Right to Repair Movement

gatorcpa · Oct 11, 2020

Your point is specific to automobiles, which have specific laws protecting dealers. There is a historical perspective. Just pointing that out. Not meant to be adversarial at all.

No such laws exist for watches, computers, etc. I would suspect that if control of parts supplies were given to Swatch (or Rolex or Patek Philippe) dealers or distributors, rather than the factory, the situation regarding repairs would be much different than it is today.

In fact, you can find tons of old LeCoultre and Longines parts on eBay today because back in the 1950’s, parts went through Longines-Wittnauer USA and not Jaeger-LeCoultre in Switzerland.

gatorcpa

TDBK · Oct 11, 2020

For anyone who thinks that the motivation here for Swatch Group (as one example) is chasing the money from servicing watches, I don't think it's material. In 2019 Swatch Group made 8.2 billion Swiss francs selling products, and only 21 million servicing them; 0.2% of their revenue. (Annual report, p180). I doubt any watchmaker has a very different ratio.

My belief is that the motivation of manufacturers is more often to have control over the complete customer experience and to avoid the cost and complexity of training and coordinating a large number of independent service providers. I've heard about the standards that Omega requires to authorize a watchmaker; running that program is a lot of work which doesn't bring them a lot of direct revenue.

Again, Swatch and Omega may not be representative of all and may be better than many, but just to use them as a specific example of the fact that servicing is not a big revenue stream, doing quality control on independent repair shops isn't free or easy, and that there are other motivations for providing the service directly besides simple stories around dominating all revenue streams.

Archer · Oct 11, 2020

gatorcpa
No such laws exist for watches, computers, etc. I would suspect that if control of parts supplies were given to Swatch (or Rolex or Patek Philippe) dealers or distributors, rather than the factory, the situation regarding repairs would be much different than it is today.

I agree it would be different - there would be zero access to parts. No dealer selling watches is going to want to be involved in ordering and shipping tens of thousands of small parts per year to people asking to buy them. This is why watch material suppliers existed, to coordinate that activity through one place.

gatorcpa
In fact, you can find tons of old LeCoultre and Longines parts on eBay today because back in the 1950’s, parts went through Longines-Wittnauer USA and not Jaeger-LeCoultre in Switzerland.

gatorcpa

There was a time when watch companies would send watchmakers parts they wrote in asking for, free of charge. But it was apparent that the Swiss industry in particular employed monopolistic practices, and by 1960 they and the industry associations were considered a cartel by the US government, and a consent decree was imposed.

Back in 2006, Rolex applied to have this consent decree removed - information here:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-do...-motion-rolex-watch-usa-inc-order-terminating

The final agreement has Rolex paying $750,000 to cover costs. Essentially, this removed the restrictions on Rolex to limit the supply of parts.

Curiously, the AWCI (originally the AWA back in 1960) - the trade organization representing watchmakers in the US, agreed to this. This seems rather strange considering that this group represents watchmakers, and to be honest the membership were not pleased. However, the AWCI was working with Rolex to develop the CW21 at this time, and not long after the consent decree was removed in 2007, Rolex announced that all watchmakers with a parts account had to become CW21 certified by the end of 2010, or they would lose their accounts.

If it strikes you as maybe a bit strange that the AWCI agreed to this against the wishes of the membership, then benefitted from it, you are not alone. Everyone was required to take the 4 day long test, and these were held at AWCI headquarters near Cincinnati - you had to pay for the test, pay for the travel and lodging, and you lost a week of income. They also ran refresher courses to prepare watchmakers for the exams. I was in many of those classes, and all the watchmakers with parts accounts were shitting bricks because they knew they would likely be out of business if they lost their accounts. They were also very bitter that their own organization was involved in the removal of the consent decree.

The AWCI said that other brands were going to adopt this standard, but none other than Rolex ever did. When I was at Swatch in NJ for training on servicing the co-axial escapement in 2012, someone in the class asked the instructor about Swatch adopting the CW21. I'll not forget the response:

"That's got nothing to do with us. That's a Rolex thing."

