When Heavy Watches Stopped Meaning Expensive Watches

It's human intuition that weight is associated with quality. And, historically, that's certainly been the case with watches. But now a new generation is challenging this assumption.

When the Californian company Barrelhand launched its Monolith watch last month, there was much that was technically new about a watch engineered from the ground up to be worn in space, not least its weight. With it costing around US$20,000 to send 1kg to the ISS, every gram counts, and the Monolith weighs in at just 31 grams.

It's an exemplar of how the watch market is changing, reckoned Karel Bachand, Barrelhand's founder. "Instead of gold cases and guilloche dials, we're seeing a new focus on high performance alloys and shock absorption systems," he said. "A full metal watch with a thick sapphire crystal at this weight starts to break conventions of what someone expects when they handle it." Certainly we're a long way from, say, Audemars Piguet's Royal Oak Offshore in platinum, at a bicep-building 430g, or Rolex's yellow gold Deepsea, at 322g, a diving weight in its own right.

Indeed, for some the Monolith might feel too light. After all, a seminal study in 2007 and 2013 by the University of Bangor, UK, showed that in many categories of purchase, weight has a small but statistically significant influence on consumer estimations of value and quality. It found that the assessment was largely subliminal and subtle but no less real: reduce the weight of an empty container by 15% and consumers typically valued its contents at the same as at the original weight; reduce it by 30% however, and suddenly those consumers wanted to pay less for it.

As Jean-Paul Suchel, the technical director of Bell & Ross, explained, new materials make it possible to make ever lighter watches - but designers still have to balance this possibility with consumer expectations. He said he often studies how shoppers ponder competing models and finds that many literally weigh up their options - they want to feel a watch's presence in their hand, he said.

"Ultimately this [issue] is almost beyond technology and design. It's a matter for psychologists. The fact is that a watch may be a small piece of material and yet prices are quite high, so people feel if there's no real weight to a watch, there's no value. That's especially since watches are still part of the jewelry world and with jewelry there's a direct correlation between weight and value, because of the historic use of precious metals." It explains, he said, why hefty stainless steel pieces remain so popular, despite their escalating prices.

"Yet the last five years have seen a major change in perceptions about watch weight," argued Bianchet's co-founder Rodolfo Festa Bianchet. The brand recently launched its UltraFino in gold, at around 190g, according to Festa Bianchet, but the same model also in carbon, with the first fully integrated carbon bracelet, at 62g (just 32g without a strap). Carbon is outselling gold.

"It's the application of materials science technology to watchmaking that is increasingly being perceived as the benchmark of quality, rather than just the use of precious materials," he added.

"Through exposure to the automotive world and F1 [as well as the likes of advanced bicycles, sports equipment, even furniture and clothing] consumers are coming to understand that lightweight doesn't mean fragile, that new materials can, in fact, be much stronger than traditional metals." A lighter watch is also more shock resistant, carrying less inertia during an impact.

This then is perhaps about retraining the power of expectations. Further studies have shown how consumers' notion of the perceived value of an object is shaped by how much the product matches their expectations of what it should weigh: we expect the expensive object to weigh more. The more those expectations are disrupted, the more our value judgment is affected. In theory, greater exposure to lightweight watches, more disruption, will, over time, break the connection between weight and value.

And certainly there's more chance of that exposure. Behrens, Richard Mille and Hublot, as well as more historic names Zenith and Omega - the latter using gamma titanium, an alloy of titanium and aluminum - have all launched watches around the 50g mark or under. IWC and Panerai have proprietary lightweight materials, the likes of Ceratanium and Carbotech, making use of the relative lack of weight in ceramic and carbon. Silicon nitride - a high-tech ceramic which is half the weight of more standard ceramic, and which is more typically found in aircraft engines, is now being used to make cases in watches from Richard Mille and Rado, among other makers. The trends for smaller and thinner watches have also seeded the idea that heft isn't everything.

Meanwhile, Ming's LW.01 Manual, launched in 2023, is, by the brand's own billing, probably the world's lightest, at just 8.8g, though that is surely pushing at the limits of what is feasible "until some anti-matter material is developed," laughed Festa Bianchet.

The more consumers understand about watchmaking, the more that goes into making a watch lighter is also appreciated, said Guillaume Laidet, CEO of Nivada Grenchen, whose F77 Titanium, at 86g, is a best-seller for the brand. With sustainability in mind, lightness in many things is increasingly seen as a yardstick of their efficiency, performance and contemporaneity, he suggested.

Yet this isn't to say that designing lightweight is easy, the rotor in an automatic movement, for instance, has to have a certain weight to function, or that converting more mainstream consumers from the heavyweight division to the more flyweight won't prove challenging. For all that there may be a complete about turn, the lighter the watch, the more valuable it may come to be seen, changes in weight perception will take time.

"After all, weight has been associated with quality for decades. [To many people] heavy still feels more substantial and so valuable," noted Matteo Mercan, product manager for Norqain, which recently released its 45g Wild One Skeleton X-Lite.

"But the most convincing argument is what happens on the wrist," he added. "A lightweight watch can feel surprising when first picked up, but after a full day of wear the benefits become immediately apparent: comfort, freedom of movement, wearability, especially given our increasingly active lives."