Toledano & Chan: The definitive guide to the brand’s past, present, and future

Andrew McUtchen

Editor’s note: In the video below, we tell the Toledano & Chan story through the three watches they’ve released so far – past, present, and future – in conversation with Toledan & Chan co-founders Phil Toledano and Alfred Chan and Justin Hast who came in and welcomingly crashed the party as well. We can not recommend enough that you sit down, pour your coffee or whiskey, and enjoy this in-depth video interview. But as a secondary option, below the video, you can find an edited and slightly abbreviated transcript of the interview as well.

Andrew McUtchen: The purpose of this video, you know Toledano & Chan, you know what’s going on with this watch. You’ve seen this around Instagram, you’ve seen it on YouTube, and there’s a lot of questions that people have. Every time we post about this brand, we get questions and we’re going to answer as many of them as we can today. And we’re going to tell the story so far, which began a ripe old, how long ago?

Phil Toledano: Last May. We’ve been an established historical brand since May 2024. Sorry, jet lag.

AM: So in internet years, that makes you about 10 years old [laughs]. But look, it is a short story and yet there is quite a lot to tell. We have some watches here and we do have our beloved advisor, consultant, and how shall we say, just lurker, loiterer, interloper with Justin.

Justin Hast: What’s the, what’s that word? Who’s that person that hangs around in bushes outside your house? Peeping Tom?

AM: He will not abide by our restraining orders. He’s here again!

PT: Horological peeping Tom.

AM: No, Justin’s here because honestly, Justin is, I would say, atypical of the sort of your response, your enthusiastic response to this brand is representative of many who are watching. And I just brought you along for the ride. It’s always fun.

JH: Just to be clear, this is the first time I’ve met Phil and Alfred in person. Like many of us out there, we have comms online and we send cheeky pics on a Friday night, but we’ve never met in person. So this is the first damn time we’re meeting. And if anything, maybe I could be that buffer and ask some of the questions that you guys might have about the watches and the people behind them.

AM: Look, the most extraordinary fact about you two is that the first time I met these two gentlemen… Well, this is my number one most extraordinary fact because it is ridiculous, is that when I met you two for the first time, you were meeting each other for the first time in real life.

Alfred Chan: Second time.

JH: Second time you got him, man. It’s like a Tinder date gone wrong.

AM: They’ve had triplets and more on the way. We may or may not get to what’s on the way, but they’ve had triplets. so the first time we met was in Geneva at a panel. Now it’s in London. This is crazy. I am the common denominator in your meeting.

PT: So proud, we’re proud parents. Yeah, we would basically never have met unless you were here. I think that’s the way has to go.

AM: That’s a beautiful thing. This conversation is off to a warm and cosy start, but let’s get serious. This watch, the B/1, is lauded by many as a watch that defined 2024. Justin, am I being too kind?

JH: No, I think that’s spot on. It encapsulated in many ways the shift that went on in the industry last year from a design perspective, predominantly. But no, it was absolutely everywhere. And look, stone dial, asymmetric case, integrated, interesting bracelet, something completely fresh. I think you guys sort of spearheaded a movement of others. I’m thinking of Anoma and Dennison, and they came this year. Just a real shift in approachable, fresh and fast-moving design in the best possible way.

PT: All of which we saw four years ago when Alfred and I started talking.

AM: So, to be legal about this, May was the signing of the papers last year. That was the beginning of the company, but there was a longer story before that. Okay. How long?

PT: Yes. Four years, right?

AC: End of 2020, beginning of 2021.

AM: And this is a point I made on the Geneva Watch Days panel I co-hosted: that it looked opportunistic to appear at the perfect time with this design. And yet, despite coming to market around the same time as Audemars Piguet’s [Re]Master 02, you drew this up many years prior with the hope and expectation that this might somehow hit. That’s an amazing thing, isn’t it?

JH: Who sent the first message? Because you guys did connect online to start with. And what did that message, you still have that message now, what did it say?

AC: We connected over Phil’s Viva Bastardo clothing brand and podcast.