When everyone who was going to take the test had taken it, revenue started drying up, and the AWCI implemented (tried to anyway) continuing education requirements to retain your certification, that were not originally there when the process started. Most people just ignored them.

More recently, Rolex has started closing all these accounts. In all Rolex agreements, there is this clause:

"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."

So Rolex played the long game, and the AWCI got played, and US watchmakers paid the price for it.

Subsequent to the removal of the consent decree, Cartier was sued by a watchmaker in California...

https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/i...t/fleury-et-al-v-cartier-international-et-al/

This time the AWCI officially stayed "neutral" however one of the past presidents took Cartier's side. There was a settlement, and Cartier was ordered to provide parts accounts, but they ended up having very onerous requirements - pages and pages of requirements that went above and beyond anything any brand has ever required previously. Only 9 parts accounts were ever granted...

Anyone who thinks these brands don't play hardball on this stuff, is being very naïve.

Cheers, Al

Rman · Oct 11, 2020

Archer
I agree it would be different - there would be zero access to parts. No dealer selling watches is going to want to be involved in ordering and shipping tens of thousands of small parts per year to people asking to buy them. This is why watch material suppliers existed, to coordinate that activity through one place.

There was a time when watch companies would send watchmakers parts they wrote in asking for, free of charge. But it was apparent that the Swiss industry in particular employed monopolistic practices, and by 1960 they and the industry associations were considered a cartel by the US government, and a consent decree was imposed.

Back in 2006, Rolex applied to have this consent decree removed - information here:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-do...-motion-rolex-watch-usa-inc-order-terminating

The final agreement has Rolex paying $750,000 to cover costs. Essentially, this removed the restrictions on Rolex to limit the supply of parts.

Curiously, the AWCI (originally the AWA back in 1960) - the trade organization representing watchmakers in the US, agreed to this. This seems rather strange considering that this group represents watchmakers, and to be honest the membership were not pleased. However, the AWCI was working with Rolex to develop the CW21 at this time, and not long after the consent decree was removed in 2007, Rolex announced that all watchmakers with a parts account had to become CW21 certified by the end of 2010, or they would lose their accounts.

If it strikes you as maybe a bit strange that the AWCI agreed to this against the wishes of the membership, then benefitted from it, you are not alone. Everyone was required to take the 4 day long test, and these were held at AWCI headquarters near Cincinnati - you had to pay for the test, pay for the travel and lodging, and you lost a week of income. They also ran refresher courses to prepare watchmakers for the exams. I was in many of those classes, and all the watchmakers with parts accounts were shitting bricks because they knew they would likely be out of business if they lost their accounts. They were also very bitter that their own organization was involved in the removal of the consent decree.

The AWCI said that other brands were going to adopt this standard, but none other than Rolex ever did. When I was at Swatch in NJ for training on servicing the co-axial escapement in 2012, someone in the class asked the instructor about Swatch adopting the CW21. I'll not forget the response:

"That's got nothing to do with us. That's a Rolex thing."

When everyone who was going to take the test had taken it, revenue started drying up, and the AWCI implemented (tried to anyway) continuing education requirements to retain your certification, that were not originally there when the process started. Most people just ignored them.

More recently, Rolex has started closing all these accounts. In all Rolex agreements, there is this clause:

"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."

So Rolex played the long game, and the AWCI got played, and US watchmakers paid the price for it.

Subsequent to the removal of the consent decree, Cartier was sued by a watchmaker in California...

https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/i...t/fleury-et-al-v-cartier-international-et-al/

This time the AWCI officially stayed "neutral" however one of the past presidents took Cartier's side. There was a settlement, and Cartier was ordered to provide parts accounts, but they ended up having very onerous requirements - pages and pages of requirements that went above and beyond anything any brand has ever required previously. Only 9 parts accounts were ever granted...

Anyone who thinks these brands don't play hardball on this stuff, is being very naïve.

