Does this bother you?

I am a watch neophyte, and I honestly don't care if a movement is in house or not, I would rather just have a great movement. Now if a manufacturer is lying (the word imply may or may not mean lie) that is another story.

 

I have a Movado HS360 on the radar. Internally it's the El Primero. Plenty of companies have shared internals. ETA on it's own is polarizing. I mean the El Primero-Rolex thing is its own special bit of bit of is it or isn't it because a few parts changed.

Wind it, wear it, walk it off.

 

They're owned by the Richemont group so there's every possibility they're using a movement from another owned company. No different in the modern car world where FCA/Stellantis are going to share parts, VW/Porsche, the legacy of Daimler and Chrysler, etc....This has gone on in the watch world for over a century. Bulova models have numerous FHF and AS equivalents. Glycine has used Bulova, LeCoultre, Valjoux, Landeron, AS, FHF, and ETA. Audemars Piguet, Vacheron and LeCoultre shared the AP 2003 movement....We could go on and on about this. People need to get over it.

 

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In this case, yes it bothers me, and is why I didn't buy a particular pam that caught my eye a couple of years back. For the price, I wanted a true in-house movement. Bring the price down (like other oems) and not lie about being in-house, and I have no problem. I would still have probably passed though.

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Richemont owns Panerai (“makes” the PAM 01111). Swatch Group owns ETA (makes the 2892A2 used as the base for this movement). Panerai using an ETA movement doesn’t make it even under the Richemont umbrella. Dubois-Depraz (makes the chronograph module) sells to both Richemont and Swatch so definitely not part of either umbrella.

So yes, to call this an “in-house” movement is misleading or at least that is my opinion. Maybe the make the main bridge and some other parts or maybe the extensively refinish each ans every part… but if I restore/refinish and modify a Honda Civic, that doesn’t make it a car I made myself.

How much “in-house” should matter or not depends on the individual buyer. But for a company to intentionally mislead by choosing to make their own definition of a term that is contrary to that definition widely held by the rest of the “community” is wrong even if the end product is very high quality.

You’d never catch me doing this! I’ll tell everyone that’ll listen where each and every component of a wade I “make” came from.

 

The initial impulse is to say "no big deal, movement works and is industry standard, get over it"
However I think this is incorrect. Mechanical watch movements are intrinsically illogical vs quartz when comparing only performance metrics
With a brand like this part of what you're paying for is the engineering honesty to tackle a problem that has no purpose other than that it is hard and creates beautiful machines
Panerai selling something to its customers that implies it did the work, and made the investment, of an in house movement when they did not is a bad look
It's nothing about function and everything about honesty

 

I am a little confused about what the term "in house" means. Does it mean that the movement is both designed and constructed by the manufacturer or just constructed by the manufacturer?

It seems to me watch movement design is a refinement process; a certain design, such as a chronograph movement, becomes a proven and acknowledged champion that should be attractive to all watch manufacturers. It seems like ETA has designed some famously good movements. Shouldn't these be more desirable than the unusual suboptimal designs made for the sake of being unique?

 

There is no formal definition of "in house," however it's usually used to refer to a watch making group that has the ability and know-how to make all of the metal parts that make up a mechanical watch movement. This involves a significant investment in capital for the machinery and (as you pointed out) a very large amount of human capital to work out the processes and refine the techniques. The upside to this is that the watch brand is then no longer beholden to an external manufacturer for their future ability to make watches and that brand now has the ability to innovate.

For an example of the former: right now there is a fight within the watch repair world as ETA (the main whitelabel maker of standard Swiss movements) is restricting sales of replacement parts to independent watch repair shops, forcing buyers of these watches to use brand approved repair/service providers.

For an example of the latter: Lange is either at the top or near the top of watch houses at current because of their own continued innovation including developments in their in house movements.





Again, I would agree with you that an ETA movement is a standard for a reason. It's easy to buy an ETA movement, put it in a case with a sapphire crystal, pick your dial, hands and crown and have a "Swiss quality" watch that is exactly what you want for a fraction of the cost of a Panerai or Breitling. I wear a "frankenwatch" made that way with a seiko nh35a movement every day.

But that's the problem. If you're just buying a whitelabeled ETA in a case, there really isn't a reason for a brand to exist outside of marketing and profit.

Some may disagree with the above. I think everyone would agree that saying "we made an in house movement" when they clearly didn't is a bad look. Especially when saying that implies an investment in the future of the brand on the order of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man hours that they didn't make.

 

Personally I only buy watches with in house movements.

It's in poor taste for them to try to pass this off as in house. The whole move in my opinion devalues the Panerai brand as a whole. Most people probably don't care or know the difference.

The first quality watch I bought ever was a Steinhart with an ETA movement. It was all the watch without the marketing overhead markups. Still have it to this day although I never wear it.

Comparing them to cars, it's like Lotus using a Toyota engine. It gets the job done, but it's not really all a Lotus is it?

 

Cost is always a factor, even for high end watches. Sometimes a maker will buy an ETA movement but heavily modify to meet their own standards and design parameters. They may decide to call it an in-house movement. Manufacturers also outsource parts, (dials, hands, springs, jewels, crystals) and again can have them made to their own specs, and use them to build what will be called an inhouse movement. I'd even hazard a guess that Patek Philippe might do this. Certainly Rolex. Rolex makes the cases for Tudor, but uses modified ETA movements. So many manufacturers were killed by the quartz watches...yet the names still survive (as part of holding companies) and are kept alive by the resurrected mechanical watch market. Look at how over the years, so many Ferrari parts were picked from the Fiat parts bins. It's the same with watches today.

 

I would prefer in house movements for most watches. I believe Richard Mille is using a highly modified outsourced movement for their watches and they are commanding a very high premium in the market now.


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