The Watch Industry Is Lazy

I've been thinking about this for a while and I'm just going to say it. The watch industry is lazy. Not every brand, not every person in it, but the industry as a whole has been coasting for years and getting away with it because people keep buying.

Lazy in design. Lazy in marketing. Lazy in pricing. Lazy in how they treat the people spending their money. It's everywhere once you start looking, and honestly I'm a bit tired of pretending it's fine.

Lazy Design

Walk into any watch shop or scroll through any brand's website and count how many watches fall into the same five categories. Submariner-shaped diver. Speedmaster-shaped chronograph. Calatrava-shaped dress watch. Explorer-shaped field watch. Royal Oak-shaped sports watch on a bracelet. That's basically the entire industry.

And look, those archetypes exist for good reason. They're proven designs that work. I'm not saying every watch needs to be some avant-garde statement piece that looks like it fell off a spaceship. But there's a difference between being influenced by great design and just doing the same thing everyone else is doing with slightly different hand shapes and calling it innovation.

The big brands are the worst for this. They'll release a new watch and the press release will bang on about "bold new design language" and you look at it and it's the same watch they made five years ago in a different shade of blue. A new dial colour is not a new design. A ceramic bezel instead of an aluminium one is not a new design. Going from 40mm to 41mm is definitely not a new design. But the industry treats these things like they just reinvented the wheel and expects you to be excited about it.

The really frustrating part is that when someone does try something genuinely different — a new case shape, an unusual dial material, a colour palette that doesn't look like everything else — the community often punishes them for it. "It doesn't look like a proper watch." "It's too out there." "I wouldn't know what to pair it with." And then those same people complain that everything looks the same. You can't have it both ways.

The brands that are actually doing interesting design work right now are almost all independents. Smaller companies with smaller teams who can take a risk on a shape or a colour without needing approval from fourteen people and a focus group. That's where the energy is. And the big brands know it — which is why they keep buying the small ones or copying their ideas two years later and pretending they came up with it.

Lazy Marketing

The marketing language in the watch industry has been on autopilot for decades and nobody seems to care.

"Timeless elegance." "Unwavering precision." "A legacy of excellence." "Crafted for those who dare." "For the modern explorer." I could generate a watch brand's entire website copy by pulling phrases out of a hat and nobody would notice because they all sound the same already.

Every watch is "meticulously crafted." Every dial is "captivating." Every movement is "the beating heart" of something. Every brand has "heritage" even if they were founded six years ago. It's all meaningless. It's filler that sounds expensive and says absolutely nothing about why you should care.

And the photography is the same thing. White background. Watch floating at a slight angle. Maybe a macro shot of the dial texture. Maybe a wrist shot on someone in a suit or standing on a cliff. The whole industry shares about four moods and three lighting setups and nobody questions it.

The reason this bothers me isn't just aesthetic. It's that when every brand sounds the same and looks the same, you can't actually tell who's good and who's full of shit. That's a problem. A brand that's put genuine thought and money into their product and a brand that's rebadged a catalogue watch from Alibaba can use exactly the same language to describe themselves. "Swiss movement." "Sapphire crystal." "British designed." Those phrases tell you nothing about quality, nothing about care, nothing about whether anyone actually gave a shit when they made the thing. And that's by design. The vagueness protects the lazy ones.

The brands I respect are the ones that talk like actual people. Tell me specifically what you did and why. Tell me about the decisions you made and the ones you didn't. Have an opinion about something. Be willing to say "we think most watches at this price are boring and here's why ours isn't." That's interesting. That's a brand with a pulse. "Timeless elegance" is a brand on life support.

Lazy Customer Treatment

This is the one that genuinely baffles me. The way some watch brands treat the people spending money with them is absolutely disgusting.

The whole authorised dealer system is built on the idea that you should feel lucky to be allowed to buy a watch. Waitlists where nobody can tell you how long you'll wait. Purchase history requirements where you have to buy stuff you don't want to earn the right to buy the thing you do. Sales associates who treat you differently based on how much they think you're worth. And the brands behind all of this just let it happen because it feeds the exclusivity narrative.

I'm not talking about hating ADs — the people working in them are mostly just doing their jobs within a system they didn't create. But the system itself is stupid. In what other industry would you hand over thousands of pounds and feel like you should be grateful for the privilege? Imagine walking into a car dealership and being told you need to buy three cars you don't want before they'll let you buy the one you came in for. You'd walk out and never come back. But in watches, people accept it because the industry has convinced them that's how luxury works.

Then there's the after-sales side. Service costs that have gone through the roof. Wait times for servicing that can be months. The fact that some brands actively make it harder for independent watchmakers to service their watches so you're forced to go through their service centres.

And the communication. God, the communication. Try emailing some brands with a simple question. You'll either get a template response that doesn't answer what you asked or you'll get nothing at all. For brands selling products at this price, the level of customer service is often embarrassingly bad.

The independents are generally better at this because they have to be. When you're a small brand with no logo prestige to hide behind, you live and die by how you treat people. That's another reason I think the independent space is where the real value is right now — not just in the product, but in the experience of actually buying one.

So What Changes?

Honestly? Probably nothing unless people start voting with their wallets.

The big brands will keep doing what they're doing because it works. Prices will keep going up. The marketing will stay vague. The designs will stay safe. The waitlists will stay long. As long as people keep buying, there's no incentive to change.

But I think there's a growing number of people — collectors, enthusiasts, people who just like wearing nice watches — who are getting tired of it. Who are starting to look at independent brands not as a compromise or a stepping stone to a Rolex, but as genuinely the better option. Better design, better value, better customer experience, more interesting watches.

The laziness in this industry created the space that independents now occupy. And the more people realise that, the more the balance shifts. That's not wishful thinking. I see it every single day in what people are buying and what they're asking about. The conversations are changing even if the big brands haven't caught up yet.

The watch industry is lazy. But it doesn't have to be. And the brands that aren't — the ones actually trying to make something worth caring about — those are the ones I want to sell and the ones I think you should be looking at.