Micro Tournament Round 1 Day 3: Horage vs. Brew

One of two match-ups I am most interested in today.  You have Horage, who makes in-house spec monsters punching classes above their price vs. perhaps the budget hype retro-watch of the year whose best movement is a NH35. 

Ooof. I voted Horage but it's a hard one.  I think they're going to have the bigger impact at the end of the day on the industry.

It is a tough vote. Brew is a fun watch with cool retro flair for a few hundred bucks, despite the movement. Perhaps the most hype outside of the MoonSwatch. Horage is doing something innovating with cool styling, granted they are at the higher end of the competition price wise, but I’d argue they compete with brands costing 2-3x as much.

If anyone cares, there's going to be a theme to the way I'm voting.  If more than half your watches are sold out, you probably aren't getting my vote.  I get that as a micro it's tough to keep things in stock and possibly foolish to make tons of watches even if you can.  That said, I start to suspect these guys aren't in much of a hurry to make more because they like having a waiting list.  It's BS when Rolex does it, and it's BS when Brew does.  I fully accept that I may have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you're a watch company and you can't sell me a watch, I'd argue you're doing something wrong.

insane. horage clearly wasted their money on developing a wholly unique movement. should have slapped an nh35 in there, spent the rest if their r&d budget on marketing. 

Can’t vote for either. Horage sounds like Horror-porage and I dislike their designs. Whilst I like Brew’s designs in general, I don’t get the coffee-watch connection. I know it’s their thing, but it kinda ruins it for me. Ugh, I guess I’ll vote Brew even though I wouldn’t buy one. lol 😆 

It depends on how one looks at things.  First off, our hats go off to Brew. Jonathan has created a great brand and community and we have enjoyed getting to know him over the years.  Our roadmaps are different, however we share a passion for watchmaking and the community that makes this hobby so much fun.  Our investments in our future independence started back in 2008 when we realized access to premium automatic movements would become increasingly difficult to obtain due to them being controlled by larger groups. Rather than fill ourselves with hopium and sit on the sidelines settling for whatever movement we could get our hands on we took on an incredible challenge to develop our own movements.  Our first 7 years had us freeze any brand development and we invested in engineering our K1 automatic.  This move although very costly was important to ensure Horage could have a fighting chance as a Swiss premium performance movement maker.  We also realized that many still had a deep appreciation for mechanical movements and the development road needed to create them.  Our goal was to be one of the top movement manufacturers and secondly pack that into our brands watches. Rather than marketing smoke and mirrors with a decoration exercise on a modified subpar performing movements we set out to create a new architecture.  Unfortunately there is no easy road and investments in ones independence takes time however once made a brand can then focus on connecting with the watch community and getting exposure in media.  It has really only been in the past 2.5 years of our nearly 15 years existence that we had market exposure due to our focus on creating three calibres (K1 automatic, K2 micro-rotor and tourbillon).  We as well as our community of supporters are happy we have done this, as it has solidified our position as an independent and we can now offer something different. Such an approach meant we had to sacrifice short term gains for a much longer opportunity window.  Is that so bad?  Is the watch community suffering because of this? 

The H is silent, but if you like Porridge is a fine substitute for us. Brew are good people and they deserve all the credit they get for their creativity and doing things most only dream of doing.  

Thanks for the vote 👍.  We like what brew is doing and how much passion he has for designing and presenting watches.  Our hope is we can help make a difference in future times through our movement development for young and old brands alike.  Only time will tell. Thanks again!

Great to hear.  Wonderful to see the interest in Brew and our brand here. 

Love that you are active with this and thank you! I really appreciate the approach and as others said, I think others will grow to appreciate the Horage more over time as word of mouth gets out. 

Based on what you said, as well as the R&D  that went into your movements, will we see them starting to pop up in other brands? I would love to see an alternative to what’s out there and the benefit of your micro router could really impact the movement market, especially when the landscape does not have many alternatives in that area. While I appreciate that Hangzhou offers one, I don’t trust the quality and durability which has prevented me from supporting brands who I otherwise might have. I’d far greater appreciate seeing a K2 in other brands. While I fully plan on adding a Horage to my box, I imagine people would jump at, say, Baltic using a K2 instead of Hangzhou.

Thanks so much. In our early days our goal was to become a major OEM supplier, but as with any journey there are forks in the road, obstacles to observe and focus needed to maintain resilience.

Being the new Swiss manufacturer was and has not been an open arms type of situation that many would think.  We had hoped so in the beginning, but reality would soon come knocking on our door.  There are many brands big and small alike that would love to have access to new movements, but few wanted to be the first.  Taking a chance on a group of young engineers and watchmakers is as we learned not a road many want to share.  

Enthusiasts like new, but brands as we learned don't always want new, but rather movements from a market proven brand with available stock that could be delivered at the drop of a hat.  Going through this exercise with various brands expressing interest had us realize that proving our pedigree would need to be done with Horage.  Luckily we took on the tourbillon project as well as K2 micro-rotor as these projects helped us gain notoriety as a serious movement developer.   K2 itself has already been a 5 year long development so these things take incredible amounts of time. Now that we have some market exposure the next step in the traditional OEM spectrum would be taking big risk on huge amounts of stock and managing requests for decoration and modifications from brands.  Simply put we realize our strengths are in creating movements and building Horage rather than acting as a supplier.  We therefore have doubled down on engineering and this approach has companies coming to us for help in developing their own movements. Like most things we embark on, the road is long, but we have our eyes set further down the road.  This means we believe there could be a movement solution for the 3rd party brands in future times. Good things take time and for that we will all have to wait a little longer. 😉 

I love what you're doing with movements.   The microrotor GMT is such a cool design and I think there's just so much room for movement competition in the industry.

Wonderful to hear.  It's an uphill battle, but one we are taking with stride.  There is a lot planned for the micro-rotor.  Thanks for the support!

Great to have the support.  Either way it's fun to see how this little tournament goes and the conversations it strikes up.  Thanks again!

Fair play guys! Respect! 😊👍

Poll closed for the tournament. Congratulations Brew!

Thank you for such a thoughtful response to my unmediated frustration! I‘ve only made myself aware of the k1 recently and it’s very heartening to see contributions to the field such as a movement. I think that’s what I was getting at. Keep up the good work. 

Thanks for the kind note back. We are still relatively new on most peoples radar, but hope that will change in future times. Thanks again.