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Richard Mille Replica Watch

Who Sells The Best Best-selling watches in France – A tough sell for the watch industry? Replica Watches Free Shipping

The French watch market is not setting the world on fire. Far from it. And it’s not because the French don’t sell any watches; watches make up almost one-third by value of total jewellery sales. This is an entirely respectable figure for a country where jewellery plays an important cultural role. But the thing is, the proportion of watches fell by 6 points in 2016.

A closer look at the statistics paints an even less rosy picture. Sales of watches over 5,000 euros have declined significantly (-10%), and in the price-bracket lower down, between 1,000 and 5,000 euros, things are even worse, with a decline of 14%. The obvious conclusion is that the French buy quite a lot of cheap watches. The only segment that grew was watches priced between 100 and 300 euros.

Action, reaction: entry-level value

How are Swiss brands dealing with this disappointing situation? Well, it’s quite logical: the models that offer the best value for money are leading the way. For example, Baume & Mercier’s Classima watches took a clear lead in 2016. There’s a similar situation over at Seiko, where the 3-handed Presage automatic, which offers excellent value for money at just 479 euros, is forging ahead.

A tough sell for the watch industry?

Anonimo, while less well-known than the other two, has come through with its Nautilo at 1,950 euros (steel case, Sellita movement). And then there’s Frédérique Constant, whose Heart Beat collection remains a winner in France and many other countries, thanks to its particularly well-thought out positioning.

L’impossible conquête horlogère ?

But where do smartwatches come in all of this? TAG Heuer is doing very well. Its Connected Watch currently tops sales in France, although it has been said that the watch’s marketing budget virtually guaranteed it would be successful. But if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Star for a day, star forever

There are nevertheless a number of hardy perennials that appear unaffected by the turmoil. Look at Hublot, whose Big Bang Steel Ceramic was a top seller in 2016 in France as well as internationally, a position it has held since 2005! Close behind is the Classic Fusion Aerofusion Chronograph Titanium. The former is priced at 13,400 euros, and the latter 14,800 euros, both well under Hublot’s average price of 20,000 euros. So France loves Hublot, yes, but there are limits!

A tough sell for the watch industry?

A similar phenomenon is at work over at Piaget. One of the watchmaker’s most lauded models repeated its convincing performance in 2016. This year, once again, the Altiplano 38mm in pink gold, with its legendary calibre 430P, stole the show. There’s a similar situation at A. Lange & Söhne, where the Lange 1 remains dominant, albeit with a local preference for the Moon Phase. Richard Mille’s RM 011 collection (which includes the RM 011, RM 11-01, RM 11-02 and the recent RM 11-03) remains the front-runner in terms of sales. And Hermès’ eternal Cape Cod refuses to relinquish the top spot, as do Girard-Perregaux’ evergreen 1966 and Laureato collections.

L’impossible conquête horlogère ?

Haute horlogerie: after a difficult year, some difficult conclusions

Sales in haute horlogerie are obviously smaller in number but far bigger in price. Nevertheless, some brands still offer a number of standout models. Roger Dubuis’ French best-seller of 2016, for instance, was the Excalibur 42 skeleton automatic, with the RD820SQ calibre.

However, it is less easy to draw any meaningful conclusions as far as independent brands are concerned. Distribution can be far more patchy, and is often significantly weighted in favour of particular territories, which can hide strong disparities. As far as independent haute horlogerie watchmakers are concerned (Christophe Claret, Greubel Forsey, MCT, Romain Gauthier), sales are rare because the watches are rare. Julien Coudray 1518, for instance, charges as much as 400,000 euros for a single piece. That means the company doesn’t have to sell very many in order to keep its head above water. This year, HYT recorded a preference for the H4, which overtook the H1 for the first time. Creativity remains a strong driver for growth in watchmaking – provided that the price is right.

My sorrow (as somebody who enjoys bicycles) is that the invention (beyond the design — that might be the true winner here) in the opinion is an incremental digital counter that Richard Mille Watches 2015 Replica relates to being just like an “odometer.” Don’t overthink this. A panel on the dial has five rollers and also is the screen of the “totalizer.” Basically you manually input each mile (or anything you would like to count) on the “horological odometer” and be on your merry way. Richard Mille states such as that cyclists can manually input each mile they rode after the actuality. Are they going to learn this? Probably by referencing an electronic device that’s documenting the quantities of miles traveled — and that may keep track of this information anyways.Richard Mille no doubt has other (let us imagine they are nefarious) uses in mind with this particular totalizer complication. Imagine if that were a lookout for hit guys or mercenaries to track their entire body counts? Or imagine if something much more mundane happens and people who have one of these rare luxuries will delight in the uncommon experience of the exotic fidget spinner allowing you to count as large and pretty much anybody can in one sitting… and then simplifying the total to zero. C’mon, it is roughly as cathartic as idly spending some time on a casual smartphone game.Richard Mille isn’t ignorant of how the totalizer isn’t the most exciting innovation in the realm of watches, but they do stress that the upsides indicating that the rollers align quite precisely, that the system is intended to prevent “casual manipulations,” along with also a lock to ensure overall equilibrium. In other words, Richard Mille would like you to be aware that the practice of pressing in digit after digit through the instance button will feel incredible for all those tactile mechanical button fetishists (we know who we are).