Cheers, Al

Thanks for the inside look Al, fascinating.

Rman · Oct 11, 2020

Archer
No idea what hand sets you are referring to, but unless you are asking for discontinued parts (which means no one can get them), or parts for LE's where an exchange is required, anyone with a parts account can order anything Omega sells if they are fully qualified. Give me an example and I'll look it up...

Richemont basically doesn't sell to any truly independent watchmakers. Rolex is closing parts accounts in droves. Swatch group is probably the most open manufacturer of any of them right now, and yet people rarely mention the others...baffling...

Let’s just do a bog standard Connie reference, 2852. White metal. For the sake of the thread.

Archer · Oct 12, 2020

Rman
Let’s just do a bog standard Connie reference, 2852. White metal. For the sake of the thread.

Okay, case CK2852 in steel, the hour and minute hands sets available are:

065PZ500LG1275L | HANDS H.M.CAT D1 DAUPH.SILV. LUM L. 1275
065TZ0500LG1030 | HANDS H.M. CAL.500 L. 10.3 SYLV.DAUP.
065TZ8183 | HANDS H.M. 013 12.7

The seconds hands available are:

066UZ1355 | HAND SEC. 072 10,5 GS FUSEAU C
066UZ1365 | HAND SEC. 072 12,7 GS FUSEAU C

So if the watchmakers you are using can't order these, then I question if they are certified as they claim to be - these hands are readily available and their purchase is not restricted in any way.

Cheers, Al

abrod520 · Oct 12, 2020

For those not familiar with the main driver behind these movements - the major farm equipment companies in the US have been essentially locking users out of any diagnostic or repair actions, and it actually requires a technician with proprietary software to come out to your farm and spend the day diagnosing, and hopefully fixing, your equipment. If it needs parts though, you'll have to wait for the diagnostic appointment, then the parts order to arrive, and then another visit from the technician to install them. When your livelihood depends on being able to use your equipment efficiently (think about limited harvest windows etc) this is a bit egregious.

John Deere (large tractor and farm equipment company in the US) actually has an entire office in Silicon Valley dedicated to this effort

STANDY · Oct 12, 2020

Try getting Caterpillar parts off anyone but a Cat dealer.

Must admit I did witness a Cat dealer in the USA send a guy to Panama to drop off a $100 part to get a truck going that had to be on a boat in two days

abrod520 · Oct 12, 2020

STANDY
Try getting Caterpillar parts off anyone but a Cat dealer.

Must admit I did witness a Cat dealer in the USA send a guy to Panama to drop off a $100 part to get a truck going that had to be on a boat in two days

Yeah, parts sourcing is one thing but to include software that won't allow it to work unless a technician with a laptop hits the right key, is a whole different ballgame - that $100 part turns into being charged for travel, plus $200 an hour (my guess, totally baseless) for the technician to install it.

Archer · Oct 12, 2020

abrod520
For those not familiar with the main driver behind these movements - the major farm equipment companies in the US have been essentially locking users out of any diagnostic or repair actions, and it actually requires a technician with proprietary software to come out to your farm and spend the day diagnosing, and hopefully fixing, your equipment. If it needs parts though, you'll have to wait for the diagnostic appointment, then the parts order to arrive, and then another visit from the technician to install them. When your livelihood depends on being able to use your equipment efficiently (think about limited harvest windows etc) this is a bit egregious.

John Deere (large tractor and farm equipment company in the US) actually has an entire office in Silicon Valley dedicated to this effort

That's a big driver here in Canada as well. Machinery for agriculture is so much more sophisticated than it was in the past, this has become a huge issue.

I guess for me coming from a world of corporate manufacturing/engineering, I bought and installed countless pieces of industrial manufacturing equipment in those years. It was always part of the purchase contracts that we had all technical information required to maintain the product ourselves. This included everything from manufacturing drawings for every mechanical part of the machine, to wiring diagrams, and all the software (mostly PLC based at the time) for it.

