Think back to the time when you were new to the world of watches. There’s a good chance that at some point, perhaps in the smooth patter of a sales pitch or the heated debate of an Instagram comment thread, the phrase “this has an in-house movement” was dropped, heavy with the implication that anything sourced from outside the hallowed manufacture was inferior. This attitude still carries a lot of weight, despite the concept of “in-house” superiority being relatively young and driven largely by an industry emerging from crisis and looking to reposition itself firmly into the luxury sector. We look at the industry factors that led to the rise of “in-house” and why the concept might not be as important as it once was.
’90S REVIVAL
The 1990s was an interesting and exciting time for watches. The late ’80s and early ’90s, in particular, was a marked contrast to the doom and gloom atmosphere of that period of time in Switzerland known as the “Quartz Crisis,” when new technologies and competitively priced watches made in Japan combined to take a sizeable chunk out of the traditional Swiss industry, an industry which had evolved piecemeal over the course of the 20th century into a complex and
