[orbifold]

If you buy such a watch, you also buy a story. A single person producing a decently complicated watch from scratch is a pretty good story to tell. I image there are enough people in the world with the kind of disposable income required to buy such a watch, so he will have a pretty good business regardless of Chinese copycats.

[Antonio123123]

Well I am not sure. It's a good story to tell if the person is someone important in the community that has for example written important books or invented something that is useful.

If it's just worker-bee man-hours I guess it would be better value-for-money to buy a seiko and tell the story of the factory and how it's made using such complicated processes and optimizations (not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right).

[dagw]

not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right

Depends on the Seiko. Seiko makes and has made a large number of complicated and historically interesting watches and movements with a story, but your average Seiko won't have that.

If you want a cheap mechanical watch that's a historical 'first' and has an interesting watchmaking story to tell in terms of processes and optimization, get a Swatch Sistem51. It's the first automatic movement that is simple enough and has few enough parts to be mass produced entirely by robot. Of course if that's a 'good' story to tell or not is very much up for debate.