For me, they are all over the place on watches. Numerous lower end of the market brands in general, with most watches priced around the £200 to £300 mark averaged out, I would guess. Rarely, if ever, do you see what I (and I’m no watch expert) as a punter would regard as a quality make. Because my late father’s Breitling Top Time got damaged beyond economical repair recently, I got a payout in the form of a voucher to spend in a jewellers. So I have been looking at lots of brands - mid and higher end in reputation. I certainly didn’t see any of IW’s so called high-end watch makes in the shops I looked in. Essentially, it’s mail order type brands you would have seen in catalogues or the back pages of weekend T.A. Bloids in years gone by.
Why so many brands? I just don’t get it. Why don’t they just focus on say, four or five regulars, rather than 30 plus? Also, their ‘experts’ in general are lacking in any in depth knowledge, and often seem happy to go along with a misleading atmosphere in terms of consistently over exaggerating the quality and so called RRPs of the watches shown.
Pro rata, the levels of watch shows in comparison to other products are massively unbalanced. This suggests to me, they struggle to fill all their viewing hours with a distinct range of different products (virtually no Tech at all now, for example), and constantly fall back on watches as an easy fill in.
In my case, I settled on a Tudor watch, a Rado one and a Citizen Eco-Drive watch to purchase with the voucher. I doubt I will see any of those brands on IW any time soon.