PT: Yeah, that’s right. You emailed me and then somehow we started talking about watches. And then I pounced on you when I realised you were a watch designer.

JH: Just as a question for those who do not know, tell us who you worked for before Alfred.

AC: I worked for Undone of Hong Kong before, and before that Studio Define – a Swiss design studio that primarily does watch design.

JH: How far, how many, how many weeks, months, years into those comms did then you get to the point where like, Hey, maybe we should think about doing something together?

PT: I feel like it was pretty soon because I had already been ruminating. I was deep into ’70s stuff at that point. And I started talking to you about this idea of like…

AM: Both are showing some defensive body language.

AC: Architecture, how that can translate into a watch, not how can a watch be.

PT: We took the next step in our relationship when we moved to WhatsApp, which is a serious commitment [laughs]. It’s official. All of our initial kind of exchanges were brutalist buildings. And look, we did not anticipate that shift, that paradigm shift that happened last year. I mean, it was just we were honestly making something that we just for us that we love, that we thought was interesting and beautiful and different. And there was like a 15% to 23% hope that maybe we’d sell some if we were lucky.

AC: No, if we go back to right to the beginning, I don’t think we were going to make a watch, we weren’t going to sell a watch and we weren’t going to build a brand.

PT: That all came later.

JH: What were the inspirations? Were there models out there?

PT: For sure. All of the Rolex Midas, of course, oddly enough, the Audemars Piguet, the one that inspired the remastered thing. Sadly, I had been obsessed with that watch for years. I had been looking for it for years. I didn’t realize they only made six. So I felt like a buffoon. But, the idea that really grabbed us right away was the general concept of an integrated bracelet watch that was a continuous concept, because we felt like that was a design language that had been kind of abandoned.

AM: We have 130 people coming into the studio tomorrow night. And that is because somehow that combination of design-led watches and again, at an accessible, I would say, you know, accessible point for what you’re getting in terms of this style of watch and this quality of watch, we have 130 in here tomorrow. And to me, the tone of this event tomorrow feels more it’s like an art world frenzy. VIPs are now actively reaching out saying, we’ve heard about this event. This is not that common in the watch world for a watch event to have this kind of art feel to it. What is happening here? Why is there this extra sense of, to me, there’s something around the paradigm, like there’s a cross paradigm between watches and art?

JH: I am a buyer, I’m a collector, spend far too much on watches and I speak to so many other collectors every day as we all do. And the one thing they want more than anything is something fresh, something new, genuinely fresh. Now, a lot of those brands that we love tend to look back and that’s tricky. We’ve got that little bit of irk in us when it’s like a reissue. Like, I love it. But it’s not the original.

PT: The issue I have with reissues is that they are rarely one-to-one to the original.

JH: Which is often not feasible as we touched on with that Audemars Piguet. And I was the same with the 1921 from Vacheron, just this tiny little thing and they made so few I could never wear it. But your watch is entirely fresh and that’s why it’s captured the imagination as it has. And the fact that you were able to make it approachable price point-wise, probably based on the fact that you were able to keep the costs in a place that made it acceptable. But that’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. So for me, it’s the fact that it’s fresh and genuinely new, you haven’t got any history to look back on.

PT:  We really appreciate what you say and it’s lovely to hear that. There is no question there are influences in there, but I think the trick with influences is to absorb them and then to put this in a very unlovely way, excrete it out in a new way.

AM: And when you get to the heart of it, it’s all a framing conversation about the art world and the watch world. But to me, it’s exemplified by the fact that I saw this and jumped on it. I want in on this brand. And there was a sense that when I have it, I’ll scratch the itch. I’ll be done. I’ve got a Toledano & Chan. They’re not wildly changing the envelope. So I should be good for a stretch until you do something different. And yet, when we went from the Lapis Lazuli B/1 to the mother of pearl B/1.2, it suddenly dawned on me, the collectability. It’s like, do I just need one Rothko? That’s what I think gets to the heart of the art in this design is that it is absolutely not enough to just have this one because the way that you have sort of innovated within the envelope, gives you a strong need for a second. It is more like an artist who, once you start collecting, instead of saying, well, I have that now, I’m going to move on to another artist, you actually get a taste for it.

