Seiko owns a workshop that hand paints porcelain watch dials and almost nobody who owns a Seiko knows it exists. A man working alone in Tokyo makes a few watches a year. His steel prototype sold for several times what the corporation asks for platinum.
Matched on
The Japanese hand finished dress watch at the top of its maker's ability: a corporation's in house atelier working in platinum and porcelain, against an individual in Tokyo whose annual output is counted in single figures.
Credor, Seiko
6,545,000 yen including tax for the 18k rose gold. Credor's English pages carry no price at all
Seiko owns an atelier most Seiko owners have never heard of. In Credor's own words the watch "hails from the elite Micro Artist Studio, located within the Seiko Epson Shiojiri facility", and what comes out of it is thirty nine millimetres across and ten and a third high, on the hand wound Spring Drive calibre 7R14, good for about sixty hours and plus or minus fifteen seconds a month. The dial is pure white porcelain, and Credor states that the studio's watchmakers "carefully paint each of the 12 hour markers and the Credor logo by hand", against blued hands. The rose gold lists at 6,545,000 yen including tax on the Japanese page. The English pages carry no price, which tells you something about who the watch is aimed at.
Hajime Asaoka, Tokyo
No list price is printed here. His own site could not be opened, so nothing about his pricing comes from him
Asaoka read design rather than horology, opened a design office in 1992, taught himself watchmaking and started making in 2005. In 2009 he produced Japan's first wristwatch with an in house tourbillon. He put his own name on a watch in 2011, joined the AHCI in 2015 and founded Precision Watch Tokyo in 2016. The Project T runs its tourbillon on ball bearings instead of ruby jewels, which is the sort of decision a product designer makes and a trained watchmaker generally does not. His output, in the words of his own academy, is limited to only a few watches a year. We have printed no price, no waiting list and no component claim, because his own site serves a certificate that does not cover his domain and could not be opened from any route we tried.
The verdict
Put the two prices side by side and the usual story inverts. In November 2025 Phillips sold an Asaoka Tsunami "Art Deco" prototype, in stainless steel, for CHF 228,600 against an estimate of CHF 40,000 to 80,000. Steel. A prototype. Roughly three times its own high estimate, and several times what Seiko asks for the platinum Eichi II. It is not an isolated result: the same house has taken his Tourbillon #1 to CHF 304,800, his Tourbillon PURA to USD 361,950, a Tsunami to USD 107,950, a Project T to HKD 1,905,000 and a Tsunami 16 to HKD 1,460,500. Those are past results and not a price guide, and a prototype carries a premium that a series watch does not. What they establish is the direction, and the direction is unambiguous. On the bench there is not much between the two. Both are hand finished at the limit of what their makers can do, both are quietly sized, neither is trying to be noticed across a room. The difference is that one of them was made by a company that also makes quartz watches for supermarkets, and the other was made by a man on his own. The market pays for the second fact and discounts the first, and it is the same discount the corporation is paying to advertise its way around.
The TGC view
This pairing is the clearest version of the argument this letter keeps making, which is that the label and the value rarely sit in the same place. Seiko owns the porcelain dial, the hand painting and the atelier, and prices them at a figure it does not publish in English. Asaoka owns none of that infrastructure and the salerooms pay him multiples of it. If you want the Eichi II, it is a watch you buy on its own terms and it will not be a trade. If you want an Asaoka, the queue is the product and the introduction is the only part we can help with.
A drawing made for a machine to repeat, against two brothers finishing movements by hand in a Dutch market town. The interesting difference is not the watches. It is that one of these houses will tell you the number before you are in the room.
Read the review →An IWC pilot's watch against a Bavarian house that makes its own steel and its own movements. The usual story is that the independent charges a premium. Here it does not, and the establishment name is the one trading under list.
Read the review →Breguet patented the tourbillon in 1801 and puts the patent date on the dial. A twenty-something Frenchman on the shore of Lake Annecy makes twelve tourbillons a year by hand, and charges less. For once the independent is not the expensive one.
Read the review →