Interesting read, thanks prof!
That author clearly has more regard for MT than the folks on r/watch where the Mathey-Tissot descriptions range from "Est 1886 but fell to the quartz crisis in the 70s, brand purchased by Chinese investors and now they do mostly entry level homages" and "The history they market today is someone else’s history" to more, ahem, blunt descriptions like "******* brand", and "should be given a very wide berth; avoid".
After Blue Magic and Dormeo I learned my lesson. if something is sold on IW with too many oohs and aahs it's more likely to be iffy than not
I know what you mean, but in fairness there are lots of brands who went under in the quartz crisis and have been resurrected since.
Matthey -Tissot are a tiny, resurrected, brand for sure, and I would expect that in part they are relying on brand confusion to boost sales, but in their automatic watches, they use stock Selitta SW200-1 mechanisms, in the main, so they can be repaired, and serviced, just like most Oris, or Raymond Weil, or CW etc…
Some watch forums are a bit extreme - I think people sometimes post on them to vent, when they’ve bought a Friday-afternoon watch, or they just had wrong expectations of what they would get. A good example, and very similar in many respects, would be Dreyfuss & Co. Now they are part of Rotary who were bought out by the Chinese a few years back. I think now that they own Eterna as well, Dreyfuss is taking a back seat. Anyway, they used ETA 2824-2 calibres in the main, often with Dubois-Dupraz 2021
modules attached to provide Chrono, or other add-on complications (probably not the best practice, really - I’d expect an ETA 2892A2 if a module were being added- it’s just a stronger base calibre, but it’s far from terrible). When ETA stopped providing to independents, they started to use Selitta SW200-1 just like Christopher Ward, or Oris, or Raymond Weil, etc…
But Dreyfuss - like Matthey Tissot - get really bad reviews, and I never understood why. I can repair them easily, and cheaply, and the cases are well made, the crystals sapphire etc.
So I guess what I’m saying is that they aren’t Tissot, and some of their designs are, well, to me an acquired taste (the tiger watch, in particular, I find really ugly) but I don’t see them as quite so bad as the usual IW watches.
And if there’s a Matthey-Tissot automatic that you liked, and it was say £300-£500, I’d see it as a reasonable purchase.
But I’d rather have a Tissot Visodate - especially with the blue dial! I think Hammy also has a Visodate?
. And making disturbing noises...
