Why do some watches cost lakhs?
Everyone quotes the price. Almost nobody explains it. So we took the question apart — component by component — until there was nothing left to hide behind.
There is a moment every watch buyer in India has had. You're looking at two watches. They are the same size, the same colour, roughly the same shape. One costs eight thousand rupees. One costs eight lakh. And nobody — not the shop, not the ad, not the influencer — can tell you what the other seven lakh ninety-two thousand actually bought.
We build watches for a living. So we can tell you. Not in marketing language, but in the language of a costing sheet.
Some of what follows will make you respect expensive watches more. Some of it will make you trust them less. Both reactions are correct.
By the end of this, you will be able to look at any watch — ours included — and know roughly where its money went. And whether it went there at all.
Where the money actually goes
In most watches at most price points, the physical object is not where the cost sits. This is the industry's least-discussed open secret. Here is roughly how the rupee splits on a typical mass-market "fashion" watch versus a genuinely specification-led one.
Illustrative proportions, not audited figures — they vary by brand, channel and volume. The point is the shape, and the shape is real: two watches can carry the same price for entirely different reasons.
So when you ask "why does this cost lakhs," there are two possible answers. Sometimes it's the watch. Sometimes it's the poster. Learning to tell which is the whole skill — and it starts with knowing what the expensive parts actually are.
Seven places money hides
We'll go from the outside in — the order your eye travels when you first pick up a watch.
The crystal
The part you look through, and never look at.
Three materials cover watch dials, and the gap between them is enormous.
Plastic. Warm, domed, charming on a genuine vintage piece. Scratches from a shirt cuff. Costs almost nothing.
Hardened glass. The great middle of the market. Resists scratches — until the day it doesn't, and then it chips rather than scuffs.
Grown in a furnace, second only to diamond in hardness. Keys, coins, desk edges — nothing marks it. The most expensive way to cover a dial.
Now the part that matters: a curved sapphire crystal costs several times a flat one. You cannot stamp a dome. It is ground and polished from a thicker block, which means more raw material, more machine hours, and a far higher rejection rate — every flaw is magnified by the curve itself.
This is precisely why the domed crystal quietly disappeared from affordable watches in the mid-1970s. It didn't go out of fashion. It went out of budget. Flat glass was cheaper to cut, so flat glass won, and an entire generation grew up never touching the shape that made watches feel alive on the wrist.
The dial
Where the largest price gaps in all of watchmaking live.
A dial can be a printed disc that costs less than a cup of chai. Or it can be a finished metal surface that costs more than a motorcycle. Same diameter. Same job. Different universe.
The expensive ones are finished rather than printed. The vocabulary is French and worth knowing, because these three words are the difference between a watch that photographs well and one that survives being looked at closely:
Why does finishing cost so much? Three reasons, and only the first is obvious.
- Time. A finished dial is worked, not stamped. Machine hours are hours.
- Skill. Setting up the cut is judgement, not a button.
- Rejection. This is the one nobody mentions. A single mis-cut and the dial is scrapped. You are not paying for the dial you received. You are paying for the ones that didn't make it.
Then there are the markers. Printed indices are ink on a surface. Applied indices are separate pieces of metal, individually faceted and pinned into the dial by hand. Under a domed crystal they throw real shadows. That is a cost decision you can see from a metre away, once you know to look.
The case, and the lie of "stainless steel"
Two words that cover a multitude of sins.
"Stainless steel" on a spec sheet tells you almost nothing. There are grades, and they behave differently against Indian humidity and Indian skin. 316L — sometimes called surgical grade — resists corrosion and reacts far less with skin than the cheaper 201 and 304 alloys common further down the market. It costs more and machines slower. Brands that use it tend to say so. Brands that don't, don't.
Then there's finishing, which is where quiet money goes. A case that is entirely polished is cheap to produce — one operation, one machine. A case with alternating finishes — mirror-polished bezel, vertically brushed flanks, a crisp polished bevel running along the lug edge — requires masking, multiple passes, and a human being who cares where one finish stops and the next begins.
That crisp line between brushed and polished is one of the most reliable tells in watchmaking. It cannot be faked, it cannot be printed, and it is the first thing a cost-cutter deletes.
The movement — and the most expensive myth in watches
Read this part twice.
