It’s a fair question, and it gets asked more often than you’d think — usually not out loud, but somewhere between adding a watch to a cart and closing the tab.
You can buy a mechanical watch for $200. You can buy one for $20,000. Both tell the time. So what separates them, and where does a $1,325 watch sit on that line?
We’d rather answer that honestly than let the question go unanswered. Here’s where the money actually goes.
The movement — and the work that happens after it arrives
This is the part everyone asks about first, and it’s the easiest number to look up, so let’s start there.
The Gin Clear 3 runs a Sellita SW200-1, a Swiss automatic. It isn’t exotic. It’s a workhorse — accurate, proven over decades, and serviceable by any competent watchmaker anywhere in the world. That last point matters far more than prestige if you intend to own the watch for twenty years.
You can find out roughly what a movement like this costs. Plenty of people do, then work backwards from the retail price and conclude the difference is margin. It’s worth explaining why that arithmetic doesn’t hold.
The supplier’s invoice is where a movement’s cost begins, not where it ends. A movement arrives running to factory tolerance — accurate enough to pass, inconsistent enough to irritate you inside a week. Left alone, that’s the watch you’d wear.
So we don’t leave it alone. Every Gin Clear movement is regulated by hand before it goes into a case: adjusted, measured in four positions, adjusted again, and measured until it holds. It’s slow work, it can’t be rushed, and at our scale it can’t be automated. One person, one movement, for as long as that particular movement takes to settle.
Regulation isn’t the only work a movement goes through before it’s cased. Every one of them also has its date wheel removed and replaced with ours.
A movement arrives with a standard date disc — generic printing, in a typeface and colour that were never chosen with our dial in mind. Most brands leave it exactly as it comes, which is why so many otherwise well-made watches have a date window that looks borrowed from a different watch entirely.
Swapping it is not a quick job. It means opening a brand-new movement, lifting the date disc clear without disturbing the calendar mechanism sitting underneath it, fitting the custom wheel, and reassembling. The parts are small and the tolerances unforgiving — a slip doesn’t produce a slightly imperfect result, it produces a damaged movement. It’s done by hand, one at a time, with no way to speed it up.
Two brands can buy the identical SW200-1 and arrive at very different prices. What separates them is everything built around the movement — and everything done to it after it arrives.
The case
A watch case looks like a simple object. It is machined from solid 316L stainless steel through a sequence of operations, and every one of those operations costs time on a machine.
Then it’s finished by hand. Brushed surfaces and polished surfaces meeting at a clean, sharp line is not something that happens automatically — it’s skilled, slow work. The crispness of that transition is one of the clearest tells between a cheap case and a considered one, and it’s almost entirely a labour cost.
Some of the most important work in a case is work you’ll never see. Inside every one sits the movement holder, the part that secures the movement within the watch and keeps it from shifting under knocks and vibration. Ours is machined from steel. Many brands, from mass-produced labels to microbrands and even some at luxury prices, use a moulded plastic holder instead, because it’s far cheaper to make and nobody looks inside. We’d rather the part holding the most important component in the watch be built to the same standard as everything around it.
But 316L has a weakness that finishing can’t fix. It’s soft. Desk edges, door frames, the clasp of a bag — everyday life leaves its mark, and it does so regardless of what the watch cost. Very few brands, luxury houses included, do anything about it. Which means most watches, at any price, won’t look as clean and fresh after two years of even light wear as they did coming out of the box.
That’s why we surface harden our cases and bracelets, taking the steel to 1200 Vickers. We started with our first-generation Mandala in 2020, and we didn’t get it right straight away. It took some hard lessons, and a change of supplier, to be confident we were using only the best methods to get the result we wanted. What we see now, on watches like the Gin Clear 3, is a watch that doesn’t just look good on day one — it stays that way.
It isn’t cheap to do. Hardening is an additional process on parts that are already finished, and parts that don’t come out right can’t be reworked, only replaced. On the case, that’s costly. On the bracelet, as you’ll see below, it’s far more so. Honestly, it costs us a lot more than we care to admit. But it’s what our customers want, so it’s staying.
