The Breitling Watch Blog

I’ve owned a few Orbita Sparta deluxe winders, and the older ones that I own, though still only 10 months old, the motors they shipped with were quite noisy. Not a huge problem for a winder that only winds for 5-10 seconds every 10 or 15 minutes depending on the cycle. I ended up selling one of them, but still have two of the deluxe models, one with a noisy motor, and one with a nice quiet one. The noisy one bugged me, so I emailed Orbita.

My Sparta Deluxe Winder looks like this:

A nice lady named Cheryl emailed me back quite promptly, and we conversed via email and she said that it would be replaced under warranty if I could provide the serial number to her as proof. WOW! That made me a happy guy. I was perfectly willing to pay money for the new quieter motor, but she said that it would be replaced free of charge, which really made my day.

I sent her the serial number and she sent me an email a few days later indicating it would be shipped out. I received it a couple weeks after our emails via Fedex, installed it in my winder, and it is now dead silent! I love it.

I really have to say that my experience with Orbita Watchwinder’s customer service was among the best I have ever experienced, and that all my further winder purchases will be made through them, not just due to the customer service (other winder companies have also been good) but because of the excellent product as well.

This video I made last week, and showcases a Project I made, after purchasing half a dozen Breitling dials on ebay. I got them for a decent price, of $1 each, unfortunately the guy charged me almost $10 each to ship! I guess he was unhappy about the ending bid price. I ended up getting a custom Matte made for a frame that I picked up that would suit the dials. The outcome was very nice, and I finished it up with a metal sticker/label with custom Breitling text written on it.

The dials are mounted on fiberboard and attached to the matte and then set into the frame. Great way to add Breitling decoration to the den!

Looks like Tiffany & Co has joined up with Nicholas G Hayek and company to have their watches built by the Swiss Watch Giant. This would appear to be a smart for both companies, as having the Swatch Group handle Tiffany and Co watches will improve their quality and desirability on the market.

Tiffany makes great jewelry, now maybe they will start making some WIS worthy timepeices as well!

http://www.tiffany.com/

With the explosive growth of the luxury watch in the last 5-10 years, its suprising to hear one name not commonly associated with high-end watches come up over and over again: Timex. Yes, that Timex. The same Timex that makes drugstore watches and supplies the bulk of the inventory for Wal-Mart and makes the tried and true Ironman Watches with their familiar Velcro Nylon straps.

Here are a couple of watches from the TX (Techno Luxury) Line of watches from TX’s 700 series. They come in very large sizes, and look quite nice.. some as large as 46mm.

However, there is more to the new Timex than just the new TX Watches (www.txwatches.com). The Timex Group consists of several brands and licenses which now include: Vincent Berard, Versace, Versus, Valentino, Salvatore Ferragamo, Guess, Helix, Nautica, Mark Ecko, Avirex, Timex, TX, Acqua, and Carriage. They are spread among 5 divisions based in Switzerland and the USA.

I was quite surprised to find out that the Versace watches were owned by the Timex Group. I had been considering the purchase of one of them for my girlfriend for a while, and have actually owned a couple as you might have known from reading my previous articles. These automatics had nice decorated swiss ETA movements in them, hardly something I would have associated with the Timex brand.

Some of the offerings from the Timex Group include the Versace DV One, in black ceramic – a very beautiful jewelry watch:

But the real suprise is the company that sits at the top of Timex Group, in the same way Breguet sits at the top of the Swatch Group, but with much less esteemed company so-to-speak. The company is Vincent Berard. The company makes less than 100 watches a year, priced at around $70,000 a pop, and is a premier small manufacture brand.

Here is an example of his work, the esteemed Luvorene 1. Read more about it here.

Will the Timex Group soon join the ranks of the Swatch Group, Richemont and LVMH? It will be interesting to see what happens..

That’s a good question. In my mind, if the crown falls off the watch, it should be fixed by Breitling under warranty… that’s assuming it unscrewed from the stem. However, if it snaps off the stem, then that’s a bit more difficult. Was it abused? Was it a fault stem? These are things that Breitling must consider when looking at the problem.

I received an email from someone and the email says this:

“Hello there! Thank you for your website, it was really helpful, I have fews questions that I hope will get an answers.
My father bought almost 10k for breitling watch. Last time, he lightly pull out a dial(knob) to change the time, and that little knob fall off. I sent it to Breitling to fix it, they charge me $984 to fix it. My father just bought a watch last year, warranty is 3 years. Should they fix this with no charge. Becuase it is such an expensive watch, and you lightly pull out a dial to turn the time, it fall out and they considered this not cover in the warranty. You know a lot about watch. What should I do? Can you please advice.
It is so unreasonable that I bought a watch, and something wrong with the dial installment, I have to pay to get it fix? So, they meant that Breitling is made out of cheap materials and cheap equipment? For example, if something wrong with the chain then it is our responsibility to fix it, but there should not be any wrong with the watch right? The dial is 18kt gold, and the watch is expensive, my father treat it very nice and genlte.
SO, what shoud I do now??
thank you for your time reading this, I really appreciated it.”

Now, warranty is usually 2 years, so I’m not sure where they got 3 years. I am waiting on a reply from her since $984 is an incredibly large amount of money to fix a broken crown stem. If its costing that much to fix whatever it is sounds like it should be under warranty, unless they smashed the watch against some pavement or something.

But it made me think. What if your crown does fall off? Is that covered? What if you take your watch swimming, is that covered? The Breitling warranty manual is somewhat ambiguous when it comes to what it covers. I personally have had no experience with Breitling Warranty as I have had no problems with my watches. I took them in for servicing and that was that. I had to pay.

I’m hoping some of you guys might be able to chip in or shoot me an email with some info!