Two watches judged on the same virtue, finishing, at twenty times the price. One is a Japanese manufacture selling a mirror-polished case for the price of a holiday. The other is a Finnish master hand-making fifty a year. How far up the curve does your eye want to go?
Matched on
The time-only dress watch judged on its finishing: a mirror-polished case, a hand-worked dial, the movement as the argument.
Grand Seiko, Japan
About USD 4,300, in steel
The quiet master of finishing at an accessible price. Zaratsu blade-polishing gives the case a distortion-free mirror the Swiss charge multiples for, the dial and hands are worked to the same standard, and it is all made in-house. In steel, for around four thousand dollars. You are buying finishing that punches far above its price, from a manufacture that answers to no one.
Kari Voutilainen, Môtiers
From about CHF 89,000, in gold
One of the most decorated independents alive, working in Môtiers with his own dial manufacture and his own escapement. The bevelling, the guilloché, the dial: made by hand, in gold, at roughly twenty times the Grand Seiko. Fewer than sixty leave the workshop a year. You are buying finishing at its ceiling, and a name only the initiated will recognise.
The verdict
Both are celebrated for the same thing, finishing, and that is the whole point. Grand Seiko engineers a mirror by hand and sells it for the price of a good holiday. Voutilainen takes finishing to its limit, one watch at a time, and charges twenty times more. Neither is wrong. One is the most finishing you can buy for four thousand dollars. The other is the most finishing there is. The question is how far up that curve your eye, and your budget, want to go.
The TGC view
The independent index is a spectrum, not a switch. At one end, exceptional finishing at a price anyone serious can reach; at the other, the hand-made summit at twenty times the money. We place both, and the visit to Môtiers is the part we most enjoy arranging.
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 →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.
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 →