SDC Weekly 96; Berneron Innovates; Lange’s Misleading Marketing; Apple Watch and Luxury Innovation
Watches of Switzerland and Richemont Results, Swatch Group Under Fire
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🦹♂️ Lange’s Misleading Marketing
Have you ever heard something which made you question your own ears? Well, that is exactly what happened to me when I watched this video interview between Ben Clymer and Wilhelm Schmid discussing Lange’s Minute Repeater Perpetual Calendar (video below, so no need to click the link).
First, let me set the stage for what you’re about to see and hear. This video lives on Lange’s own YouTube channel. It is possible that Hodinkee may have shot and edited it, but Lange chose to publish it. This matters because what you’re about to hear (or not hear) falls squarely on Lange’s shoulders.
Did you hear that? That crystal-clear, insanely loud chiming which makes the watch sound like a miniature cathedral bell tower strapped to a wrist? It is genuinely extraordinary.
Too extraordinary, in fact.
Compare that sound to this more realistic capture from Revolution, where Wei Koh interviews the same CEO with the same watch:
Let’s talk about dishonesty!
This sh1t is beyond standard marketing polish - it is a gross misrepresentation of the watch. The first video has been edited to make the minute repeater sound like Big Ben1! The sound you hear does not come from the watch; it is a post-production enhancement which creates a completely false - and undeserved - positive impression.
One might be inclined to say this sort of deception is trivial - “it’s just marketing” they will say with a shrug - but for a brand that wishes to trade on authenticity, tradition, and German engineering excellence, this is a total betrayal of trust.
Of course, this isn’t Lange’s first misstep. Their service issues have become legendary in collector circles, where many have shared horror stories about watches being kept for months, returned with new problems, or service bills being extortionate. Their marketing team seems intent on burnishing an image that their operations can’t actually support2.
There is a concerning trend in luxury marketing where certain brands prioritise perception over reality. In a quest to create perfect social media content and influence/convert potential future customers, the truth seems to be… collateral damage?
I must also clarify that what makes this insanely frustrating for me, is that aside from the brand being run by circus clowns, Lange makes genuinely brilliant watches and they really do not need to resort to cheap tricks like this. Their finishing is fabulous, their movements are works of art, and yes, their minute repeaters seem decent - even with their actual, un-amplified sound.
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Lange really should take down the misleading video and issue an explanation / clarification along with an apology to those who watched the original video and were misled. The person who approved this deceptive edit should face dire consequences. Most importantly, the brand needs to recommit to honest communication with its customers and fans.
Will any of this happen? I doubt it. The video will likely stay up, collecting views from unsuspecting watch lovers who will then be disappointed when they hear a real Lange minute repeater in person. Honestly, for a brand that prides itself on exceptional standards, this falls embarrassingly short.
Lange executives should consider reading the words of Gandhi before their next marketing meeting:
“Truth never damages a cause that is just”
What do you think? Have you noticed any other examples of watch brands stretching the truth in their marketing3? Please share them in the comments below.
💡 Berneron Innovates
The last time Sylvain Berneron made an appearance on SDC was not a very positive story at all, but I am pleased to report that today I will balance that out with some well-deserved praise. Note: all the technical information in this post was shared by Sylvain himself; either in this video, or directly with me4.
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As everyone may not know Berneron’s backstory, it’s worth a brief detour. He’s a French native (now 36) who studied industrial design before spending over a decade in the watch industry. He worked for the Richemont group (IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre) and spent five years at Breitling, where he ultimately became Chief Product Officer.
As he explains, he felt constrained within corporate structures:
“I’ve heard too many times ‘this is the way we’ve done it for two centuries and it should not move’. I heavily disagree.”
So, he left his corporate job and decided to do things his own way. His first collection, the asymmetric Mirage, seems to have been a runaway success with three years of back-orders and a GPHG award to boot. That’s the gist of it, but his new collection is what we are here to discuss.
Quantième Annuel (Annual Calendar)
I wasn’t at W&W myself, but Berneron did a sneak preview of his second collection at this year’s Watches & Wonders in Geneva – the Quantième Annuel (Annual Calendar) – set to be launched in September 2025:
After watching the video my only reaction was that this watch is a technical tour de force wrapped in a ton of practical innovation. Now maybe you’re not into these sorts of watches and this causes you to react with “ugh, not another calendar watch,” but bear with me, because this one genuinely brings something new to the table.
As he was introducing this new watch, Sylvain started by clarifying something from a ‘brand-building’ perspective: “I don’t want to be a one-trick-pony brand, I don’t want to be the Mirage guy.” This watch has certainly accomplished that goal. Aesthetically, the Quantième Annuel is clearly a total departure from the simple, asymmetric Mirage; it embraces symmetrical design, it’s round, and it’s pretty complicated! Berneron discusses (in the video) what he calls a “sequential reading procedure through a regulator” which supposedly means all the information is decoupled from the centre of the dial.
