What is a watchmaker? (Corporate edition)
“So you make watches?” Not really. But in order to fix a watch, it really helps to know how to make a watch.
Most watches and components are made by machines in huge manufacturing plants, not by hand. There are very few individuals making watches by hand, and most of them don’t fabricate every part. I make watches the same way you make your bed. You don’t actually build a bed from scratch every morning. That would be insane. I’m more of a watch repairer. Many of the skills and theory used in making a watch are necessary for repairs— especially when it comes to older pieces. So I’ll lay out for you some different ways to be a watchmaker.
Corporate / Brand Service Centers
The watchmakers in big corporate service centers have a great job. They have unlimited access to parts, and they work in big, beautiful, clean facilities that feel like top-secret laboratories. There’s lots of key-card swiping, long hallways, and people in lab coats. The equipment is state of the art. The coffee is usually excellent.
In corporate service centers, the workload is usually focused on one brand or style of watch, and the watchmakers never have to interact with customers. Labor is distributed for the sake of efficiency— one department just evaluates watches for service and creates estimates. Another uncases and cases up the watches. The movements go to watchmakers for service and the cases go to a refinishing department. At one facility I visited, I saw a workbench with a rotating platform designed to hold 5 movements to be serviced at the same time.
The corporate watchmaker has a production quota and must work very efficiently. They do not repair watches as much as they replace parts and make adjustments as needed. At some brands, there are technicians who just install dials and hands after service. If a watch hand is loose on a post, the hand gets replaced instead of tightened. The service centers don’t want to see your watch again for several years, so it’s more cost effective to install new factory parts than to rely on a modification to fix the problem.
For very complicated watches manufactured by high-end brands, it is more likely that a watch will be serviced from start to finish by one person. There are also watchmakers in these facilities who deal with “repeat offenders”, or watches that have come back more than once in a period of time. At one facility I visited, these problem solvers had their own separate quiet workspace with even more advanced equipment. They stared patiently at large timegrapher screens, tapping their fingers in anticipation.
The technical evaluators are masters of theory and experts in the nuances of every caliber that crosses their bench. Once a watchmaker services a caliber three or four times, they are armed with techniques to extracting the best results. After years of working for a single brand and seeing all they have to offer, a level of understanding develops that cannot be defined.
This team also reports to the designers and engineers who developed the watches they service. That’s why it’s important to send a watch back to the manufacturer whenever possible. It’s not cheap or fast, but it does aide in the creation of better watches in the long run.
