Parts accounts are tricky things. You have to meet the brand's requirement for education, experience, and the shop must meet their standards for cleanliness, organization, and of course the equipment you have. Often equipment you might have does the job perfectly fine for one brand, but does not meet the requirements of another. Some brands also have shop inspections, so they come in and look at your shop, and if they see anything they don't like, they may guide you to correcting it, or they may just pull your account. A recent example that created a lot of chatter in some circles (among watchmakers in the US) was a visit from the Swatch inspector to a particular shop. He asked to see the hands of the watchmaker, and told him that to be a professional he needed to get a manicure (WTF?) and pay more attention to personal hygiene. Watchmakers in the US will know the inspector I'm talking about and if you know him personally, he can be very cold and blunt to put it very mildly. I have heard recently that he no longer works for Swatch, which in my view is a good thing for several reasons (some not related to his interpersonal skills, or lack thereof). Even with meeting all these requirements, an account is not guaranteed. In many cases you need to be affiliated with a dealer, or if there is a dealer or other watchmaker near you with an account, your account may be denied. Brands will often require you to go to training, and also to buy new equipment every year in order to maintain your account. The number frequently given is that you should budget $4,000 per year for new equipment requirements. And even if you do get one, accounts can be terminated by the company at any time for no reason. I was viewing some court documents once and came across a letter sent to someone in the US with a Rolex account - he had the count for decades, and then one day just got this letter in the mail: Dear Mr. XXXX, After careful review of your spare-parts account, we are herewith informing you of our decision to discontinue our business relationship. Your Rolex spare parts account has been officially closed as of today's date. For more information, you may refer to your agreement, which provides in the Policy Statement, under General Policies, 4th item, that "Both the parts account and Rolex are free, at any time and for any reason, to discontinue their business relationship, without cause and without prior notice." In compliance with this agreement, we will not discuss the details of our decision. Sincerely, ROLEX WATCH SERVICE CORP. /s/ Khaled Elrawi Spare Parts Manager I copied that to remind me not to get too comfortable... Note the line "without cause and without prior notice" and then they go on to say they won't even tell you why the account was terminated. If you have invested $70k in equipment to meet this brand's requirements, which is not hard to do, and most of your business is doing work for that brand, it can't be understated how devastating it is to lose parts access. This is one reason why watchmakers who have accounts tend to not fight this fight - if you are branded a troublemaker, you are toast. It's a relationship, but it's certainly a one way relationship. Cheers, Al