What are you actually paying for in a handmade watch?

The question I get more than any other is some version of the same one: what makes it cost that much? People ask it politely, and sometimes they ask it straight. Both are fair.

The answer is time. The hours, and the fact that those hours cannot be shared out between very many watches.

Isn't most of it the materials?

No, and this surprises people. Stainless steel is not an expensive material. Neither is the aluminium the dial is built on. Silver has a price you can look up. Add together everything physical in one of our watches and it is the smallest line in the account.

Materials are what a watch is made of. They are almost never what it costs. If you have ever compared two steel watches with the same movement and found one costs many times the other, you already know the money is somewhere else.

So where do the hours actually go?

Into the work that has no shortcut in it.

The case is 316L stainless steel, machined and then finished by hand along its eight sides. Eight sides means more edges, more corners, more places where a slip shows. Every one of those surfaces is done by hand, and a hand that slips on the last one starts that surface again.

The dial is 22 individual parts. Its ground is glass-bead-blasted anodized aluminium. Across it lies a mesh woven by hand from sterling silver wire 0.4 millimetres thick, worked so the movement still shows through the weave. Silver wire kinks if you look at it wrong, and a kink is permanent. That single surface is the slowest thing we make.

The hands are cut from carbon steel 0.2 millimetres thin, filed to shape, and blued by heat, one at a time. The window between the blue you want and the blue you do not is narrow, and there is no undo.

The movement is a Swiss ETA 6498, bought, then stripped, modified and refinished here, with our own Rippling finish cut into the bridges. Then assembly, regulation, and the corrections that follow when something is a fraction out.

None of that can be done faster by wanting it more.

What about the parts that fail?

They are part of the price, and anyone who tells you otherwise is leaving something out.

A hand that goes one shade past blue is scrap. A bevel cut through is scrap. A dial part that seats a hair off gets made again. That is not carelessness, it is what hand work is: the finished watch is the survivor of a longer process than you see. Every watch that leaves carries the cost of the parts that did not.

Why can't it just be cheaper?

Here is the part most brands leave out, and it is the real answer.

A factory spends its design hours, its tooling and its problem-solving once, and then divides that cost across a very large number of watches. The bigger the number, the smaller each watch's share. That is not cheating; that is what scale is for, and it is why a mass-made watch can be good and still be affordable.

We do not have that number to divide by. The same design work, the same solved problems and the same pair of hands are spread across very few watches. So each one carries much more of the total. That is the whole economics of it, in two sentences.

It is also why our series watches exist at all. A series is the one place where we can share some of that work between watches — which is exactly why a one-off costs more than a series watch.

Doesn't a slower watch just mean a worse deal?

If you measure a watch by specification per euro, then yes, and I would not argue with you. There are watches with more water resistance, more accuracy on paper and more features for less money, and they are good products. Buying one is a sensible thing to do.

What you are buying here is different: an object where a very large share of the price went into work done by hand, by a person you can write to, in a place you can visit.

Then what is the point of paying it?

Meaning has to be put into a watch at the bench, and difficulty is what makes room for it. The hours are not a side effect of the price. They are the product.

That is the short version. The longer one is in Our why, which is the first thing I ever wrote about this.

If you want the actual figures, they are on the watch pages, next to what they include. And if you want to know exactly which hours went into a particular watch, write to me at reach@reigi.fi and ask. I will tell you.