Quote:
Originally Posted by Z K
$50 for a good quality movement maybe but not a high end fake whole watch. The high end fake watches are anywhere from $500-1000+. ....
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If you say so, sure. The fakes I see in Luohu Commercial City don't cost anything like that and my whole team of expats has scores of them. Nobody's complained about any of the. That makes them high quality enough.
Here are a couple of pages from the "menu books" the watch sellers in those little stalls will show you. There are multiple makers of the same style.
Might some of them have ETA-clone movements? Some might. I don't go that much into detail about fake watches. If it's inexpensive, doesn't fall apart, keeps time as well as a standard grade ETA or Miyota, that's going pass muster with me as "high quality" for a fake watch.
One thing I think is that it's just nuts to buy a fake, complicated watch. As soon as one gets into chronographs, let alone a more advanced complication, the differences become plainly obvious. In contrast, a simple watch like most Rolexes are easy to copy and the copies aren't hard to make be decent. The reason is that a good uncomplicated watch movement just isn't that hard to produce in 21st century.
Also, buying a copy of a watch that has elaborate aesthetics is also going to result in one getting a poorly executed piece, but that won't matter if one is happy with the look of the fake, as opposed to wanting it to resemble as closely as possibly the watch it copies. This, for example, will look nowhere near as nice in a fake.
On a fake, the imagery itself will be oddly proportioned. The color depth won't be close, and the textures will reflect light poorly. That said, if one likes whatever it might look like as a fake, so be it. Buy it.
This on the other hand is very easily reproduced as a fake. Buy an authentic gator strap for it and it'll look every bit as nice as the real thing.
I can't say what folks like and don't like. I can say that if a person likes the look of the watch above and is unwilling to spend thousands of dollars to get it, their alternatives are something similar like the ones below or a copy. Whether a similar watch is similar enough for them or not, is not mine to decide.
Back when I got my Cartier Tank, I didn't want to spend what the Louis Cartier version cost, so I bought a
must de Cartier instead. At the time there were street vendors selling copies of the Cartier Tank literally across Connecticut Ave from the Cartier Boutique where I bought my watch. Even so, it was (for the times) an expensive watch and the fakes were far less expensive.
Cartier must de Cartier Tank (vermeil) (ca. 1980s)
Cartier Tank (solid gold)
I can remember back then that folks would always check to see if your Cartier branding was in cursive or print to tell if someone had bought a fake. This despite the fact that the exact same watch from the 1970s had Cartier written in cursive. Of course, "knowing just enough to be an asshole about things" isn't new; snobs today are very much like snobs in the 1980s.
On a slightly different note....Seeing as the vast majority of Chinese have never seen the authentic versions of most watches that might be copied and made available for sale in their city, it really can't matter to them how "faithful" the aesthetic aping is. Outside of the company presidents and their direct reports with whom I deal in managing projects, I would wager that not one other Chinese I've met has any idea that companies like VC, IWC, Breitling, ALS, and many others even exist. I'm sure they can "put two and two together" and realize that since they see, for example, IWC on the dial of a watch in a store that sells nothing but copy watches, they know there is likely a company called IWC making watches. That's probably the beginning and end of what they know about a company in Germany called IWC.
All the best.