The dial
The dial is the part of a watch you’ll look at more than any other, thousands of times a year. It’s also where we’ve chosen to put a level of detail, precision and component quality that most watches at this price simply don’t attempt.
Detail is expensive in two ways. The first is obvious: fine printing, layered elements and precise applied parts take more steps and more skill to produce. The second is less obvious, and it’s the bigger cost. The more detail a dial carries, the more places there are for something to be slightly wrong — a fractionally misaligned index, a soft edge on a printed line, a speck under the surface, a variation in colour or texture from one dial to the next.
We reject dials for all of those things. Not dials that are broken or unusable — dials that most people would never notice anything wrong with, until it was on their wrist and catching the light every day. That standard means a high proportion of dials never make it into a watch. To end up with 100 perfect dials, we need to produce 20 to 30 percent more, to allow for the high scrap rate that comes from our obsessive quality control process. Every rejected dial is a cost that has to be carried by the ones that pass.
A simpler dial would be cheaper to make and would fail inspection far less often. We’d rather pay for the rejects.
The bracelet
The most underestimated cost in any watch, and the one that most often gives a watch away.
A bracelet is dozens of individually machined links, each with pins and tolerances that determine whether it articulates smoothly or rattles. Loose tolerances are cheap. Tight ones are not. The difference is felt within about ten seconds of putting the watch on, which is why reviewers consistently single this out — and why we won’t cut cost here.
Every link is milled and machined individually from solid steel. Then each one is finished by hand, the same way the case is. Brushed and polished surfaces have to meet cleanly on every link, and they have to match from one link to the next across the whole bracelet, or the eye picks it up straight away.
Our polished links go a step further. They’re polished on every external surface, including the underside that sits against your wrist. Most brands brush the entire link set on the underside, because nobody sees it in a product photo and it saves a lot of hand work across dozens of links. We think a watch should look as finished when you take it off and turn it over as it does on your wrist. It’s one of the easiest ways to tell how much care went into a bracelet, and one of the first things to go when a brand is cutting cost.
The clasp is its own small piece of engineering: the milling, the stamping, the hand brushing and hand polishing, and the mechanism that has to open and close thousands of times without loosening.
Every link is also surface hardened, and this is where that process becomes genuinely expensive.
A bracelet can’t be hardened once it’s assembled. The hardening has to reach every surface evenly, and on a finished bracelet the joins, pin holes and inner faces of each link are hidden from the process. So every link is individually surface hardened, in its deconstructed state, before the bracelet is put together.
That means dozens of small, intricately shaped parts per bracelet, each with its own chance of coming out wrong. Any link with an uneven finish is scrapped, and because it has already been machined and hand finished, all of that work goes with it. The scrap rate is very high. On its own, it adds around 30% to the cost of producing the bracelet. We could skip the hardening, brush everything, and assemble the bracelet straight from the machine. It would be cheaper, and in a product photo it would look much the same. Two years into ownership, it wouldn’t.
Hardening creates one more problem, and solving it is some of the most time-consuming work in the whole watch. Our bracelets use screw pins, and any excess hardening material that finds its way into a screw hole can cause the screw to jam permanently the first time the bracelet is sized. So every screw pin hole is individually resurfaced after hardening. A locking gel is then applied inside each one, which holds the screw firmly in place while you wear the watch, but still lets it be removed when it needs to be, without seizing and stripping the screw head.
It’s slow, fiddly work, repeated on every hole of every bracelet. If we told you how much time it takes across a single production run, you probably wouldn’t believe us. But a bracelet you can’t resize without damaging it isn’t a finished bracelet.
The parts you’ll never think about
These rarely make it into a spec list, but they’re where a real portion of the budget goes.
The crystal. Crystal quality is critical. Sapphire is extremely hard, but it’s also brittle, and lower-grade sapphire with internal flaws is far more prone to cracking and chipping. We select hand-finished sapphire of outstanding clarity and purity, then give it an anti-reflective treatment. The treatment is a coating process, not a material, and it’s what stops the dial disappearing behind a mirror in daylight.
