Tech Guru Paul Graham Says The Watch Industry Has Brand Disease

An attempt to diagnose the ills of luxury watchmaking hits a nerve, but is it correct?

Because I live a narrowly circumscribed life in the quiet green shade of literary pursuits, far from the madding crowd (HAH) I had never heard of Paul Graham before kingflum turned me on to an essay the gentleman had written entitled: “The Brand Age” which was published just this month.

Graham is a computer scientist and investor probably best known for being a co-founder of Y Combinator, which got started in 2005 as a sort of (as far as I can tell) hothouse for investing and fast-tracking startups, and the list of companies they’ve funded is over five thousand names long and counting. The first three listed on the company’s website are Airbnb, DoorDash, and Coinbase, so the scope of their activities and his, are I think safely described as enormous and highly influential in terms of how the company, and Graham, have helped create what we think of as startup culture in Silicon Valley.

Now you know about as much as I do; it’s another example (like the little mine I found out about just recently which provides most of the ultra pure quartz you need for growing silicon crystals for the semiconductor industry) of something which in many respects has a great influence on our daily lives without our knowing anything about it, or even (for many of us, including me) that it even exists.

His thesis is a straightforward one: that watches since the quartz crisis, have become largely expressions of brand identity rather than instruments for telling time and in doing so, have tended to migrate towards increasingly poor and functionally disconnected designs whose primary purpose is to express “brand identity” as loudly and clearly as possible, rather than to fulfill what Graham says was their primary purpose during the “Golden Age,” which was to tell time accurately, and be practical to wear.

It’s hard to say that Graham doesn’t have a point. It is absolutely true that mechanical watches are an anachronism and (often although not always) a damned expensive one at that, looked at purely from the perspective of functionality. The essay has been circulating around the watch internet and reviews are somewhat mixed, although it is also true that some of the pushback can be seen from the perspective of individuals who feel their tastes and their affection for modern watchmaking – and especially, their sense that their appreciation is grounded at least partly in demonstrable functional excellence – is being devalued.

We all have narratives about which we feel protective and if you are a Rolex fan who is proud of the Superlative Chronometer standard, or an Omega fan who’s pleased by its adoption of the co-axial escapement and the Master Chronometer/METAS standard, it’s easy to feel as if Graham is painting with too broad a brush. That said, when quartz watches are keeping time as they routinely do, to seconds per year, and mobile devices are doing so to atomic clock precision of about 1x10^-16 seconds per year (that is the figure I have found for the atomic clocks at Fort Collins, Colorado, at the USN Observatory) you are compelled to admit that in terms of fulfilling the basic need for accurate delivery of time on an individual level, Graham is inarguably right when he calls mechanical watches an obsolete technology.

There are few if any circumstances where a mechanical watch is indisputably preferable functionally. It is for instance considered poor operational security for someone for whom that’s a concern, to wear a connected watch which may broadcast your location (as well as your heart rate, emails, and God knows what else) to an adversary, but you can just wear a solar powered quartz watch if that’s a real concern; I’ve heard from divers who have had dive computers crap out on them during a dive, who were glad to have a mechanical watch as a backup, but that’s not exactly what you would call a ubiquitous use-case scenario.

A central and interesting point Graham makes is that as technology improves, there is a tendency for designs to start to look alike as they tend to converge on optimum engineering solutions. The reaction to this by his thesis, is that design becomes an expression of brand-identifiable designs in which practicality becomes subordinate to purely aesthetic design considerations.

He brings the point up in the context of the Golden Ellipse, and how the crown in particular is too small to be used easily for its intended purpose, which is in deference to the design; but as elsewhere in the essay he’s also concerned to make a general point about converging technology. The reaction to this convergence of technical solutions, is sacrificing functional excellence for brand identity expression. He writes:

“So even in this early example we see an important point about the relationship between brand and design. Branding isn't merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.”

Where I think the argument starts to show some signs of, if not weakness, at least incompleteness, is in how Graham tends to be broadly right, but misses some nuance, which tends to be an early casualty when you’re making an argument based on a single overarching organizing principle.

The Golden Age: Myth Or Reality?

There is first of all, the idea that the period 1945 to 1970 was a “golden age” against which presumably the decadence of our moderns and brands must be judged and found wanting. Here’s Graham on defining the Golden Age of Watchmaking:

“The golden age was from 1945 to 1970 — from the point where the watch industry emerged from the chaos of war with the Swiss on top till the triple cataclysm that struck it starting in the late 60s. There were two things watchmakers sought above all in the golden age: thinness and accuracy. And indeed this was arguably the essential tradeoff in watchmaking. A watch is something you carry with you to tell you the time. So there are two fundamental ways to improve it: to make it easier to carry with you and to make it better at telling the time.”

It’s absolutely true that thinness and accuracy were major objectives and that watches and watch brands competed strongly on both qualities although it’s also an interesting point to note that these are fundamentally opposed goals. Thin watches are very difficult to make really precise; there are compromises in everything from rigidity to mainspring height to escapement design which argue against it and to take an extreme example, if you look at mechanical marine chronometers – both before and after the war – you’re not going to see anything that looks like it’s trying to be a thin, elegant style statement.