PT: Well, I think for us in particular, here’s what we’ve done is we’ve created the beginnings of a language. And so what’s exciting for us is we want to continue to explore that language, to continue to add words and phrases to that language. So when we did the B/1.2, how do you develop the language in a way that’s surprising, beautiful and impactful, but yet somehow also minimal? So that’s why we thought, well, the crystal, because we’re the one – you have this negative space, right? And so we thought, well, here’s a space we can fill. We can continue that conversation, that design language. You can add words to that conversation with sapphire, not with steel, with sapphire glass. So that’s what we did. And I think, I mean, I really love how it looks so, now we’re on the crystal thing. We have, we have many ideas up our sleeves about what comes next.

JH: Did you ever have anything on the dial in the early designs?

PT: Well, funny enough, a lot of people say, you have to put a brand on the dial. But I think that they’re missing the point because the brand is the watch. The brand is the shape, is the design language. That’s the brand.

AM: Did you feel when this got successful that you had a Damocles over your head in terms of this design being so recognizable and potentially so constraining?

AC: Not really.

PT: I mean, it’s funny because in retrospect, when look back, we should have, right? We should have. We had such a successful, miraculous first launch. The second album is always fraught.

AM: Because you think about it, Bell & Ross’ cockpit instrument case, Seven Friday, even the Royal Oak to an extent, these iconic designs can certainly be hard to get out of the shadow of. But I feel that the evolution from this model to this shows what is so different about you guys. Instead of immediately thinking, OK, so what people loved was the avant-garde angular shape and brutalist echoes and shadows, you just built within the parameters that people seem to love.

PT: Also, from just a creative perspective, it would have been so boring just to do another dial. I mean, what’s the point of that? Where’s the effort? Where’s the art? I think that so much of what’s exciting to the two of us is creating. We have so many ideas of how to continue this language in different sizes and slightly different variations. Because it’s just, I know I always say this and Alfred and I feel the same way about this, but if you have an opportunity to create something, you should try and make something new every time. And if you don’t, you’re being lazy.

JH: You guys are coming at it as collectors and enthusiasts primarily, and that’s the fundamental difference here for me, listening to you speak. We speak about other watches all the time. I know what you love and you’re contrarian. I know what you love and what you don’t love. And you’re doing what we all want to see. I think that’s the crux of them. Sometimes brands feel like they’re a bit slow to evolve. It’s years down the line before you see a change. And it’s not necessarily run by the committee that are the buyers. And that’s the key difference, think, listening to you guys.

AM: And we’re so used to those iterative changes that are agonizingly slow. Rolex getting into titanium. It’s like one appears as a prototype on a yachtsman’s wrist, disappears and then comes up on the least popular of their sports models and then goes away. And it’s this sort of game of cat and mouse. You know what we want, won’t you give us what we want? Justin, I need to ask you this, like, are you getting this effect from where I’m sitting?

JH: Yeah, totally.

AM: Of the light spearing through the faceted sapphire crystal.

JH: I’m quite particular about the way I like to see. A lot of brands use anti-reflective coatings, which is quite modern. I’m not sure. On some really modern, I’m thinking of some IWC pilot’s watch with its ceramic cases. It looks quite nice. But actually, when comes to dressy watches, I’m not absolutely sure. I’m also thinking about Laurent Ferrier, who sort of takes the old Patek approach of not using that. So it’s very much reflective. It’s quite reflective. It’s traditional. And I like the flatness on the B/1 because you can see the dial very clearly. But then the B/1.2 gives me this depth, this 3D effect that’s insatiable.

AM: What else are you noticing about it, Justin? Considering you are seeing it in-hand for the first time.

JH: Well the mother of pearl just to start with. I don’t know what the need for the Tahitian element is. Clearly, there’s a reason you went for that.