This was party for maintenance, but also because we would often improve on this equipment with our own proprietary technology - grinders for instance. The large companies that made these machines (for example Cincinnati Milacron back in the day) didn't have the technology we had developed in house, and we could not give it to them to put on a machine we were purchasing, because there would be a risk they would copy and sell that technology to other customers (our competitors). So we bought the base machine, then upgraded it with all our own technology - the company who built the machine could never come to our plants to maintain it - again because they would see what we had done to the equipment.

If people are fine with companies selling you a black box technology, where you can't do anything to it without using the company that made it, that it leads to very bad places in the long run...

STANDY · Oct 12, 2020

@abrod520 being In Agriculture and big machinery I am well aware of the new whole package sales.

Gas and oil you buy the item with a technician included with the goods. Money is not a option in these scenarios 😉

abrod520 · Oct 12, 2020

STANDY
Gas and oil you buy the item with a technician included with the goods.

Ah yes, that's quite a step up from a combine harvester though 😲

abrod520 · Oct 12, 2020

Archer
That's a big driver here in Canada as well. Machinery for agriculture is so much more sophisticated than it was in the past, this has become a huge issue.

I guess for me coming from a world of corporate manufacturing/engineering, I bought and installed countless pieces of industrial manufacturing equipment in those years. It was always part of the purchase contracts that we had all technical information required to maintain the product ourselves. This included everything from manufacturing drawings for every mechanical part of the machine, to wiring diagrams, and all the software (mostly PLC based at the time) for it.

This was party for maintenance, but also because we would often improve on this equipment with our own proprietary technology - grinders for instance. The large companies that made these machines (for example Cincinnati Milacron back in the day) didn't have the technology we had developed in house, and we could not give it to them to put on a machine we were purchasing, because there would be a risk they would copy and sell that technology to other customers (our competitors). So we bought the base machine, then upgraded it with all our own technology - the company who built the machine could never come to our plants to maintain it - again because they would see what we had done to the equipment.

If people are fine with companies selling you a black box technology, where you can't do anything to it without using the company that made it, that it leads to very bad places in the long run...

I'm not sure how things are for complex installations - I would think contracts are still drawn up that way, since if Company A isn't willing to allow you to customize and service it, one of their competitors probably still will. Compared to a contained piece of equipment like a tractor, I wouldn't think service and repair would contribute that much to their profit. No?

Archer · Oct 12, 2020

abrod520
I'm not sure how things are for complex installations - I would think contracts are still drawn up that way, since if Company A isn't willing to allow you to customize and service it, one of their competitors probably still will. Compared to a contained piece of equipment like a tractor, I wouldn't think service and repair would contribute that much to their profit. No?

When I would bring in a new piece of equipment, part of the contract was that the company provide training for our maintenance people. So for example when we bought our first laser marking equipment, we trained a group of people to be able to change bulbs, changes lasing medium (Nd:YAG rods), clean out the gold lined lasing chambers, Q-switches, and perform alignments. So we always had in-house expertise to do the actual work, and it was rare that we had to call in a technician from the company that made the equipment.

So servicing in terms of labour coming in to work on the equipment was not our concern, but spare parts can cost a very large amount and was the primary issue I dealt with from the engineering side of things.

For example on one grinder we used had a proprietary hydraulic valve design (very specific porting on the valve), and to buy a new valve from the OEM cost several thousand dollars. I took one of the worn out valves apart and designed a mounting block that redirected the porting locations for a standard valve (standard ports on one side of the block, and custom ports on the other), and making that block cost about $500. But once you had that, you could swap the valve that cost a few thousand, with one that cost $400. That one thing saved enough money to pay my salary for the entire year and more for our small plant, and the design was released on the corporate engineering portal, and it was used on thousands of machines.

In other instances if for some reason we didn't have a drawing of a part for a piece of machinery, and we had to buy one, I would assign one of the junior guys to draw the part so we had a drawing for next time. Even making a one off in our own machine shop (which isn't cheap by any means paying for shop time) was cheaper than buying it from the manufacturer. The mark-ups they had on parts were astonishing.

