The Fourth Wheel, Issue 109

The myth of the quartz crisis, gender politics in watch marketing, a slippery slope for prestige brands and one very silly limerick

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that as you read this, is en route to a long-awaited week off. Never fear, however, for arrangements have been made to ensure your continued entertainment every Friday.

Regular readers will know that every ten weeks, I open the floor up to you, my delightfully inquisitive readers, and answer any questions you might have. (If you’ve joined in the last nine weeks - welcome!). We would normally be doing an AMA next week, but I am going to be far too busy lounging by the pool to answer your head-scratchers. You’ll be getting a review of the Schofield Obscura instead, which was a really great opportunity for me to focus on a truly different kind of watch from the mainstream models I’ve reviewed to date. I also spoke to Schofield founder Giles Ellis to get a bit more insight into the design, which is never wasted time.

The AMA will take place in Issue 111, two weeks from now, so I urge you as always: get your questions in! There is a question thread you can reply to here, although people have largely preferred other methods recently. You can reply to the email, message me on Substack, send me a DM on Instagram or if you’re really ambitious, fly a banner over the Dordogne and hope I see it in the next seven days.

Last minute update:

I am sorry to announce that the Vintage Bulletin newsletter for July - set to go out on Monday July 1st - has had to be postponed. I am deeply irritated not to bring you the stories I had planned - circumstances have conspired against me, and I would rather put it on hold than publish something hastily cobbled together. I know this vintage strand is only just getting going, and hope these teething problems will soon be behind me, but for now please accept my apologies! Proper vintage content coming in August, I promise.

Chris

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The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

World Exclusive: Horological Dicktionary On The Record
Is The Louis Vuitton Escale Bringing Back The Classic Round Watch?
The Most Incredible Ressence Watches Ever Made
Is a COSC Certificate Irrelevant In Today’s Market?
Revolution At Bremont

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Within mere minutes of publishing last week’s email - which by the way, is well worth it if you haven’t caught up, featuring as it does an interview with none other than watch meme lord Horological Dicktionary - my attention was drawn to a story that I might well have wanted to recommend.

The article in question is a column by Robin Swithinbank for WatchPro, asking whether quartz watches might in fact provide the answer for several problems currently facing the industry. Now Robin is a friend, and I promote his work an embarrassing amount already, but having read the piece I’m going to do better than recommend it: I’m going to use it as the jumping-off point for this entire newsletter.

I won’t paraphrase the entire article - you can read it here - but the backbone of the argument goes like this:

“For the entirety of my career in watches and at least the past quarter century, quartz has been a dirty word in a luxury watchmaking sector hell-bent on mechanisation.

The cult of mechani-cool has given mechanical watches a sort of moral superiority, and with it has come the rather lazy assertion that quartz, to put it bluntly, is crap.”

However, as he continues:

“mechanical watches have a number of problems at the moment that don’t seem to be going away, chiefly that they’re too big, too expensive and too un-buyable. Quartz, and I say this despite myself, might just provide the solution.”

Robin goes on to point out that not only was the biggest success story of recent times - the MoonSwatch - quartz, but that today’s customer is less concerned with movements than ever and more inclined towards smaller, slimmer, possibly shaped watches.

“if you’re one of the many brands that has shelled out on movement design over the past 15 years, you might be in trouble. Because your high-functioning in-house automatics don’t fit inside today’s genderless 34mm watches. Quartz, Swiss Made quartz no less, offers a ready-to-go solution…

“…If we can agree prices are too high, then we must agree they need to come down. And yet no one in their right mind is going to risk sacrificing their brand equity by slashing prices of existing models, and nor should they.

Far better would be to introduce a new generation of quartz watches with lower price points.”

You get the idea. Now, I am not entirely sure that the shift towards ‘genderless 34mm watches’ is as pronounced as it might seem from Instagram, but it has been the direction of travel of the last few years. To my mind, it’s more about a widening of the ‘Overton window’ of male watch buying habits; some people now consider smaller watches but the majority of men still buy watches between 36mm and 42mm.

Why am I only talking about men? When you start talking about quartz, one of the issues that immediately comes up is that the technology has been heavily gendered over the last 30 years or so.

Within luxury brands - i.e. leaving aside the likes of Swatch, or companies whose entire output uses quartz - the majority of quartz watches are marketed primarily at women, and the vast majority of watches marketed at women are quartz.

The latest addition to the Royal Oak family

I’m not denying there has been a recent move towards a more unisex watch market, but a look at any brand’s (or retailer’s) website will still show clearly-defined collections that are stereotypically feminine. It’s more socially acceptable for men to wear them nowadays, and I’m absolutely fine with that, but that doesn’t change the fact that a large number - I’d suggest the majority - of men will pause before buying something that we’ve all been conditioned to see as a woman’s watch.

The thing here is that quartz, itself, is not ‘feminine’, but because it is usually bound up with qualities that are seen that way - size, shape, colour, gemsetting - it has become somehow feminised.

We could get bogged down in discussing to what extent this accurately represents the priorities and opinions of watch-buying men and women; likewise we could discuss the inherent sexism of quartz’s portrayal as inherently ‘lesser’ and its association with women’s watches¹. I’ve seen so many articles heralding the arrival of the mechanically-savvy female collector over the last 13 years - I’d say it rears its head as an idea about every 2-3 years - and I’m not dismissing the notion, or the individuals who speak up for it, but things don’t seem to have changed dramatically in that time².

Side note: It is reasonable, I think, to say that watch brand marketing and media strategy is probably ignoring a small but not insignificant percentage of women who find the above reductive and patronising. I think it’s also probably true to say that broadly, brands and retailers and publishers do what they do because they can see that it’s working - or at least, working well enough. From a free-market, supply-and-demand-led perspective, you have to conclude that brands wouldn’t leave a huge potential market for mechanical watches marketed at women untapped; therefore the percentage of mechanical watches that are aimed at women is an accurate measure of how many women really care about them.

What I’m getting at, with this diversion into gender-based marketing, is that when we talk about the popularity of quartz watches, we need to remember the picture is very different if you look at the whole market, and very different if you are a woman. When Robin talks about introducing new ranges of less-expensive quartz watches, you have to add the qualifier ‘for men’; those watches already exist at many brands - TAG Heuer, Breitling, Hublot - but we’re told they are for women. I’m as woke as the next man, but every sales and marketing manager under the sun will tell you that represents a problem if your goal is to find an answer to the aforementioned commercial quandary.