Time to move on the a new brand ?

My son is obsessed with Bauhaus and Nomos. He owns 3 Sternglass and I gifted him my Max Bill Chronoscope last X Mass. He’s saving up. I’ve basically told him that there is no point in buying more less expensive watches when you know what you want.

Your post made me look at their site. Saw this red dialed one I really like. I’m on a self imposed no watch purchases for the rest of the year but I don’t have much longer to wait

their dial colours are really nice. The blue, the green, the chalkboard green…

I've seen this sentiment in several forums, and over the last while I've been thinking about this a bit...here's my take on it...

I think it's simply because as you say, the quality to price ratio was very good - too good. These are for profit companies, so leaving money on the table isn't something they normally do. When enough people say that these are such good deals (I think even Philippe Dufour recommended them), you start to wonder if you could charge more, and the potential lost sales are made up for by the higher profit in each watch.

From my own experience, setting prices is not an easy thing - there's a lot that has to be taken into consideration when you are a smaller brand. Too inexpensive and the watches will not be seen as high enough quality. Too expensive and people will see you as gouging, with "nothing to back up" the prices.

Add to this, not only are you competing against new watches from other brands, but also used watches from name brands. People will often buy a used name brand than spend the same money on a smaller brand's watch that is new. "I could get a used (insert name brand here) for the price of that new!" It was something I was very conscious of personally.

I think there's also a point where you have to decide as a brand that wishes to grow if you invest to scale up production, or if you hold off on that and maximize returns on each watch you sell. One requires a large capital and labour investment, and the other doesn't. So the second option becomes very appealing.

To me they went from being a massive bargain for what you get, to being a smaller bargain, but still a bargain. I have the 35 mm classic Tangente manual wind, and I think in the 10 years since I bought it, the price has gone up about $700 Canadian. If I look at price increases from just about every other brand out there, this really isn't all that bad in real money terms, although as a percentage it's quite significant.

Collectors often don't like price increases, but for a small brand like this, these increases are more important to brand survival than Rolex or Omega increasing their prices.