Phil Toledano: Because of the way that interacts with the light. It can be technicoloured, it can be grey. It’s much more interactive and has this holographic quality.

JH: From a collector standpoint as well, I’m quite conscious about some dials being a little bit too loud to actually wear. I say that because I’ve got an aventurine dial watch, which is a bit too much for me. It’s just a bit too much sparkle. Whereas this I can get behind because this is quite subdued when you want it to be. It’s quite loud when you want it to be as well. That in natural light, it really comes alive.

AM: But the B/1.2 is not the one that has been on Justin’s wrist since he walked into this room. So please, I will say to Phil and Alfred, quickly introduce the B/1M.

AC: This is a full meteorite case, lugs, buckle and dial and is similar to the prototype that was auctioned off at Phillips late last year.

AM: What was the final hammer price on that lot?

PT: US$35,000. But, to be clear, this is the production version of this watch. So there are some differences between this one and the prototype we auctioned off. It’s a slightly different size. It’s a 32mm width rather than 33.5mm width, the introduced facets of the crystal, and the finishing is darker. We haven’t quite figured out which strap exactly we want to use.

AM: I think there’s a misconception about meteorite. I mean, we’re conflating meteorite dials with this watch, which we should not do, you’ve told me many times.

PT: Well, as we discovered from this in the early stages, when we originally came up with the B/1M we were going to do the watch in all meteorite, right? With a meteorite bracelet. Then, as we discovered, meteorite basically is similar in cost to gold. Just the materials alone for a bracelet would have been about thirteen grand and that is just the cost before we even started crafting it. So we thought, a US$25K – $30K watch may be a bit cheeky at this junction, where we are as a brand.

AM: Where did you land on pricing for this then?

PT: So, this, on a strap, is going to be US$9,700, and it’ll be a run of 30 pieces.

JH: Honestly. I’ve not been able to take it off. Can I just put it back on just because…

AM: It’s so interesting to me, he’s just been fanatical about this one since the minute he laid eyes.

JH: Honestly, and I’ve realized now through the collecting journey that when you react like this, it’s totally honest and authentic. Through the watch journey if you don’t react like this, if you don’t have that reaction…

AM: Brands, if you ever wonder whether Justin Hast will buy your watch, he needs to say this particular phrase: “Oh! I’m in on this!”

JH: Oh, I’m in on this. I’m in on it. I put it on and it’s immediately that visceral, it’s like I absolutely have to find a way to make this happen and then the gears start going, pardon the pun, what can I, you how much can I get away with at home? What can the accountant know and not know? What does the HMRC need to know and what do they not need to know?

AM: I’m picturing Zach Galifianakis with all the numbers going past his head.

PT: A Beautiful Mind, all these numbers going on.

JH: You know, what’s happened here for me is I’m thinking immediately of I think of the Bulgari Octo Finissimo because I actually commented on this strap being very similar in the suppleness and how it exaggerates the design by removing the bracelet. Don’t get me wrong I love the finishing on the bracelet but actually, the bracelet is not for me. This is far more for me. I’m immediately just looking at this in the whole visuals of what you guys the window on the building there that was the inspiration.

The whole design ethos comes alive in this for me. Super, super clean. It’s darker. So it wears even smaller. I know we’re at a shift of smaller cases. I’m not even that bought into the idea of smaller cases necessarily. But for me, this just feels comfortable. This just feels so much more comfortable. Look at the buckle on it as well. I know we all love the Ellipse and the buckle on the Ellipse echoing the case. That’s what you guys have done here. I just think it’s a great detail that most brands ignore.

PT: When you’re designing a watch, everything is an opportunity, And I think what happens, I see often a lot with watch brands is they’ll design their head and then they’ll do the reflex strap, they’ll do the reflex buckle, but all those opportunities to continue the conversation you started with the design of your watch. And I don’t understand why people don’t do that.

JH: But Phil and Alfred were saying that the price has gone through the roof, in line with gold, and we don’t really know why.

PT: It hasn’t increased, it’s just incredibly expensive.

