Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

"Hublot: You are, simply, wrong."

Then again when history and marketing collide the latter will win out for most in the general public. Years ago on another watch forum I posted a pic of one of my WW2 German issued watches and one poster went off on me. How dare you! Nazis! kinda thing. Another member who I used to chat with by PM, as it happens a Jewish lad from New York popped into the thread and pointed out that the poster having a fit regularly posted pics of his IWC Big Pilot with no sense of Irony. Well IWC keep the not very marketable direct link to the Reichsluftfahrtministerium(German air ministry) design it uses. As did Patek when they wheeled out their pilots watch line.

Like I was saying much earlier in the thread, out of the Swiss brands Longines really are a bit of an oddball. While Omega are very focussed on their lines, Longines are like a mid tier watch company of the past before more modern marketing kicked off where there was usually a scattergun approach in place. They have a huge range and range of prices that runs from quartz dress watches, through historical remakes, through high end quartz, to higher end chronographs and solid gold dress pieces. They also hit the women's market hard. In Asia that segment makes up half of their overall sales so a lucrative one. Actually they concentrate hard on the Asian market itself. They were always well known over there going right back. Longines were also big in the Americas and southern Europe before brands tended to be worldwide.

Rolex for example were very much a British and her empire/commonwealth market brand, only getting any traction in the US in the late 60's and then other places followed to where now they're the worldwide luxury brand. They're very focussed too. Always were actually. How they navigated the market range in the past was with different brands under the Rolex umbrella. At the very start of the company they had many brand names going at once(12 IIRC), from cheap to expensive, until they narrowed things down to Tudor and Rolex.

Another oddball thing with Longines in the old days were their movements and the finishing on them. You could buy an entry level time only dress watch and it would have the same attention to detail movement as their top of the range chronographs. No extra prima, no more decorated versions.

Even odder was how few watches they sold that were officially certified as chronometers. Yet between timing awards and the chronometer trials they won more than any other brand in the 20th century. Sure, they'd run ads with "the world's most honoured watch", but produced few official chronometers even when their movements were well capable of passing. Omega were kinda similar but copped on in the 60's. Actually Omega were real cute hoors in the 70's when the tuning fork f300 movements were bought in. They just slipped under the radar for mechanical chronometer testing and being electronic would pass the tests in their sleep, so nearly every 70's Omega f300 has chronometer on the dial. They clearly saw it was a sales advantage, while Longines who had the same movements were off smoking dope or something.