To its benefit, the wristwatch industry (since I’ve been paying attention to it, at least) has always been somewhat fragmented. What I mean by that is that there is a great variety in the types of brands that make products, the types of timepiece models available, the places to purchase such products, and the types of people and communities that are interested in timepieces. Even though a love of watches is able to bring many people together, the market itself is not a cohesive group of people or ideas, but rather a more loosely associated collective of personalities who are on a similar mission to express themselves through wristwatches. Nevertheless, until recently, a lot was holding the watch industry together. Many of those connections are now breaking, and despite the distance-shrinking power of the internet and hobbyist communities, I’ve noticed that the watch industry is moving toward more fragmentation, as opposed to more cooperation and standardization.
Three things have mainly contributed to cohesion in the watch industry over the last few decades. Those things include where watches are typically made, where watch products and brands are initially debuted (industry trade shows), and where watches are typically sold (third-party authorized dealers). Each of those connecting factors is relatively weak by today’s standards and has thus contributed to a lot of brands doing things their own way, communicating with their own groups outside of industry events, and selling directly to consumers using a variety of methods.
Today, people who make watches have more options but also risks when it comes to how they do business. No longer do brands feel beholden to attend major tradeshows (though many of them still do, and the pressure to participate is high), and either bypass tradeshows altogether or participate in smaller or more niche events. Brands also have a variety of options when it comes to how to build their watches. Some brands want to manufacture everything themselves, and others hire third-party companies to take care of the industrialization part of their business. Most brands blend the two and seek to create diverse supply chains and are motivated to find new suppliers as opposed to trying to work with busy, picky, or difficult-to-work-with legacy suppliers – especially those in Switzerland and surrounding Europe. You can build watches or get components in more parts of Europe now. Parts of Asia are expanding their watch-making capabilities, including Japan, which now actually makes more watches for third parties (as opposed to only their own brands). Finally, a number of watch brands have eschewed traditional sales distribution schemes by “going direct” and seeking to interface with consumers directly. Direct-to-consumer brands are not typically present at multi-brand retailers and do not attend events seeking to court retailers. For the most part, this group of companies is mostly interested in directly meeting with consumers who want to purchase their products. With that said, the types of consumers they target, as well as the price point of their goods, can vary dramatically.
For a number of years now, I have tracked and commented on the ways that modern watchmakers do business and try to navigate markets and consumer groups. One of the most common things I keep repeating is that we are in an era of vast experimentation and testing due to economic necessity and the erosion of traditional business models. It is not the fact that all of the strategies of making or selling watches right now are working or are effective. Rather, it is more accurate to say that traditional strategies are considered either too expensive or too competitive for many companies, and they are reaching for new models and niches that may work. In an attempt to assert themselves in very crowded markets, many brands (new or old) try novel approaches to marketing, production, and distribution. Some of these modern techniques will survive, and many will go extinct. The point is that the fragmentation in the watch industry is not a response to opportunity, but rather a hunt for it.
For enthusiasts and collectors, one of the harshest realities of today’s fragmented watch market is that no one person can really participate in all of it. There are too many various communities and types of brands around the world, that it is currently impossible to entirely wrap your mind around “all that is happening in the wristwatch space.” Even if you travel around the world all the time, there will be large parts of the enthusiast community, brands, and products that you will miss out on. This is tough for someone like me, who has striven for more than two decades to fully “understand” the contemporary wristwatch space. Boy, can I say it has been a moving target. And now there is not even a way for me to observe what everyone is doing all over the world, at any given time.
In some ways, the watch world today is more similar to when I started collecting watches more than 20 years ago than just a few years back. It used to be that surveying a few websites, more or less, informed you about all the watches available, and most watches could be purchased by anyone, anywhere in the world. When I first got into watches, there were a vast number of excellent brands that were not available in the United States, and that required lots of hunting to find or learn about in the first place. Internet enthusiast communities like aBlogtoWatch sought to close those gaps and generally report on as many of the cool watches around the world as possible. At the same time, more and more brands sought international sales distribution either through stores or by selling online directly to consumers. A large subindustry of timepiece advertising and marketing professionals sought out media and influential voices to educate them first, hoping that they would go on to educate their own communities. At the time, the watch world was going through a process of less fragmentation and more cohesion, bolstered by the online information economy, professional media, and the desire to reach consumers around the world. Those forces are now in marked reverse.
This fact is abundantly clear to the team members of aBlogtoWatch and other watch media, who can no longer meaningfully wrap their minds around the larger happenings of the timepiece universe. This is because there are a large number of brands and models that never get on our radar, or that we don’t have access to photograph and inspect. Sure, we can find images online to cover new things, but we also want to protect the audience from products and experiences that are not up to snuff. I’ve always designed aBlogtoWatch as a gatekeeper of sorts. We try to understand a brand’s products and story first, and then share those stories with the audience that we feel will be worth their time. Much of this came from a brand being interested in communicating with media through public relations outreach, and the dynamic worked out well because consumers could trust our selection criteria, without feeling overwhelmed by options.