AM: My point is that when you get a sliver of meteorite, because I saw a tube of meteorite at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, and it truly is just a tube. Then they managed to cut off just a slice for a dial, however many microns of dial. This, on the other hand, is a big chunk that’s milled out of a much bigger piece. It’s just a lot more material.

PT: You made a good point Alfred, about when they’re making it the waste.

AC: Yeah, whatever you mill out is wasted. You cannot recycle it.

AM: So, you have to be very careful.

JH: The strap, although it’s not the one that you want, we talked about thinness and thickness and puffiness. I can’t get my head around why some brands are still ruthlessly sticking with a puffy fat alligator strap.

PT: I feel like so much of what happens in design is an inherited habit, and that’s an inherited habit.

JH: I know you’re not keeping it, but I love how soft it is already. Look at this sort of tactility, this suppleness. Now this is what you fight for, right, after years of use. You fight for this in a strap.

PT: Whatever we end up with will be that thin and that soft.

JH: Honestly, I’m speechless. I really like this, and the way it’s shaped as well. I also like that you’ve gone smaller instead of blowing it up. Like the Offshore versus the Royal Oak, which was blown up. This, however, has been blown down.

PT: Well, the whole size issue, insert jokes here, we’ve been discussing size, we’ve been having a size off for a while now because we are thinking we are going to make a slightly smaller version of the bracelet watch. But next year, we’re going to launch the B/2. So the B/2 is going to be on a strap, carrying on this language, but in a different articulation. Articulated differently in terms of the case shape and also in terms of the crystal. So, we’re going to do an asymmetrical crystal of some kind, but different than this one. And then the main thing is this concept that we call corrupted beauty.

So what we’re going to do is these B/2 cases were made of precious metals, but they will be corrupted because traditionally when watch brands use precious metals they’re beautifully presented, and polished without flaws. But we want patina, flaws, degradation, inclusions. So that’s the idea behind this. So it’s going to be a smaller watch on a strap, but this kind of beautiful, like, like, you know how you talk about this, you want that patina on a strap. It’s going to be like the watch has been left exposed to the elements.

AM: I see that appeal in Arsham’s artworks, that degradation that is worked into a whole and perhaps the character can sometimes come from the floor.

JH: So, you guys are going to wear it for a few months, beat the hell out of it and then sell it?

PT: No! We’re in the middle of endless R &D to figure out how do you… can you corrupt silver, gold, and platinum in ways that’s interesting?

AM: Returning to the bracelet though Justin, I could not disagree with you more in terms of the appeal of a Toledano & Chan watch. And I need to say that because I think many people are going to come to this watch for its bracelet. To me, it is more in the oeuvre of a Piaget Polo from 1979, which is a watch on a bracelet as opposed to a bracelet attached to a watch. And I feel that the head of this watch is actually more the diminished part of a bracelet than it is the thing that the bracelet is supporting.

And when I interviewed Yves Piaget about this, he was adamant that, no, this was a piece of male jewellery that happened to tell the time. And it’s more in that category of jewellery. And I think that that is what appeals to me so much about it. However, I do take your point that with the smaller size and with this juxtaposition of, I mean, even like space material with organic leather material, it’s all, it’s pretty sexy.

JH: Just a thought, were you considering the idea of a dress watch versus a sports watch?

AC: It’s not a dress watch, nor even a sports watch. Just because it’s on a bracelet doesn’t make it a sports watch. Just because it’s on a leather strap doesn’t make it a dress watch.

JH: So, what is it then?

PT: There’s a kind of paradigm shift we’ve seen happening this year with people wearing smaller watches, with people wearing like, you know, precious metal watches more casually. The idea of what a dress watch is, I think it’s sort of vanished a little bit. And so I will wear like a 70s Patek that was designed for dress, for evening wear, but, you know, a jeans and t-shirt kind of situation. So when we went for the B/2 and even for this one, we were not even thinking about dress versus sports or anything. We’re just thinking about something beautiful to wear.

