The Importance of Build Quality

You know that feeling when you pick up a product and are immediately impressed with how it feels in your hand? The weight, the materials, the fit, the finish? Everything is balanced, and you just know it will last a lifetime? What you are feeling is build quality. And to us here at MINUS-8, it is one of the most important considerations when crafting a new watch. Design, features and functionality are absolutely critical, but a timepiece with great build quality helps tie the entire experience together. 

If you read enough of our posts, you have heard me mention build quality multiple times. The reason we bring it up frequently is that it is one of the main reasons we started this company over 10 years ago. We just could not find well-built watches in our price range and everything we did find ended up falling apart. The cheap finishes wore down fast, the flimsy bracelets would break or fall apart and the off-the-shelf crystals scratched too easily. These days you can pick up a watch that claims high-quality for a great price almost anywhere, but when you put the watch on your wrist, you can immediately feel the lack of craftsmanship and know that it’s not going to last. The focus and effort put into the materials, manufacturing and finishing just isn’t there. On the flip side, you recognize a watch with solid build quality the moment you take it out of the box and put it on your wrist.

Throughout our previous careers designing and manufacturing high-end technology products, we learned how to integrate build-quality into the products from day one. It starts with a focus on an optimal, balanced feel on the wrist, followed by developing precision tooling for custom-built components and then manufacturing using only premium materials. When we combine all of this with an unwavering focus on the finishing process, it allows us to deliver timepieces with a fit and feel that is unmatched.

There is a lot of junk out there in the watch world today, because companies are way too focused on time to market and their bottom lines. When these become the priority, the product quality gets sacrificed. Essentially, when brands cut corners to save cost and boost margins, they have to make sacrifices throughout the supply chain and during manufacturing in order to meet the demands of the investors/shareholders. That leads to building with cheaper materials that won’t last as long or aren’t as strong, cutting corners during assembly and/or loosening the quality control process and allowing a higher defect rate. 

We’re a small business and don’t answer to investors or shareholders. We live and die by the quality of our products and the experiences of our customers. This is why it takes us longer to bring new products to market and also why we don’t launch a ton of new watches each year. We like to focus on one new project at a time to ensure that we have the time to make well-informed, tested and validated decisions that are not driven by cost or timing. This approach results in delivering timepieces that we are 100% confident in and that have the build quality our customers expect and deserve. When you pick up a new MINUS-8 Watch, we want you to feel the craftsmanship immediately, out of the box.

I could sit here all day and talk with you about how much I appreciate a product with great build quality and why this element of watchmaking is so important to MINUS-8, so if you’re interested in chatting more, just reach out to care@minus8watch.com and I’m happy to discuss further or answer any questions you might have, anytime. In the meantime, have you seen our latest watch, Diver GMT? If not, be sure to check it out.

As always, thank you for being here and following us on this timekeeping journey.

-Mike