In short, you read the watch vertically for time (jumping hour at the top, minutes in the centre, seconds at the bottom) and then horizontally for the calendar functions (day, date, and month). Around the point where these two axes intersect, you’ll find an AM/PM indicator which changes from white to black at midday. It’s pretty cool that it’s slightly offset, because AM/PM is in fact the only indicator which interacts with both time and date displays - maybe it’s a cool story to make the narrative work, but hey, I like it 😂!
I’d be curious to hear whether you agree, but to me, the result is a clean, balanced display with fantastic legibility – something too many complicated watches seem to consider optional (and we will revisit this in a moment). The watch will come in a 38mm platinum case which is 10mm thick – putting it roughly in the same size category as classic and comparably complicated watches.
Here are some wrist shots with the 3D printed dummy-watch, to give you an idea of the case size and thickness (screenshots from the video):
Technical Stuff
The movement features a “quadruple jump” i.e. four jumping windows (hour, day, month, and AM/PM) which would all change simultaneously at midnight on December 31st, at which time the retrograde date would also snap back to 1. According to Sylvain, these simultaneous mechanical actions would typically require enough power to stop the movement dead in its tracks, and he needed to find a way to power these jumps without killing the movement.
Instead of trying to generate all that power in one instant, what this movement does is gradually store energy in cams, with each one saving power for their big moment (day stores power over 24h, month over 28 days etc). Think of it like a cyclist gradually storing some potential energy in a spring while pedalling downhill, and then releasing the spring to ease the pedalling uphill. In a way, these cams are like additional tiny power reserves within a movement which already features two main barrels.
That’s technically-innovative in my opinion.
Practical Innovation
So the movement seems great, but maybe you don’t care about that and you just want to wear and enjoy. Well, what’s been done with the practical aspects of this watch is more than Patek has done in 10 years5:
Fail-safe setting
Ok fine, this isn’t completely new, but a lot of calendar watches have a well-earned reputation for being temperamental at the very least. If you set them incorrectly, you are often staring down the barrel of an expensive trip back to the manufacturer. The Quantième Annuel includes what Berneron calls “safety mode.”
Two (finger-operable) pushers in the case at 8 and 4 o’clock set the day and month, but if you make a mistake during setting, the movement won’t lock up or break. In the video he says this particular feature required an additional year of R&D on top of the year spent developing the base movement. I wanted to understand how this takes a whole year, so I asked him!
Sylvain explained how, in a conventional calendar watch, the movement is designed to work ‘in one direction only’. When you send ‘the wrong message’ to a traditional calendar (like trying to advance from January 31 to February 31), you can inadvertently push the cams into what Berneron described as “no man’s land.”
Once there, the movement doesn’t know which way is forward, so it gets stuck. The only solution is to disassemble the movement and manually reset the cams to a known position. Berneron’s solution required building what sounded to me, like a whole other movement - but in reverse (my words not his, but I don’t want to get into SJX-level of technical jargon!). His new system understands the various “no man’s land” scenarios and instead of getting stuck, automatically kicks the date back to 1 which is a known ‘correct state’ from which the user can simply start again.
In layman’s terms, this watch can detect and correct user error – which is a level of mechanical intelligence we don’t see too often in watchmaking6.
Replaceable steel “bumpers”
I’d say this is my favourite ‘innovation’ if you can call it that; but it is the practical solution to our watches’ susceptibility to scratches but our general aversion to ever polishing them. With this watch, instead of accepting scratches as an unavoidable compromise to being able to call your watch ‘unpolished’7, Berneron incorporated what he calls a “steel bumper” system8.
The bezel, lug tips, crown button, and other typical points of impact for an average watch are all made from steel components which are screwed onto the platinum case. So when you inevitably bang your watch on a door frame or drop it in an airport security tray, the steel takes the hit instead of the precious platinum.
What I thought was a cherry on the top, was that these components are designed to be owner-replaceable. He makes it sound so easy… “Oh you scratched a lug?” No problem. Berneron will mail you a replacement part and a screwdriver (I think!), and you can fix it yourself.
This image was shared by Sylvain, and he agreed to let me publish it on SDC despite being scheduled for public release on Thursday. I had originally suggested it was going to be behind a paywall, but we eventually agreed I would make it free for all to see, with one request:
PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS IMAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA BEFORE THURSDAY.
We both acknowledged this was a gamble, but also an interesting social experiment. Now the ball is in your court; please don’t be a cvnt.
PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THE ABOVE IMAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA BEFORE THURSDAY.
Balanced and considered display
This was worth discussing, because this is kinda the opposite of when AP messed up their new QP. In the video, Berneron directly compared his watch to the Patek Philippe 5496P (bold move, but I love it!), and he took the time to point out a subtle but significant design flaws in the Patek’s retrograde date display. On the Patek, the date hand jumps the same distance for each day which results in numbers which get cramped towards the end of the month, and are too spaced out at start of the month. You can see it for yourself in the image above, and I think it’s quite obvious when you look for it.
Berneron’s display solves this by creating equally spaced numbers around the retrograde scale, and then doing some engineering to create a date-hand which jumps in three different ‘lengths’ depending on where it is in the cycle – in other words, the date-hand does different jumps for days 1-9, 10-19, and 20-31. As you can see in the image, the result is a balanced dial which is pleasant to look at and easier to read.
