The Last Affordable Handcraft: Why a £500 Watch Is the Best Value in Manufacturing

A modern Toyota rolls off the line having been touched by roughly a thousand robotic arms. Welding, painting, assembly, inspection — machines handle the majority of the process with human oversight at checkpoints. The result is extraordinary: a reliable, precise vehicle built to tolerances that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. Nobody is complaining. Robots build better cars than people do.

Now look at your wrist.

If you're wearing a mechanical watch — even an entry-level one powered by an ETA 2824 or Sellita SW200 — you're wearing something with around 130 to 170 individual components, depending on how you count the sub-assemblies. Every one of those parts has been handled, positioned, and checked by a person. The balance wheel pivots on a shaft often thinner than a human hair. The jewel bearings are synthetic rubies set into holes measured in hundredths of a millimetre. The hairspring — the component that actually determines whether your watch keeps time — is a coiled strip of metal so fine that a single fingerprint can throw off its performance.

And someone assembled all of that with tweezers, a loupe, and steady hands.

This isn't a quirk of the luxury end. This is the baseline. The movement inside a £500 Baltic or a £600 Farer went through the same fundamental process as the one inside a £50,000 Patek Philippe. The finishing is different, the complications are different, the materials are different — but the assembly method is essentially the same. A trained human, working at a bench, placing tiny parts into precise positions. It's been done this way for centuries because there is no machine that can do it better for movements at this scale and complexity.

That makes mechanical watchmaking one of the last handcrafts you can actually afford.

The Comparison Nobody Makes

Think about what £500 gets you in other handmade categories.

Furniture: a hand-built solid wood chair from a British workshop will cost you north of a thousand pounds. A simple oak side table, closer to £800. Anything with joinery and real craftsmanship is well into four figures before you've sat down.

Shoes: Goodyear-welted footwear made in Northampton — Loake, Cheaney, Crockett & Jones — starts around £250 for entry level and climbs past £450 for the mid-range. Crockett & Jones describe their process as requiring over 200 separate operations across eight weeks. That's serious handcraft. But you're paying for it, and the cheapest pair of properly hand-welted English shoes will still run you more than a Baltic Aquascaphe.

Clothing: a bespoke shirt from a Jermyn Street tailor starts around £200. A hand-tailored suit starts at £3,000 and goes up fast. Ready-to-wear with hand finishing — the kind you'd find at a decent independent — still commands a premium that puts it well above what most people spend on clothes.

Ceramics, leatherwork, glassblowing — any handcraft you can think of has a floor price that reflects the labour involved. And that floor is high.

Mechanical watches break the pattern. You can buy a hand-assembled, Swiss-made mechanical movement inside a well-designed, properly finished watch case for less than £500. The Studio Underd0g 01 Series starts at around £550. Farer's field watches sit in the same territory. Baltic's core range lives between £300 and £600. These aren't cheap watches pretending to be good. They're genuine handcraft at a price point that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Why Watches Are Different

The reason mechanical watches can be sold at these prices isn't that they've been cheapened. It's that the watch industry developed something unusual: a shared infrastructure for movement production.

ETA and Sellita produce movements at scale — but "at scale" in watchmaking still means that final assembly, regulation, and quality control are done by human hands. The efficiency comes from standardisation of components and tooling, not from replacing people with machines. When Baltic puts a Miyota 9039 or an ETA 2824 in a watch, they're buying a movement that has been individually tested and regulated before it arrives. That movement contains the same fundamental engineering — mainspring, gear train, escapement, balance wheel — that has powered mechanical watches since the eighteenth century.

What the independent brands add is everything else: the case design, the dial work, the hands, the finishing, the assembly of the complete watch. And in many cases, these brands are doing things at their price point that have no business being there. Anordain fires grand feu enamel dials in Glasgow. Studio Underd0g hand-finishes their dials with techniques borrowed from haute horlogerie. Baltic designs cases with proportions and details that reference mid-century watchmaking without copying it. Farer developed a distinctive colour language that's immediately recognisable.

This is the part that gets lost in the conversation about watch prices. When people compare a £500 microbrand to a £10,000 Rolex, they focus on the brand premium and the resale value. They miss the more interesting point: the £500 watch is a handmade mechanical object with decorative finishing, assembled by a person, powered by engineering that's been refined over three hundred years. There is nothing else you can buy for that money that involves this level of human craft.

What This Actually Means

There's a quiet revolution happening at the entry level of mechanical watchmaking, and it has nothing to do with disruption or marketing. It's about the basic economics of what these objects are.

A car with 30,000 parts costs £25,000 and is built mostly by robots. A pair of shoes with 200 operations costs £300 and takes eight weeks. A mechanical watch with 130–170 parts costs £500 and is assembled by hand using techniques that haven't fundamentally changed since Abraham-Louis Breguet was working in Paris in the 1780s.

The watch is, by any measure, absurdly good value for what it is. Not because the market has underpriced it, but because the combination of standardised movement production and direct-to-consumer independent brands has created something rare: genuine handcraft at a price that normal people can access without thinking twice.

Every time you wind a mechanical watch, you're engaging a mainspring that stores energy through coiled tension. That energy passes through a gear train, is metered by an escapement, and is regulated by a balance wheel oscillating back and forth — in a standard movement, 28,800 times per hour. Every hour. For days. Powered by nothing but a spring and governed by nothing but physics and precision engineering.

No battery. No circuit board. No software update. Just a person with tweezers, and three centuries of accumulated knowledge about how to make small things keep perfect time.

That's the luxury story the industry should be telling. Not heritage. Not scarcity. Not the mythology of brand names. The actual, physical, remarkable fact that in 2026, you can still buy something made entirely by human hands, powered by nothing but mechanical ingenuity, for the price of a decent pair of trainers.

The independents already know this. It's why they show their workshops, explain their processes, and let the work speak for itself. The rest of the industry is still trying to sell you a logo.

At CalderoneWatchCo, we stock watches from makers who let the craft do the talking. Every watch we sell is a hand-assembled mechanical object — and every one is available to buy, right now, at a transparent price. Browse our collection.