When one of your non-watch friends asks how much your watch cost, they’ll probably be shocked or straight up appalled that anyone could spend thousands, never mind tens of thousands of dollars on something that tells the time “just like your phone”. So how do you explain the reason why best quality fake watches are so horribly expensive?

More to the point, how do you justify a hobby that has the potential to be ruinously expensive? The team over at the Wall Street Journal just took a look at three big reasons why watches are so costly and the first two might be a little more comfortable to explain than the third.

The materials used in watchmaking are expensive
It’s true, for a very long time Swiss movement Rolex fake watches and even pocket watches have been produced using precious metals. The use of precious materials definitely isn’t restricted to the cases of watches with gem-setting on cases and dials, as well as a select group of watchmakers such as Journe even making movements out of gold.

Watchmakers are very highly trained, which makes the craftsmanship expensive
I remember speaking with Stephen Forsey about why his Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1 had such a price tag of around $1,000,000 AUD. He explained, “Swiss labour laws mean that most watchmakers gets paid around CHF100 per hour. The Hand Made 1 took more than six thousand hours to make, so it isn’t expensive, but it costs a lot.”

This was backed up by the WSJ in an interview they did with Karine Szegedi, a Managing Partner at Deloitte Switzerland, who said: “Swiss labour is the most expensive in the world, and the more time they spend on the luxury copy Rolex watch, the more cost that goes into it.”