In the watch industry, repression of anything but 100% positive communication is ingrained in the culture.

Watch companies will do anything to prevent known product issues from being disseminated to the public. It’s practically brainwashed into those of us who write about watches, and likely a condition of employment for those who sell the watches.

Unlike with car companies (who issue official product recalls), with watch companies, even when product defects arise, brands rarely admit anything is wrong, and many will make fixes without any acknowledgement.

Case in point, Professional Watches reviewed Oris’ in-house movement, the caliber 400, and the highly respected master watchmaker, Jordan Ficklin, who we contracted to do the review, determined that the watch had obvious issues (a jumping minute hand and potentially faulty rotor design), which he discussed in-depth.

The thing is, Oris would never acknowledge any problems and continued selling watches with the faulty movement, without a second thought. However, in the background, they were likely already working on version 2 of caliber 400.

Meanwhile, instead of working with us professionally (and being upfront), they cut off communication, in what was surely a reprisal for what our watchmaker found wrong with their movement.

I can understand the marketing motive; however, we’re an editorial publication, not a marketing division of Oris, and not a retailer, so our duty is to the end consumers.

Oris has never worked with us again after that incident. Nevertheless, we still stand behind our initial reporting and have yet to receive any notice of a version 2 (Oris caliber 400.2) update from Oris to this day. Oris did eventually make the update, but never communicated it publicly; instead, we had to read about it on Reddit. Imagine that! At least they finally fixed the jumping minute hand issue, as well as a quality control issue with the automatic rotor — but how many version 1 movements are out there with defects?