A story we hate to share but it is the truth
Starting a microbrand is not easy. There are many odds against you and then there are the cheaters that are after your money only.
We started our journey with the Pearl Diver last year and after some unfortunate delays, we finally delivered all pre orders this summer and we are currently selling stocks we have left..
We entrusted a supplier in Grenchen, Switzerland to assemble our watches and they were willing to help us with the many different combos that we offered to our backers, it is a nightmare to organize Back in January I finally received the watches and I was so excited to ship them out. I started QC and notice almost on each watch a flaw, be it glue on the bezels (we supplied the 3M tape, they used glue and too much), scratches on the hands and so on.. I was down on the ground and needed some time to find myself..
How could this happend in Switzerland, that's what I was thinking.. the watchmaker that assembled them was probably super drunk or something... However when we confronted them with the defects, they just play cold and said the watches are fine and QC checked from 25 cm distance, most problems could be seen from that distance... they started to blame me, that we supplied the parts in wrong packaging, we are amateur bla bla etc. which is impossible, the new watchmaker had no issue and could fix all of the problem watches.. It was obivous that they are just not able to do the job right. This story left me with damaged parts worth few thousand $, paid bills of a lousy assemble job of a couple thousands $... not counting the bills of the new watchmaker to fix the watches and re ordering the parts..
