zOwie Omega Discussion Forum

: I don;t buy that 'we only produce 8000 watches' marketing talk.
: You only make 8000 pieces a year because thats all you can sell....

The 'limited production' and 'in-house movement' debates miss the reality of scale of modern business and manufacturing. The idea that any of these brands still operate with the romantic setting of a close-knit family of 37 generations of watchmakers handcrafting each piece is as real as the notion that Keebler cookies really are being baked by little elves in their hollow tree!

These are large companies. Does it really mean anything that the movements are made by a different department of the same company, or a different division of the corporation, or a different company alltogether? Once you break free of incorrectly thinking of these companies as small family watchmakers, you realize that it does not matter what name is on the paycheck of the people that make the various parts -- if the whole that is the result is a product worthy of the name it wears!

Consider: Roll Royce (the Patek of automobiles?) stopped making their own automotive engines and now buy them from BMW. Why? Because RR's production numbers were so low they did not have the economies of scale necessary to have good quality control and support the level of engineering and development to keep up with the competition.

Similarly, BMW's mechanical reliability improved greatly once demand in the mid-1980's drove up their production levels.

When you only produce a small number of units, a minor flaw in the design or manufacturing process may effect only a few units at a time. Most manufacturing quality assurance checks random samples, not EVERY unit. So if only a few at a time are effected, such problems are not caught quickly - sometimes not until products are already shipped. But under large scale production, such problems come to light much quicker, and can often be resolved before products leave the factory.