“The old way is basically the technique imposing to you, the collector, an unbalanced dial to look at... This is our approach of presenting you a visually balanced dial and then we solve the mess in the back office because we consider this is good service.”
Sylvain Berneron
Other stuff
The watch also features an officer case back which opens at the push of a button on the crown, to reveal a movement constructed with 450 components, of which Sylvain claims 400 are bespoke. The movement itself is made of 18-karat gold, which is aligned with Berneron’s commitment to using precious metals on all his watches.
The movement architecture is designed with a symmetrical layout to match the dial, and what Berneron describes as a “mirror sequence” for power flow – right to left, down and up when viewed from the back, which mirrors the left to right, up and down reading sequence of the dial.
Now for the bad news – each watch will retail for 120,000 CHF (excluding VAT), and production is limited to 24 pieces per year in each of the two dial colours shown above. Berneron plans to continue production of the piece for a decade, so 480 pieces in total. A 50% deposit will secure a piece, but note that approximately half of the first year’s production has already been allocated.
Annual vs Perpetual
You might wonder why Berneron chose to develop an annual calendar rather than pushing for the more prestigious perpetual calendar. So did I, and when I asked him this, he told me it was a deliberate choice which speaks to his practical user-focused mindset.
He likened the perpetual calendar module to “driving with a trailer attached to your car for four years, just so that you can chop wood and fill the trailer once every four years.” I burst out laughing, because this analogy is scarily accurate. You’re carrying around all that extra mechanical complexity for a function that happens once in a leap year; how many perpetual calendar owners only ever share their watches on Instagram every four years when February 29th rolls around?
So, instead of pulling around a proverbial trailer, Berneron used the space he saved (thickness) to incorporate the officer-style case back and in doing so, gave owners a practical watch which prioritises daily enjoyment over QP bragging rights.
Personally, I do think the ‘horological kudos’ which would accrue to Berneron as a brand would make it worth developing a perpetual calendar, so I’d be surprised if we don’t see him release one in the next few years.
Why you should care
I’m not even a target customer for this sort of watch, but the truth is that this industry regularly seems to prioritise marketing over innovation. Here we have an independent watchmaker offering what I think should be celebrated: thoughtful, problem-solving-based watchmaking which strives to improve the user experience and enjoyment. He’s supposedly planned to have one new launch per year for a decade (which leaves 8 launches remaining after this piece), and I for one am excited to see what he comes out with next. I was given one hint: It’s called the Fiasco and it will be centred around “jewellery technique”. Cartier better be watching closely 😂
Sylvain said in the video, that 1.7 million Swiss francs and two years of R&D is what went into creating this movement. I have no idea whether that’s a lot or very little so I asked him directly. For context, Berneron told me he spent 800k developing the simpler movement for the Mirage (135 components). That, he says, is the absolute bare minimum cost of bringing a brand new calibre to life from scratch, and is predicated on everything going perfectly on the first attempt.
By comparison, when he was at Breitling, new movement development would cost CHF 4.5-5 million and take 4-5 years. The difference comes down to scale and approach. Big brands need idiot-proof movements for mass production, with extensive torture-testing and multiple iterations to get it right so that they can be assembled with minimal training. In that context, they would need to produce a minimum of 100,000 calibres to recover their investment.
Berneron is operating in what he describes as a middle ground – he’s planning roughly 500 calibres (per collection) over a decade, which provides just enough critical mass to justify investment in each one. In doing so, he is also able to keep the tolerances at a level where master watchmakers can handle finer adjustments later on, rather than requiring fully automated, idiot-proof processes.
Berneron also shared that because the Quantieme Annuel features 400 brand new, bespoke parts, each part required 3D modelling, simulation, technical programming (precise to the micron), individual prototyping, and testing. The initial development deal was for 1.2 million, but when Berneron later realised he wanted something better than “basically another Kurt Klaus,” he had to spend an additional 500k and 12 months developing the side pushers and safety mechanism.
I’m glad he spent the extra cash. In my opinion, as a result of this additional investment, the watch does a good job of addressing what luxury should be about - careful and deliberate consideration of the ownership experience. Who the fvck spends 6 figures and also wants to find a stylus to set the watch, or have to wait a few weeks/months to send a watch for a polish when you scratch it badly? That’s right: nobody does!
If you’ve been reading SDC for some time, you will know I often bang on about how the watch industry needs to focus more on solving actual problems rather than just creating complications for the sake of tradition. Sylvain Berneron’s Quantième Annuel is a very good example of what you get when a watch brand simply listens to collectors and addresses known and obvious pain points.
This is the kind of watchmaking which excites me, and I think we should celebrate it because we need to encourage more of it.
REMINDER: Please do not share Berneron’s “steel layer” image on social media.
🍎 Apple Watch and Luxury Innovation
Research suggests one in three iPhone owners in the US also claims to own an Apple Watch9, and as of April 2025, iOS held a 57.6% market share in the US. That is wild because this product only just celebrated its first decade on the market (launched in April 2015)!