Concord Watches Ride The Hype Machine

Something positive first. I give credit to Concord, or whoever Concord is hiring for being creative. Though I question the effectiveness of it all. I have to first pull myself aside and consider my own position in the watch world. Someone in the know, someone who sees most of what comes out. So consider this a biased opinion by someone who might know what they are talking about. A bit of history - Concord is owned by the Movado group, and couple of years ago it was likely decided that because the brand was not pulling its weight, they would attempt to revitalize the brand into a different kind of manly high end watch. For this they repositioned the brand as a niche product maker and hired a new president in 2006, Vincent Perriard. Since then Concord has released one watch, the C1 - In a bunch of different flavors. I've never been quiet about the fact that I don't like the design of the Concord C1. I've also been pretty straight forward on how I feel about their new QuantumGravity watch with its BNB Concepts based movement. Now, as for the design, if you are taken by it, then please enjoy it in good health, it is not my thing at all. The whole thing with Concord however is a lot of hype. The issue of hype is interesting. I call it that, Concord probably calls it "marketing dollars well spent." Never have I seen so much effort in trying to justify a design direction. I will tell you what I mean. Lets start with the new website dedicated to BNB Concepts' design of the QuantumGravity movement and watch seen here. A bunch of guys sitting around drawing a watch with wax models, and some computer rendering images is not exactly the stuff of legend. Concord wants you to think that they are working on the greatest time telling device ever. It really isn't, basically we are getting highly cosmetically enhanced watches that we have seen before. BNB Concepts is a popular high end watch movement maker that basically does all the work. It looks OK, but come on... stop telling me to look at a cottage and telling me it is a mansion.