Bezel action. A unidirectional bezel has to click positively, land exactly on the marker, and have no back-play. Ours is ball-bearing actuated, which adds parts and complexity beneath the bezel, and demands a level of machining precision normally reserved for more expensive watches. You’ll never see those parts, but you’ll feel them every time you turn it, and they cost real money to get right.
Lume. Swiss Super-LumiNova, applied by hand, in a thickness that determines how long it actually glows. Applying it thickly and evenly takes longer and costs more.
Water resistance. 300 metres is not a marketing figure. It’s gaskets, case-back engineering, a screw-down crown, and pressure testing of every completed watch.
Assembly, and checking it more than once
Putting a watch together is where every component above either comes good or doesn’t. A dial fitted fractionally off-centre, a hand that isn’t perfectly parallel, a speck of dust trapped under the crystal — any one of them undoes all the care that went into the parts.
So a Second Hour watch isn’t checked once. It goes through multiple rounds of quality control at different stages. Parts and assemblies are inspected in the QC room. Work is checked again in the assembly room as the watch comes together. And when the finished watches arrive at Second Hour headquarters in Melbourne, we check every one of them again ourselves before it’s boxed and sent to you.
Each of those rounds takes time, and each one catches things the others didn’t. A watch that fails at any stage goes back, which costs time and money that a single end-of-line check would save. We think that’s the wrong place to save.
Some of what we check is work most brands skip entirely. Take the moment the date changes. When the hands are fitted, they have to be set so the date clicks over precisely as the hour hand reaches 12. Plenty of brands don’t bother, and it’s common to see the date switch anywhere within a 30-minute window around midnight. Would most people notice? Probably not. But we’re making a precision timepiece built to challenge the luxury brands, and every aspect of the assembly has to align, including the ones you’d have to stay up until midnight to check.
Why regulation is worth paying for
Every Gin Clear movement is regulated in four positions. That means the watch keeps time in the orientations your wrist actually puts it through during a day — on its side overnight, dial up at a desk, crown down while you’re driving — rather than only lying flat on a bench.
None of this appears on a spec sheet. You experience it only as a watch that keeps good time — which is exactly why it’s the clearest example of something you’re paying for and can’t see.
The cost of building in small numbers
This is the part that genuinely separates a small brand’s pricing from a large one’s, and it’s rarely explained.
Manufacturing cost per unit falls sharply with volume. A brand ordering 50,000 cases pays dramatically less per case than a brand ordering a few hundred. Tooling is the same: the cost of preparing to make a component is largely fixed, so it’s spread across however many units you make.
When we produce a run of 50 pieces, that fixed cost divides by 50.
So a limited run isn’t a marketing device that lets us charge more. It’s a genuinely more expensive way to make a watch. What you get in exchange is a watch that a few hundred people own rather than a few hundred thousand — and the ability to design something specific rather than something safe enough to sell at volume.
What you’re not paying for
We design in Melbourne and sell directly to you, alongside a small number of retail partners.
We do spend on things — photography, advertising, the packaging the watch arrives in. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What isn’t in the price is the layered distribution structure of a large brand: regional distributors, boutique networks, and the ambassador contracts that get built into the retail price of watches at every tier above this one.
The honest version
At $1,325, you are buying a Swiss automatic movement that has been regulated by hand in four positions and fitted with its own date wheel. A steel case and bracelet that are machined, hand finished, polished where it counts even on the surfaces you’ll rarely see, and surface hardened throughout, case included, right down to every individual bracelet link. A detailed dial held to a standard that rejects more than most brands would ever notice. And a watch that has been checked at every stage of assembly, pressure tested, and checked once more by us before it was boxed.
You are not buying an in-house movement, a hand-finished bridge, or a name that will hold value at auction. Those things exist, and they cost several times this.
What we’ve aimed for is a watch where every dollar went into something you can see, feel, or rely on — and none of it went into something you can’t.