The problem of making a watch thin was not, during the Golden Age, related to making it more wearable; that problem had largely been solved when Lepine developed the caliber that bears his name, in or around 1765 and the “knife” pocket watch movements from the 1920s were less than 2mm thick. Thinness was an expression of the maker’s skill – making an 0.95mm thick movement, as Vacheron did in 1931, was extremely difficult but it was also not done in pursuit of easier wearability; it was instead primarily done because thinness was valued as a manifestation of craft (the Vacheron and JLC “knife” calibers were deployed in pocket watches) and just as crucially, because thinness was valued from the perspective of style. This is a point I will emphasize again later: watches are designed and as such, are influenced by the larger design contexts of their era. This carried on right through to the quartz era, where the lingering belief that thin watches were more sophisticated and urbane led to the development of ultra thin (and ultimately not very practical) quartz watches, like the Omega Dinosaure or the Concord Delirium.

The Elements Of Style

So thinness was certainly necessary for a wristwatch to be wearable; however it was also a manifestation of tastes and preferences in style. By the same token, accuracy was not ubiquitously pursued as a primary goal either; brands like Piaget, who specialized in making ultra thin watches, did not and could not make accuracy a primary goal beyond a certain point; there were simple engineering constraints which prevented it. (Some of the thinnest mechanical movements ever made were the Bouchet-Lassale calibers, which were produced for a short time starting in 1976, and which were so thin that they were impossible to service).

The idea that watches only became outlandishly big, with oddball case designs, as a result of the demise of the pursuit of honest goals like thinness (framed as a practical engineering goal, which beyond a certain point it absolutely was not) and accuracy (with the caveat that reasonable accuracy, if not precision chronometer performance, is a fair ask for any mechanical movement, down to the JLC calibere 101) is also partly true. However there are plenty of counterexamples which show watches in which a heavy build, was the result of the pursuit of technical goals.

Larger watches were, during the golden age, often ones that were intended for use case scenarios where an extra flat or ultra thin watch would have been impractical or impossible. An obvious example are professional watches – if you look at (for instance) Omega’s back catalog of watches designed for professional divers, you see plenty of examples of what seem like outrageously exaggerated design, up to and including the Ploprof. I just opened my copy of Omega: A Journey Through Time (which I wish were still in print; 800+ pages of pure research gold) and it fell open to a page showing a Flightmaster from 1969, which is about as immensely oversized (indeed, as Wei Koh once put it, possessed of undeniable “ursine heft”) as you could want, with plenty of buttons sticking out to boot. Watches in the 1960s like the Breitling Top Time Racing, some of the designs from Lip, and the Gilbert Albert designs for Patek Philippe, are just a few examples of how watches were, even during the Golden Age, far from a homogenous expression of the single minded pursuit of just two engineering goals.

There are a couple of other odd generalizations in the essay as well; this one sticks out:

“Women never really went for the idea of wearing mechanical watches. Most rich women are happy wearing a Cartier tank with a quartz movement. Why the difference? Partly for the same reason that most buyers of steam engines are men. But the main reason is that expensive mechanical watches now serve as de facto jewelry for men, and women don't need de facto jewelry because they can wear actual jewelry.”

“Women never really went for the idea of wearing mechanical watches” is I think, just plainly demonstratively untrue if for no other reason than that until quartz watches came along, mechanical watches were all that anybody had to wear. “Most rich women are happy wearing a Cartier tank [sic] with a quartz movement” is also demonstrably untrue these days at least (I will assume he means by “these days” as the increasingly unpleasant more or less present, as the sentence is in the present tense) unless you want to engage in solipsisms about what “most” means. As far as “Partly for the same reason that most buyers of steam engines are men” – well, I don’t know what to do with that one. Maybe because during the Industrial Revolution traditional gender roles were not only totally unexamined (mostly) but also rigidly enforced and entrenched?

I think there is also some room for maneuvering around the idea that the design excesses, as Graham sees it, of modern watchmaking, are due only to the decline of functionality as a goal. We can see just from some of the above examples that both functional and style considerations have always played a role in watch design; like any other design object, especially one worn on one’s person, watches have always been what my lit crit friends would have called semiotically multivalent. It’s certainly true that as a primary solution to the problem of personal timekeeping, mechanical watches are obsolete, but to see that part of the problem with the Swiss watch industry may not be entirely due to reacting to obsolescence with prestige branding and rising prices, we have only to look at Japan, where the art of making affordable and functionally acceptable mechanical watches seems to be alive and well. There might be people buying Citizen Eco-Drive watches because the brand is a highly visible source of social prestige and an efficient mechanism for brand signaling but there may be some who also simply want a nicely made, accurate, durable watch whose battery isn’t going to die on you at an inconvenient moment.