While a large number of brands still understand the importance of third-party media and the relationships that consumers have with reputable media voices, that process stifles other brands that are less patient and more interested in immediate sales as opposed to building relationships. Today, there are a great number of watches that don’t seek to court media attention, but rather use social media and other direct-to-consumer communication channels to pitch their goods to buyers without boundaries or first having to convince anyone that those messages and products are worthy. That’s not inherently immoral, but it does present risks to consumers who don’t benefit from the third-party validation that many buyers rely on authentic media for. It isn’t something that aBlogtoWatch can directly control, but it is important to point out that, on a simple level, the watch market is fragmented between those brands that like to work with media and those brands that are afraid of it. That also means no watch media publication can meaningfully cover all the interesting watches that are available, because getting information and access about all of them is impractical or impossible. Visibility is everything, and today media companies like aBlogtoWatch are trying to realign to determine how we can see the maximum number of watches in-person, so that we can share them with you.
This isn’t just an issue with small, start-up brands. Even some larger brands have decided to fragment themselves in some rather radical ways. Some major watchmakers today (at least historically speaking) have sought to entirely avoid participation in the watch industry space. They don’t attend events, they don’t really care about courting media, and they price their goods in a vacuum that is unrelated to the competitive marketplace. Those same brands attempt to court consumers directly and want to control the relationship with consumers without having third-party retailers or our opinions interfere with that process. Anyone subject to such a direct relationship with a brand should approach it with suspicion and cynicism. No brand that “cuts out the communication middle man” does to have a more transparent and honest relationship with buyers. On a basic level, my reaction to such brands is “good riddance.” If they are afraid of what media and opinion leaders think of them, then their products are probably inferior or overpriced. What consumers should look for is the opposite scenario – when brands are very proud of and confident in their products, they tend to want to share them as widely as possible. We can tell the difference, but consumers are not always in a position to do so.
A more fragmented watch world might create more commercial opportunities and diversity, but it also creates dangers for consumers and problems for the development of distribution and marketing eco-systems, which tend to be necessary for long-term business stability. One of the things I noticed happening as the watch world became more fragmented is that watch brands began losing their armies. What do I mean by that? When a watch brand is successful, it is often because it enjoys a lot of “soldiers” all over the world who advocate for it. Soldiers in this context are third-party people who might not work for the brand directly, but still benefit from the brand. These include salespeople, advertising professionals, and, of course, happy fans and owners. Powerful brands tend to have a large assortment of powerful voices that “fight” for them around the world. Each of these soldiers needs an incentive (often monetary or relationship-driven) to praise the brand, recommend it, sell it, talk about it, etc. Networks and professional eco-systems foster these groups of soldiers. The more fragmented the industry is, and the more alone brands become, the fewer people they tend to develop around the world who are fighting for them. A lot of brands today that have chosen to go it alone or to bypass doing business with traditional eco-systems of people or business also lose out by not having friends who fight on their behalf. This has led to considerable decreases in demand and relevance for a lot of existing brands (who try to compensate for it through marketing spending), even if they rationalize that they get to keep more of what they earn without having to share.
As a member of the media, my challenge is to guide aBlogtoWatch readers through this watch enthusiasm and collecting hobby. I want to make sure we bring enough brands and watch models to your attention, without overwhelming you or demanding your attention each time a new product is available for purchase on the market. There are far too many watches for anyone to pay attention to, but they don’t all need your attention. There will be times when brands or cool watches fall through the cracks. Often, the issue isn’t that our team doesn’t know about those products, but rather that we’ve not had an opportunity to personally evaluate them. My goal is that we get to all the interesting stories eventually.
Having said that, I am increasingly comfortable with not sharing each and every new brand or release with our audience because I think it would stress most people out. I would rather emphasize a curated experience of not just cool watches, but also brands that people tend to feel good working with. What we realize more than ever is that the process of buying a watch is just as important as the product itself for so many consumers. There are some nice watches made by brands we would not easily recommend doing business with. We don’t like to feel bad when we spend money, and likewise, I don’t want to knowingly set up aBlogtoWatch readers with brands that will not treat them with respect or dignity. Given that manipulation and pretending can happen so much in the sale of new or used watches, we try to vet those brands and retailers that tend to offer people good experiences. As I mentioned above, one of the major problems of having an increasingly fragmented watch market is the newly important concept of “caveat emptor” (buyer beware).
The days of visiting two or three major trade show events each year and being able to learn about the majority of important new watches and brands are over. While a serious watch brand requires a serious investment, anyone with just tens of thousands of dollars can fund the production of a watch and ostensibly start a brand. There are a number of smaller, regional shows that many of these companies use to find customers and get their name out there. This is where most newly formed brands (that have actual watches to sell as opposed to computer graphics or rough prototypes) debut, and they can often stay niche and unknown unless their founder is particularly charismatic or savvy at marketing.
If your goal is to know everything about the watch world, then you’ll often be frustrated and disappointed by today’s highly fragmented market. If you accept that the hobby is bigger now than it has been in the last several decades, and accept that there will be evolutionary hits and misses that will only prove themselves over time, then you might be a bit more excited about the community. aBlogtoWatch’s instincts for identifying quality products and the smart people who make or design watches are not affected by the changing or fragmenting market. That said, I must contend with the fact that aBlogtoWatch cannot be everywhere all the time. Even if we had more resources and hired more staff to cover more timepiece market niches, I believe that it might overwhelm the audience (and not necessarily in a good way). Our goal right now is to acknowledge the state of the watch industry and continue to serve the needs of people who like and buy watches by gatekeeping, curating, and assessing. Together, we can ride the wave of today’s dynamic watch industry, knowing that in the future it will probably become less fragmented again.