But this was also about time - when a machine breaks down sometimes it can take 6 weeks to get a part from the OEM. Yes we could buy them and keep spares in stock (which was something we did do), but the purchasing department was always under pressure not to stock spare parts due to the inventory carrying costs, so the process I had to go through to justify putting a spare part in stock was substantial. In tougher economic times they would strip out spares to get inventory costs down - this happened like clockwork when things were slow. This would result in critical spare parts not being available down the road. If you had the drawing and could make one in a shift, it often eliminated the need to carry expensive spares.

The whole idea that we would buy a piece of equipment and not be able to maintain and modify it, was so foreign this never actually came up in my 23 years of doing this sort of thing. It was just a given, and the OEM's all knew it. I don't recall any of them ever putting up a fight over this issue - it was an expected thing. This is why I find people's acceptance of this rather strange.

Cheers, Al

Dan S · Oct 12, 2020

This is all fairly new to me, but after doing some reading, it seems to me that the farm equipment issue seems largely about software, not mechanical parts. Isn't that the main point of contention? Whether the manufacturer is required to provide open source code?

Heath Payne · Aug 12, 2023

gatorcpa
Story on CBS Sunday Morning today.

Watches are not mentioned, but the parallels are pretty obvious.

Enjoy,
gatorcpa

Otto Frei letter for FTC contact.
https://www.ofrei.com/page1568.

Louis Rossmann fightingfor electronics repair.

Archer · Aug 12, 2023

H Heath Payne
Otto Frei letter for FTC contact.
https://www.ofrei.com/page1568.

Some information in this link is quite misleading:

"SWATCH GROUP Cuts Off All Supply of ETA Parts and Omega Parts along every other Brand they Control. Independent Watch Material Houses Worldwide and Independent Watch Repair Persons will no longer be able to get any parts."

"Independent watch repair persons" are clearly still able to buy parts from Swatch (I do so all the time), but directly from Swatch. What is correct is that they no longer can go through a middle man like Otto Frei.

Heath Payne · Aug 12, 2023

H Heath Payne
Otto Frei letter for FTC contact.
https://www.ofrei.com/page1568.

Louis Rossmann fightingfor electronics repair.

Archer
Some information in this link is quite misleading:

"SWATCH GROUP Cuts Off All Supply of ETA Parts and Omega Parts along every other Brand they Control. Independent Watch Material Houses Worldwide and Independent Watch Repair Persons will no longer be able to get any parts."

"Independent watch repair persons" are clearly still able to buy parts from Swatch (I do so all the time), but directly from Swatch. What is correct is that they no longer can go through a middle man like Otto Frei.

As a hobbyist, is it possible for me to buy parts directly from Omega?

Foo2rama · Aug 12, 2023

Archer
Do you then agree that all car companies can refuse to sell parts or distribute technical information for all their vehicles?

Do you believe that not providing parts and technical information will stop people from repairing these items?

If not do you think quality control is helped or hindered by not having parts and technical information?

In some cases “looking at tractors” you can brick it by even opening it up. It’s physically preventing self repair of items be locking it down if you attempt a self repair.

Archer · Aug 12, 2023

H Heath Payne
As a hobbyist, is it possible for me to buy parts directly from Omega?

If you have the level of education, experience, and a well equipped modern shop (with a number of required pieces of equipment), then you can apply. Then if they agree you go to Swatch for training, pass it, and you are now able to order all parts, with a few exceptions.

For a hobbyist, there are some that I know that I would say could do this quite easily, as they are as good at this as many professionals are. For the majority of hobbyists, this is unrealistic.

Right to Repair Movement

gatorcpa

TDBK

Archer

Rman

Rman

Archer

abrod520

STANDY

abrod520

Archer

STANDY

abrod520

abrod520

Archer

Dan S

Heath Payne

Archer

Heath Payne

Foo2rama

Archer

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