L’impossible conquête horlogère ?

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Richard Mille Replica Watch

Best Quality Complication watches – Watches are not rocket science. Or are they? Replica For Sale

They come with an instruction manual as thick as a telephone directory. Or, even worse, as slim as an August magazine issue. And yet sometimes even these instructions aren’t enough. Some watches these days have become so sophisticated that you need a two-day residential course to understand how to set them, or even to tell the time. With their multiple displays and ever more refined concepts, some of the most highly sophisticated watches succeed in producing only utter bafflement.

And it’s not necessarily the concept itself that is difficult to grasp. Quite often, the ideas are easily explained in simple, metaphorical, even poetical terms. But if you want to actually understand how the thing works, it’s a different matter. Let’s look at the Dressage L’Heure Masquée by Hermès. Under normal circumstances it displays the minute – just the minute. In a small window, there’s the legend “GMT”. So… does that mean that it’s the GMT minute? No. By pressing on a pusher, the watch now shows the hour, with a second time zone appearing in the window. But it’s not entirely logical, and the watch itself is very misleading. You have to constantly bear in mind this watch’s raison d’être, which is to illustrate an indirect relationship with time, and provide a meta-analysis of watchmaking. Do you think you can manage that, when you’re jolted awake at 2 in the morning? How about after a couple of glasses of wine?

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Hermès Dressage L’heure masquée © David Chokron/Worldtempus

But the prize for complexity must go to astronomical watches. We’ve never seen so many, and they are all trying to go one better in terms of realism and accuracy. They aim to represent the moon, the stars, the planets and their orbits as precisely as possible. But all these differences between solar time, civil time, sidereal time and Martian time are only relevant to astronomers and astrophysicists. The time cycles that apply to celestial bodies, including our Earth, are all different, irregular and often subject to plenty of exceptions. So it’s only natural that anyone who doesn’t spend a great deal of time in an observatory should get a bit lost. And when there are several displays on the dial, it can become quite difficult to even tell what time it is. With 19 cycles, 16 of which are displayed on a 36 mm diameter dial, an extraordinary watch like Vacheron Constantin’s Celestia Astronomical Grand Complication 3600 provides an apt illustration of the aphorism that more is less… legible.

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Vacheron Celestia Astronomical Grand Complication 3600 © David Chokron/Worldtempus

This mentioned, I can still enjoy it for what I mentioned above: to get this sort of detail within this quantity, you either go to get a close six-figure watch or you’ll miss out. Having seen numerous manufactures and managed so many expensive watches, it’s mind-numbingly complex and difficult-to-make details like this that are what really make a watch stand out from the remainder. And if there is anything that I do enjoy at a Richard Mille Watches Replica watch, it is that you can kind of get lost in it and expect to discover these facts even weeks after sporting the watch.And I am sorry, but a conventional watch with a traditional exterior must have one totally amazing movement to warrant a similar six-figure price — and again, lots of collectors that today are buying (and wearing) Richard Milles do this because a new dial on a 5270 often just is not exciting enough when on other watches everywhere you look, you see detailing which will never be current on proudly traditional watches. Before you light your torches and bring out your pitchforks, I’m not saying one is superior to the other, or you shouldn’t exist and the other should, but instead that past the show-off element, there’s another reason why Richard Mille watches (and others, such as an MB&F Legacy Machine Perpetual or Urwerk UR-110, et cetera) do this well at a time when others struggle.What leaves space for criticism regarding the case itself is the simple fact that 18k white gold scratches if you look at it the wrong way — things harder than white gold include melting icehockey, or the Queen’s royal selection of feather cushions. The titanium option will not be that much better, but will certainly offer you an improvement in this aspect, at a price of lost sheen that only precious metals can create. Water resistance, despite the double-O ring crown is graded for 30m. I keep saying all contemporary watches should have at least 100m depth rating, though the way things are going, 30-50m seems to become the norm among non-dive watches.

The final specialist area that you might like to get into, if you have an advanced degree or two under your belt, are pilots’ watches. Let’s not forget that pilots, whether military or civilian, are fundamentally engineers, and they need to have a good grasp of mathematical operations that don’t get much use in daily life. Calculating azimuths, descent rates according to air density and fuel consumption in relation to altitude are not everyone’s forte. The instruments you’ll find in an aircraft cockpit, like the E6B flight computer, are complex. So, when Richard Mille tried to cram a flyback chronograph with countdown timer, a second UTC time zone and a professional slide rule onto the dial of his RM039, he succeeded in creating one of the most advanced, and also one of the most unreadable watches ever made. This extraordinary object has 10 different scales between the chapter ring and bezel, as well as eight hands and three discs, superimposed over a plunging view into its radically skeletonised interior. It’s enough to give anyone a headache.

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Richard Mille RM039 © David Chokron/Worldtempus