Graham also notes (obviously correctly) that many of today’s prominent watch brands are “owned by conglomerates.” This is once again only partially true; in fact some of the most successful Swiss watch brands aren’t owned by conglomerates at all, but are privately held independents, including Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Richard Mille, and Patek Philippe (and of those four, three are still being run by multigeneration family owner/managers).

Being owned by a publicly traded corporation does of course exert its own flattening effect on design, which Graham mentions:

“There's a reason the Vacheron Constantin boutique looks so much like the IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre boutiques, and for that matter the Montblanc and Cartier boutiques. They're all owned by the same company. It's similar with clothing brands, incidentally. When you walk through a town's fanciest shopping district, what seem to be the shops of lots of different brands are actually owned by a handful of conglomerates. That's one reason these districts seem so sterile; like suburbs built by a single developer, they have an unnatural lack of variety.”

You would think, though, that if the ascendancy of branding producing increasingly outré designs held true, we’d see it at the boutique design level as well. What I don’t think gets into Graham’s analysis, is how being part of a conglomerate produces a flattening effect on quality, although he does note that the tendency is for technical excellence to get reduced to the minimum possible level necessary to maintain the brand image:

“This is an important point about the relationship between brand and quality. Quality doesn't stop mattering when a product switches to something people buy for its brand. But the way it matters changes shape. It becomes a threshold. It no longer has to be so great that it sells the product; brand sells the product; but it does have to be good enough to maintain the brand's reputation. The brand must not break character.”

This is a very salient point, I would just add to it that the problem is at least as much due to the need to increase margin and protect share price as it does with abdication of functionality, and that this is not just a Swiss luxury watch industry problem; it’s endemic to the entire luxury industry, which so often today pursues the simulation of luxury on an industrial scale.

So I think it’s fair to say that watches have often pursued many goals simultaneously, and that the weight given to different considerations varies according to the technical developments at any given time, the design goal of a given watch or collection, the price point at which the watch is designed to compete, the larger context of wider tastes in terms of design (expectations in 1968 were different from 1955, for instance, in terms of design idioms and movements in the fine and applied arts) and on and on. None of this detracts from the main point of Graham’s essay, which is that brand identity and branding loom disproportionately large; it is to say however that the context in which these decisions are made is exceedingly complicated and defies finding any one size fits all rationale.

I don’t think a one size fits all diagnosis was what Graham was after; I think he’s too smart for that. I do think that the tech industry rewards identifying and funding what I would call the Charismatic Big Idea; right now it’s AI, but once upon a time it was the Internet itself and in years to come, which I may be spared for or not, it’ll be other things. In military science right now the CBI is drones but I’m counting the seconds until we enter the post-drone era, which is going to be on us sooner than any of us suspect, I think; AI might be great for a cheap in-flight solution for identifying the signature of drone engines as a homing signal for anti-drone drones, if it hasn’t already happened.

The ability to identify and focus on CBIs is heavily rewarded these days as it creates value for investors; like any other highly incentivized perspective, it introduces its own cognitive biases, which can include a struggle to empathize with the human impact of Big Ideas, and a tendency to reduce highly complex multifactorial phenomena to easily digestible hermeneutics. Nothing is analytically or factually incorrect in Graham’s diagnosis; it is also true that the Swiss watch industry has been shaped by factors like the fact that it has always been an export product; it has historically relied on prestige positioning (“Swiss Made” is its own brand), that Geneva is John Calvin’s Rome and the Calvinist work ethic is deeply entwined with the Swiss watch industry, and on and on. And of course, there’s the fact that a surprising number of people who work in the Swiss watch industry take national, historical, and personal pride in their work.

None of this is to say that Graham’s essay is wrong; that in its turn would be too reductive; he is as far as my gut tells me, absolutely right about the brand-functionality disconnect. However, I think it’s often the case that the exceptions to Big Ideas are at least as informative and interesting as the Big Ideas themselves, and observing the exceptions may give us the opportunity to appreciate just how rich and irreducible human behavior really is.

Post Scriptum

PS: The last point is around this statement:

“Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it.”

This is an interesting statement. “Orthogonal” means “at right angles” to something and is a neutral expression of geometric position; here it is being deployed to say that branding as I understand Graham’s intent, has its own direction which is in some sense on a ninety degree opposed axis to “good design” but which is also qualified as “opposed to it” which I take him to mean, actively works against the expression of good design.

I’m not sure what distinction is meant to be drawn between “orthogonal” and “actively opposed” – I take it as a matter of rhetorical emphasis. This is perfectly OK as a rhetorical figure. However, to the extent that his earlier statement, which is the one that says that qualitatively, brands should not “break character” it is a little unclear. I wonder what he’d say about things like Master Chronometer certification and the Rolex Dynapulse escapement. These are very likely exercises in both pursuing precision as an objective goal, and also pursuing the support of brand identity. The two are sometimes orthogonal – shall we say, opposed and mutually exclusive – but as usual, things may be more complicated, and sometimes functional excellence, even by an objective measure, is essential to the identity of a brand as well.