Luxury Watch Brands Are Lazy (And Independents Are Proving It)

Pick any major Swiss watch brand and look at what they released in the last five years. Not what they marketed. Not what they teased on Instagram. What they actually put on shelves.

You'll find the same case shapes they've been making for decades, with a new dial colour. A heritage reissue of something from the 1960s. A limited edition that changes the bezel insert. Maybe — if they're feeling adventurous — a slightly different case size.

The luxury watch industry has a design problem. And it's been building for years.

Swiss watch exports fell 2.8% in 2024 and another 1.7% in 2025. Volume dropped to 14.6 million units — half of what the industry exported in 2000. The Deloitte Swiss Watch Industry Study described it as "one of its most complex periods in recent memory." And that was before Trump's tariffs on Swiss imports — which jumped from around 2-3% historically to 10%, then 39%, before settling at 15% — made everything more expensive for US buyers.

Here's what matters: the tariffs are an external force. Brands can't control trade policy. But what they can control is what they put on your wrist — and the product hasn't earned the prices it's being sold at, tariff or no tariff. The steel no-date Submariner now retails at £8,100 in the UK. The design hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1950s. When the only thing that changes year on year is the price tag, you don't have a tariff problem. You have a laziness problem.

To be fair, Rolex's Land-Dweller, announced at Watches & Wonders 2025, was genuinely significant — a new integrated-bracelet collection with 18 patents exclusive to the watch and an entirely new Dynapulse escapement system. The 1908 dress watch in 2023 showed creative ambition too. But these are two noteworthy releases in the space of three years, from a company making an estimated 1.25 million watches annually. Meanwhile, the Submariner, GMT-Master, and Daytona continue to print money with changes so incremental they'd need a loupe to spot them. And both the Land-Dweller (starting at $13,900 for the 36mm Rolesor) and the 1908 ($26,600 in white gold) exist at price points that lock out the buyers the industry claims to be courting.

Omega's strategy has been similarly conservative: MoonSwatch collaborations aside, the core lineup is Speedmaster variants, Seamaster variants, and the occasional Constellation refresh. TAG Heuer cycles through Monaco and Carrera reissues. Breitling repackages its Navitimer every eighteen months. The playbook across the board is the same: mine the archive, change the colour, raise the price.

The Deloitte study found that brand executives are focused on "cost measures, being more efficient and sizing down." That's the language of an industry in defensive mode, optimising margins on existing products rather than building new ones.

What Innovation Actually Looks Like

While the conglomerates polish the same cases, independent watchmakers are doing things that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Anordain, a workshop in Glasgow, taught themselves the art of grand feu vitreous enamel — a technique so difficult that even established Swiss brands outsource it to specialist firms like Donzé Cadrans. Anordain does it in-house. Each dial takes a minimum of 12 hours of handwork, fired at over 830°C across six to seven layers, with a rejection rate around 30%. They produce roughly 50 finished dials per month. The result is a depth and richness of colour that no printed, painted, or lacquered dial can match. And they sell the finished watch from around £1,700 before VAT — a fraction of what you'd pay for enamel work from the big Swiss houses.

That's not a microbrand cutting corners to hit a price point. That's a small team doing artisan work at a level that most mainstream brands won't attempt at any price — and making it accessible.

Christopher Ward developed the SH21, a manufacture movement created through their merger with Swiss movement specialist Synergies Horlogères. It delivers a 120-hour power reserve with twin barrels, COSC certification, and they put it in watches that retail for well under what the Swiss giants charge for comparable in-house calibres. Studio Underd0g builds watches with hand-finished dials and genuine personality — their 01 Series chronographs start at around £550. Baltic produces designs with more visual identity in a single collection than some conglomerates manage across their entire catalogue.

Farer builds proper GMT complications with Sellita SW330-2 Top Grade movements and a distinctive British design language that's immediately recognisable. Halios makes tool watches with finishing that punches well above the price tag. These aren't hobbyists. They're serious watchmakers operating at a level of craft and originality that the major brands should find embarrassing.

The Real Innovation Gap

The gap isn't just about dial techniques or movement development. It's about how these watches reach people.

Independent brands sell direct. They tell their story on social media. They respond to emails. They explain their process, show their workshops, and treat their customers like people rather than names on a spreadsheet waiting to be deemed worthy of a purchase.

The traditional luxury model does none of this. It relies on artificial scarcity, opaque allocation systems, and a retail experience designed to make you feel like you should be grateful for the opportunity to spend five figures. The product hasn't earned the premium through innovation — it's maintained through restricting access. That worked when information was scarce and alternatives were invisible. It doesn't work when a 24-year-old can watch an Anordain enamel dial being fired on Instagram, read a 3,000-word deep-dive on Reddit, and order one directly — all in the same evening.

The Chrono24/Fratello H1 2025 report showed demand polarising at the entry level (€500–€2,000) and high end (€20,000+), with the weakest activity in the middle. That middle ground is precisely where the major brands have parked most of their volume — Datejusts, Seamasters, Carreras — relying on brand recognition to justify prices that increasingly feel arbitrary when the product hasn't meaningfully evolved.

Why This Matters

None of this means Rolex is going out of business. Rolex dominates the Swiss watch market, and the Land-Dweller's Dynapulse escapement proves they can still innovate when they choose to. The point isn't that these brands are failing. It's that they're coasting.

When an entire industry responds to falling exports and shifting consumer preferences by raising prices and reissuing the same product in a new colourway, something is broken. When a small team in Glasgow is doing more interesting dial work than brands with hundred-year histories and billion-franc revenues, the conversation about "luxury" and "craft" needs recalibrating.

The Swiss watch industry has spent the post-pandemic period convincing itself that the bubble years of 2021–2023 were normal and that the correction since is temporary. But the FHS's own data tells a different story: volume has halved since 2000, the sub-CHF 3,000 export segment fell 15.6% in 2024, and the industry is now dependent on a shrinking number of ultra-high-end products sold to an increasingly narrow customer base. That's not a healthy market. That's a market that's forgotten how to make things people actually want.

Independents haven't forgotten. They're building watches that people choose because of what they are, not because of what name is on the dial. They're innovating in materials, techniques, design, and — critically — in how they sell and communicate. Every watch is available to buy. Every price is transparent. Every customer matters.

The Bottom Line

The luxury watch industry has a laziness problem, and independents are the proof. Not because independents are perfect — they have their own challenges with scale, service networks, and consistency. But they're showing, every single day, that you can make a genuinely interesting, beautifully crafted watch and sell it honestly to people who want it. No waitlists. No games. No pretending that a new dial colour is innovation.

The next time someone tells you that a Submariner is worth over eight grand because of "heritage" and "craftsmanship," ask them what's actually changed about the watch in the last ten years. Then go look at what Anordain, Baltic, Farer, Christopher Ward, and a dozen other independent makers have built in the same period — often with a fraction of the resources and none of the institutional advantages.

The answer to who's actually pushing watchmaking forward isn't even close.

CalderoneWatchCo exists because we believe the most interesting watches in the world aren't made by the biggest brands. They're made by the people who care the most. Browse our collection and see for yourself.