Seiko First Diver remake (is it too expensive?)

It’s a nice watch but I think Seiko has gotten caught up in the hype of their own brand. At that price it’s competing with Tudor or pre-owned Omega not to mention a dozen other brands. Love the watch but confused on the price.

It's way too easy to blame Seiko for significant price hikes. It's all across the industry that every watch brand wants its "fair share" of the hype around luxury watches. Everyone is blaming Rolex for not even trying to pretend to serve their customer, but I really don't see any innocent brands in this game. The almost 4k 62MAS being just another example of ridiculous pricing. The IWC Ingenieur, the Speedmaster Professional or the JLC Reverso being just other examples for that trend.

Hot take: I think $4,000 might be too much for any watch.

At a certain point your money stops going towards investing in practical value of a well designed / functional watch and starts being poured into brand cache.

So... is owning a Seiko worth paying that premium? Easily one of my favorite brands, but not for its recognizability as a luxury brand. Quite the opposite. I like Seiko for dependability and design. Spending that much on a Seiko would actually diminish the brand in my eyes.

It's not a 4KUS$, the real price is 2,500US$.

The additional 1,500US$ is the fee levied to erase the ass stupid prostate logo from the dial.

Even $2,500 is high for a Seiko imo.

Whether any mass-produced steel watch is worth $3500 is its own topic, but comparitavely speaking, the Seiko easily the equal of a Tudor BB at the same price .There’s a good Escapement & Watch video up on YouTube right now that reviews them side-by-side and, apart from their straps, the Seiko came out ahead or on par in every other measure.

Overall, though, there seems to be this knee-jerk “who would pay that for a Seiko” response whenever they release something priced on par or—gasp—higher than a comparative model from one of the big Swiss brands. Even Grand Seiko’s recent price increases are being widely criticized for “creeping into Rolex territory” despite GS watches being generally accepted as superior in terms of finishing and movement technology, are more limited in quantity, and involve more hand-work. It’s as if we’ve accepted this idea that Swiss watches should command a price premium merely for being Swiss (though, let’s be honest, “Swiss Made” is a pretty squishy standard that allows the marjority of the work and parts to be sourced far outside Switzerland). I think it’s worth asking ourselves, honestly, what drives the perception that non-Swiss watches (Germany sometimes excepted) should only exist as value-proposition alternatives to be judged by their relative “bang for buck” against the equivalent Swatch-made brand?

It also begs the question on the other side of that coin: Why are we willing to accept, say, an IWC Mark XX priced at $5000 as a “value” with a straight face, even though it’s a simple steel time-and-date watch with an off-the-shelf, glitchy, non-COSC/METAS movement, but challenge Seiko for charging $1500 LESS for a steel time-and-date watch finished to a higher standard (especially the dial), with higher water resistance, and powered by a more accurate and legitimately in-house movement? At a certain point, we have to admit we’ve lost all objectivity and have put way too much faith in the marketing messages these brands are feeding us and, especially, the prices they’ve arbitrarily set for their products (see: Ingeneur).

I think the answer lies in “brand equity”…does “Seiko Prospex” carry sufficient brand equity for that price point? I don’t think so, I have the same opinion for the IWC Ingenieur.

Totally fair, though "brand equity" is really just a measure of marketing efforts made to create a given perception of exclusivity and luxury (i.e. paying David Beckham or Roger Federer millions of dollars annually to wear your watches and appear in your ads, or flying watch "journalists" to your product launch event in Mallorca). If a buyer is judging value/price based primarily on a watch's function as a status symbol then certainly brand equity is the most important factor, and I think we as a community should be transparent about that. "If I'm dropping $3500k on a watch, I want people to know that" is seldom said out loud, but I do believe it underpins a lot of reviews and reactions. It's also totally valid for someone to consider resale value when buying a watch because many of us go in to a new purchase suspecting that we may sell it down the line to fund the next watch we fall for. But certainly on its own merits (including Seiko's untouchable brand history of innovation and disruption), I can't see a reason that 62MAS reissue should sell for a penny less than the watches it's competing with in the market. And, yeah...that Ingenieur is about as cartoonish an example how arbitrary watch prices can get and how cynically a brand can view its own customers...