“How much should I spend on a watch?” is really two questions wearing one coat. The first is what a watch costs to make. The second is what you are actually buying at each level — and the two stop matching each other surprisingly early.
Where the money goes
Four things drive the real cost of a watch:
- The movement. The single biggest line. A Japanese quartz calibre, a Japanese automatic and a Swiss automatic sit at very different levels — and the gap between them is larger than the gap between a good case and a mediocre one.
- The case and crystal. Stainless steel grade, finishing quality, and whether the glass is mineral or sapphire.
- The dial. The part you look at every day, and the part most often cut. Applied indices, real sunburst finishing and clean printing cost money; a flat printed disc does not.
- Distribution. Importer, wholesaler and boutique margins traditionally multiply the factory price several times over before it reaches a wrist.
That last point is why two watches with identical components can be separated by a factor of three or four. Selling direct removes most of the chain — the saving either goes to the customer, or back into the first three lines. Our guide to French watch brands explains how that model works in practice.
What you get at each level
The bottom of the market
Unbranded quartz, mineral glass, plated cases, printed dials. It tells the time. It is not made to be repaired, and it usually is not worth repairing. Nothing wrong with that — as long as you know that is what you bought.
The middle
This is where the interesting decisions happen. A well-chosen Japanese calibre, a properly finished steel case, a dial with real depth to it. A brand operating direct-to-customer at this level can put components into a watch that the traditional model would have priced two or three times higher. This is where most independent brands live, and where the value gap is widest in the buyer's favour.
Mechanical territory
Above the middle, the decisive question stops being “how good is the finishing” and becomes “quartz or mechanical?”. A Swiss automatic is not more accurate than quartz — it is less. What it offers is a mechanism that can be serviced indefinitely rather than replaced, and an object that has a reason to be passed on. The Sellita SW200 guide covers what that actually buys you.
Above that
Beyond a certain point you are buying heritage, scarcity and resale liquidity. Those are real things, and they are worth what people pay for them. They are just no longer about how well the watch tells the time.
The honest way to set your budget
- Decide what job the watch is doing. Daily wear, a gift, a milestone, or the start of a collection — each answers the budget question differently.
- Set the movement first. Quartz or mechanical is the fork in the road; everything else follows from it.
- Spend the rest on the dial and the case. These are what you actually look at and touch.
- Ignore the RRP crossed out on the page. A permanent discount is not a discount, it is a price.
- Add the personalisation. Engraving costs relatively little and changes what the object means — the single highest-return line in the whole budget. See the engraved watch gift guide.
How ZEDAIX is positioned
ZEDAIX designs in Aix-en-Provence and engraves its dials in-house on a fibre laser, selling directly rather than through a distribution chain. The daily-wear line — TIMGAD Blue, TIMGAD Gold and the CRONOS series in Gold, Silver, White and Red — uses Japanese quartz calibres. HOGGAR I sits at the top of that range, and the BLASON is the Swiss automatic, on a Sellita SW200, numbered across a run of 50.
Women's pieces — ELISE 82, EVA and ÉVIDENCE — follow the same logic. Current pricing for every model is on the product pages: men's collection · women's collection.
The short version
Spend enough to get a named movement, a properly finished case and a dial with some depth to it. Past that, every additional euro buys meaning rather than function — which is a perfectly good reason to spend it, as long as you know that is what you are doing.