Well this is some exciting news. Can't wait to see what they do with 3861 and if they will show it off with a display case back. Maybe a laser etching on the glass?
Yes, the trilogy edition was 3,557 + 500 included in the sets.
It doesn’t seem to me that they want to do the tooling for large runs of the 321. Instead it will be small hand built batches. I’m sure they did a cost demand calc on doing a few thousand and it didn’t make sense.
Changing finish or extra detail on bridges or plates is easy I’d assume. Scaling up to do 7000 means new large scale tooling and production. Doing 50-100 hand made movements would be lower costs id assume, and not have high tooling costs for mass production.
Let's be clear here - nothing about these "new" 321 movements is going to be difficult to ramp up production, and nothing here is going to be "hand made." They will be hand assembled, and before anyone goes on about how difficult that is, it's something I and other watchmakers around the world do every day.
Just to put the time required into perspective here, Omega sets out standards for workshop productivity in the service realm. They allow about 4.5 hours for a complete service of a manual wind Speedmaster with the 861/1861, and that includes time to diagnose faults, complete disassembly, cleaning, inspecting parts for wear, gathering new replacement parts, assembling/testing the movement, replacing the case parts, refinishing the case/bracelet, and final assembly. Keep in mind that none of the case work would be required since the cases these will go in will be new, there would be no disassembly time, diagnosing time, etc. Since all the parts will be brand new, it should be easy to assemble and time these movements, compared to working on a worn out vintage movement. So even without all those things it would be entirely reasonable for them to turn out two completed watches per day, per watchmaker.
Trust me this is a very generous timeline, so the idea that this is such a drawn out thing that will take some lone watchmakers toiling for days to complete is a pure marketing fabrication. Omega has apparently made a choice to make this a small run, and it's a choice based on marketing, not on watchmaking/manufacturing capabilities.
In the article you linked to, it says this about the movement they used in that first watch:
"The 18 specimens used to build this extremely limited series of modern watches had rested for years inside historical timepieces in the vaults of the company’s museum. Expert watchmakers at Omega’s Atelier Tourbillon painstakingly rebuilt and refinished the vintage movements, including having to create or re-create some components from scratch, in order to bring them to modern standards of top-shelf haute horlogerie."
So are you suggesting that Omega is using some old movements and sprucing them up, as they did with this previous watch? If so, that is the first I've heard of this, as none of the previous statements I've seen on the new production have indicated it was refurbished movements going into these watches, so I don't personally believe this is true.
Everything said to date has indicated these will be made from scratch. The tooling already exists, as do the machine tools required to make the parts, so the idea that this would require some significant investment is in my view a red herring.
Cheers, Al
Personally I think it's more of Omega's strategy...
Each of the product range might have different iterations and new model releases every few years. To target different segments and hence sell more Speedmasters than ever.
Just my guess on the strategy.
No, just the time to build the 861 I assume has some automation involved.
While the 321 requires more man hours to build and make the parts.
I’m not saying everything is built by hand, but a small team is making these 321’s. Which coincidentally has only done one other project that used old movements.
I think you've touched on the key reason Omega is releasing so many LE's and I think it will explain the logic of what they do this year.
They're doing everything they can to maximize profit and revenue (price x quantity) by utilizing as much Price Discrimination as possible. If we treated anyone interested in buying any new "Speedmaster" as one group, and included all variants of Speedmasters in that group, we might see a demand graph like the one below.
Simple economic theory explains how demand is highest with the lowest prices. Omega set the MSRP and retail prices of the standard model on some point along the curve where they sell quantity Q2. They know there are more people who will buy at a lower price, and so they use the unofficial 'grey market' channel to increase sales from Q2 to the higher level at Q1.
They release various LE's in lower quantities (Q3) so they can reach higher prices.
They create various xSOTM models that sell in lower quantities (Q4) with very high prices. I suspect they'll target this range for the 50th Anniversary LE (green circle).
The top reverse arching part of the curve is the 'sweet spot' I imagine Omega will target with the 'limited' but not LE version of the cal 321 re-edition. They know there are some fanatics willing to pay very high prices for certain models and if they get it right, they can actually increase demand with higher prices. Since their models are probably rather inaccurate at this level (impacted by rare extreme outliers like vintage Ultraman and blue soleil prices), they won't set a fixed LE number but use a Rolex'esque 'low production' model to sell as many as possible without having to determine an actual quantity.
* Note: none of these prices have ANYTHING to do with cost. Producing LE models likely costs little more than the standard model, so the additional price is mostly profit.
** Note: I don't work for Swatch Group, so this is pure speculation on my part. YMMV.
No, the times I have given you have nothing to do with automation - those are times in service. Trust me there is no automation in my shop (other than my cleaning machine runs the cleaning cycle on it's own), or at the Omega service centers, and that's where those time expectations from Omega come from. Assembling new watches should be much quicker than what is involved in servicing a watch that has been used for years.
If one watchmaker can't complete 2 or more of these watches in a day, I would be shocked...
Making the parts is a completely different topic - production of parts is done in batches and all the tooling and equipment already exist. It takes no more time to make an escape wheel, fourth wheel, center wheel, barrel arbor, etc for a 321 than it does an 861/1861.
You do realize that there are parts in the 1861 that are 321 parts, right? So these parts are still being made for the 1861 - parts like the ratchet wheel, third wheel, pinion for the hour recorder and it's friction spring, click spring, yoke, etc.
Many of the parts from the 321 are/were recently used by Breguet, so as much as the marketing hype would have people believe they are rebuilding this from ancient plans and modern scans, this is really not the case at all.
There are really only 2 items on the 321 that may be more time consuming than their counterparts on the 1861 - the column wheel and the balance. The column wheel is already a mass produced item for Omega, and the idea that these are "more difficult" to make is an idea that is from the 50's and 60's. With modern manufacturing methods these would be easily made on a CNC machine, which is how swatch already makes them for the F. Piguet movements, the Omega movements, the Longines movements, etc.
The balance assembly would be the part that would require more work, provided they do make it like the old 321's with an overcoil and screws on the balance. But of course this work will be done by Nivarox, the company that makes 90% of the balances for the Swiss watch industry, and who already makes a ton of balances that are as complicated as this one is...
Trust me if you have spent time in manufacturing, you will know that production of these parts is no great task, and will certainly not be the limiting factor in how many watches can be produced. The production run for a given part will take mere days to make all that would be required to make 10,000 watches...
How many watchmakers will be making these? Do you have some real inside information into all this? Are you part of the marketing team? 😉
These are new movements being assembled by watchmakers, which will be easier than servicing a worn out old movement, and having to do repairs to fix that wear and bad work done by hacks in the past. This is not the same sort of project that the link you provided above was - far from it actually...but their marketing is working very well.
Cheers, Al
I heard that they will be limited to 6969 pieces, at $6969 each, which will tolerate temperatures up to 6969 degrees celcius for up to 6969 seconds for a totalt number of 6969 days before breaking into 6969 pieces.
Trust me Omega will milk the number “69” for all it is worth
That would work until limited editions start to be perceived as unlimited editions. But I guess this is a problem the whole watchmaking industry will face at some point, and probably sooner than later. Mind the gap...
I heard that they will be limited to 6969 pieces, at $6969 each, which will tolerate temperatures up to 6969 degrees celcius for up to 6969 seconds for a totalt number of 6969 days before breaking into 6969 pieces.
Trust me Omega will milk the number “69” for all it is worth
