that would have been saying something real. Also, a missed opportunity for both these pundits to stick it to Big Time, or whatever.
To channel Leonard a little, the late Luigi Macaluso once told me to beware the tyranny of novelty — and I have kept his words close to heart and repeated them in public frequently. This is because this magazine, and plenty of specialists including Leonard and Corder, are constantly thrashing about in the unrelenting waves of new releases. I often find that brands should reconsider their release strategies, not to jump on trends faster but to figure out which ones to maybe ignore. It would be better if not every brand had to have a watch with a certain shade of blue, to cite just one example.
But things could be worse — we could be discussing triple A video games, the vast majorit
Read more from original article, all rights reserved The Reality of Watch Development Cycles
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