“A fool and his money are soon parted.”

That is a famous proverb that seems to be the foundation of the marketing used by watch brands today. In other words, for better or worse, despite the absolute fact that watches are machines, tools, instruments of time, etc., watch brands want us to view and judge watches subjectively like jewelry. This is how you end up with gold dive watches, for example, and people foolish enough to buy them.

Yesterday, April 26, 2017, the Foundation de la Haute Horlogerie (FHH) released a white paper on “Fine Watchmaking”. In short, the white paper was created to promote what they’re calling “Fine Watchmaking”, and they defined 4 market segments and 7 areas of expertise by which 46 “independent international experts” used to judge brands against. These people make up what they’re calling the “Cultural Council”. For a watch to be qualified it must score at least 60% where 65% of the score is objective and 35% is subjective.

In total, 86 brands were judged, 68 made the cut, and only 28 were so good they became partners.

Now that SIHH 2017 has come and gone, lets take a look at some of our favorite new watches. But first, what is SIHH?

SIHH (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie) is one of the two big watch shows in Switzerland that happens every year (Baselworld is the other). SIHH began in the early 90’s with it’s first show in 1992 when 5 brands left Baselworld to set it up: Baume & Mercier, Cartier, Piaget, Gerald Genta, and Daniel Roth. Today the show has grown to 30 exhibitors. As such, the quality of the watches revealed has also grown immensely, which is never a bad thing.

Every year we have our "new year's resolutions", but given the holiday season has just ended, which is always filled with the standard commercialism and retail therapy, I thought it might be worthwhile to give my perspective on the subject. Specifically when we refer to a certain type of spending as "materialism" - this ties in nicely with the watch world, since 2016 was officially the worst year on record since the early 80's!

First, what is materialism?

It has now become common knowledge that this past year has been one of the worst on record for the watch industry. Data released by Bloomberg and the FHS (Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry FH) show that sales have dropped over 45% between 2015 and 2016, and the level of Switzerland’s watch exports dropped 11 percent during the first 10 months of the year.

A watch's primary function is to tell us what time it is. This is why telling the time is not considered a "complication".

But anything beyond that is.

And some complications are much more difficult to make than others. And combining more than one of these complications into one watch is absolutely spectacular, hence, it's own category: Grand Complications (minimum 3 complications to qualify).

But even doing one of these things well is a challenge, and making them all, even in individual watches make for quite the repertoire.