Chanel is a French luxury fashion house founded in 1910 that focuses on fashion, fragrances, and to a lesser extent accessories such as watches.

They’re the second-largest luxury brand in the world currently, based on topline revenue, according to Statista. While Chanel is known for the J12 ceramic wristwatches, they’re not considered to be a serious watchmaker.

The J12 is all about materials and is essentially an expensive fashion watch. A watch that made ceramic popular for use in watches.

Clearly, Chanel wants to change the perception and accordingly has made investments in high-end Swiss watchmaker Romain Gauthier and movement maker Kennessi. With these investments, they’ve been able to acquire a portion of these companys’ manufacturing base and know-how, to create a high-end timepiece — the Monsieur Edition watch — featuring a jumping hour display coupled with retrograde minutes and small seconds.

Even with all the watchmaking investments — which amount to very small expenses within the much larger fashion and fragrance business — at the end of the day, Chanel is asking just shy of $40K for a watch that really was not made by them, even if they say it was. And it’s still a Chanel, not a Patek or a Vacheron or something that truly justifies the price tag.

 

Photo by Chanel.