The engine is the piece everyone argues about, and the piece most people misunderstand. So let's be precise.
A mechanical (automatic) movement is a genuine marvel: a hundred-plus parts, a spring, a balance wheel swinging several times a second, no battery, no electronics. It is a small mechanical miracle and it deserves its romance. It is also expensive to make, expensive to regulate, and expensive to service every few years for the rest of its life.
A quartz movement uses a tiny crystal vibrating 32,768 times per second. Fewer moving parts. Almost nothing to wear out.
Here is the part the industry would rather you glossed over. A well-regulated luxury automatic is celebrated when it holds accuracy to within around twenty seconds a day. A good quartz movement holds around twenty seconds a month.
Same figure. One is measured by the day, the other by the month. Even a certified chronometer — held to a handful of seconds daily — is still measured in days.
We love mechanical watches. We own them. But we refuse to pretend that paying more always means keeping better time. Sometimes it means paying for the miracle. Which is a perfectly good reason — as long as you know that's what you're buying, and nobody sold it to you as accuracy.
The hands
Two grams of metal that make or break the whole face.
Hands are the cheapest part to cheapen and the most visible place it shows. A flat stamped hand is a piece of painted tin — it reads as a dark line and dies in low light.
A faceted hand — a dauphine, say — is folded to a ridge down its spine, then diamond-cut and polished along that ridge. As your wrist moves, a line of light runs the length of it and then vanishes. That flash costs money: more operations, more polishing, more rejects, and hands are small enough that a flawed polish is obvious.
Same with lume. Painted-on luminous material sits on top of a hand as a lumpy stripe. Properly recessed lume sits inside a channel machined for it, flush and even. One is a coat of paint. The other is a design decision made before the tooling was cut.
The caseback — the honesty test
Nobody sees it. Which is exactly the point.
The back of a watch is the purest test of a brand's character, because it is the one surface the customer looks at once and the world never sees at all. It is therefore the first place a company cuts, and the last place a company that means it will.
A pressed-on back with a laser-etched logo costs very little. A screw-down back needs threads cut into both the case and the back, plus a gasket seat, plus torque control at assembly. Deep-relief engraving — where the design stands proud of a textured ground, rather than being scratched into a flat disc — is another tooling cost entirely.
None of it improves timekeeping. All of it tells you what the brand does when it thinks you aren't watching.
The strap and the clasp
The half of the watch that touches you all day.
Straps are where a good watch is most often let down, because a strap is the cheapest thing to swap and brands assume you will. Two details separate a considered strap from a filler one.
Curved, fitted ends. A straight-cut strap leaves a gap where it meets a round case, and once you've seen that gap you cannot unsee it. A strap cut to hug the case costs more to pattern and more to stitch.
The clasp. A pin buckle is a bent strip of steel and a tongue. A folding deployant clasp is a small machined mechanism with pivots, springs and tolerances — several times the cost, and the reason the strap stops taking a crease at the same fold every day.
The costs you cannot photograph
Everything above is a component. But a large share of what separates a good watch from a cheap one never appears on a spec sheet at all.
Applied markers pinned by hand. Hands pressed to within a fraction of a millimetre. Gaskets seated and torqued. Slow, careful, human hours.
The single most underestimated cost in watchmaking. A brand with real standards throws away work. You pay for the pieces that passed.
Bespoke case dies, dial stamps, engraving masters. Enormous up front, then divided across however few pieces you dared to make.
This last one explains the pricing of small brands better than anything else. Tooling for a unique case costs the same whether you make five hundred watches or fifty thousand. Divide it by five hundred and the arithmetic is brutal. Which is precisely why most brands don't bother — they buy a generic case, print a dial, and put the difference into advertising.
Nine questions that price any watch honestly
You don't need a loupe or a vocabulary. You need nine questions. Ask them of any watch — at any price, from any brand, including ours — and the answer will tell you where the money went.
A watch should be able to explain itself.
We could have kept all of this quiet. It is easier to sell a watch to someone who cannot tell what they're looking at — that is, more or less, the business model of an entire industry.
But we'd rather teach you what to look for than hope you don't. Because the moment you can read a watch honestly, two things happen. You stop overpaying for posters. And you start recognising the brands that put the money into the object.
Take these nine questions to any watch you're considering. Then bring them to ours. That's the whole invitation.