AM: Your sparring partner Mike Nouveau is emblematic of that. His whole thing is dress watches, jewellery watches, tiny watches, and yet he’s wearing them with a leather jacket, a cap with some pithy slogan, not a suit.

PT: That’s right.

AM: But I feel that it’s a post-pandemic thing as well.

PT: I think, in this last year, which is really extraordinary, I feel like so many ideas of what watches are supposed to be have changed. Like the idea of smaller watches, dress watches, the idea of bizarre-shaped watches, all this stuff. The horizon’s expanded and people aren’t so segregated anymore on how this has to be worn here, this has to be worn there. In part, maybe the pandemic helped them. And I really hope, look, I mean, who knows? I know watches are cyclical and who knows maybe in five years, it’s all going back to like the Rolex Submariner. But it’s so lovely. I think to be able to have so many different meals to eat now. Like it was just one, I felt like for the last 10 years, was just bloody like one where everyone was eating hamburgers for 10 years.

AM: You call it cosplay and I am never going to. That is the best summary of watch styles that are just echoing and echoing and echoing through all the brands. And I feel that that sums it up beautifully.

There are two questions I have for you gentlemen that may be uncomfortable: accessibility and pricing. On accessibility, will this brand ever be accessible and available apart from those people who happen to be switched on to Instagram for that 18 seconds when the watch drops? What are you going to do about accessibility so that the growing audience for your brand can feasibly be a part of what’s happening here?

PT: Looke, when we started, we had no idea what the reaction would be. We were making this thing for ourselves and we still are making these things for ourselves and hope that other people like them. But we’re pretty cautious in terms of making massive numbers because, honestly, we’re still kind of pinching ourselves, right? Yeah. Like the success is so unexpected.

AM: Let’s put a fine point on it. Between all of your creations, we’re talking less than 400 watches in total. So, I mean, if 10,000 people are reading or watching this, how do they become part of it?

PT: I totally understand that. I guess I would say to those people please have patience. We’re new. We are cautious. We are overwhelmed with gratitude at the attention. But we also recognise the worst thing in the world for us would be to make too many and then have them sitting around. Like financially, you know, we can’t make a thousand.

AM: And every time I talk to you about a new run, you’re like, “We’re going to do 200. We might’ve overshot.”

Phil Toledano: I know, because we’re basically sh*tting our pants. We were having this conversation a couple of weeks ago, like, maybe we should have made more B/1. More B/1.2.

AC: A tangent, but related to accessibility, pricing, and quantity, this bracelet you’ve been raving about Andrew is very hard to make. It’s a partially automatic, partially handmade kind of process. Everything is CNC’d out, but then there’s a technician pressing the metal against the sanding machine to get the right amount of brushing. If they do it too hard, too much metal is gone, and that link is no good anymore. It’s a particularly labour-intensive process.

PT: Funnily enough, when we first started doing it, the factory, had initially had a minimum order quantity. But then they said, you know, can we make less? Because it’s such a pain to make. When we did the second run, they’re like, okay, now we know what a nightmare this is, we’re going to charge you much more.

AM: Tell me about some other things you overcame to make these watches.

AC: Well, especially for the B/1.2, the MOP, the crystal is particularly difficult. I think we went through iterations and went through different suppliers to get the right one with the right amount of volume.

PT: It took us about five months to get that thing sorted out.

AM: Because it isn’t sort of a sheared crystal with sharp edges. It also has a slight, is there a slight sort of polish to the edges or is it really sharp?

AC: It’s not sharp. It’s got to be rounded off, otherwise it’s sharp as a knife, mean, glass. It has to be slightly rounded. In terms of challenges, it could be chipped during the manufacturing process.

JH: You know what’s just coming to mind now is that there was an agreement amongst the watch world for many, many years that a stone dial and a ceramic case were going to be expensive. That was just an agreement everyone had.

AM: Like a tourbillon, has to be more than US$40,000…

JH: I like how you guys came in and really changed that, at least with stone dials.

AM: And then Dennison came in and went screw Toledano & Chan [laughs].

PT: Well, I mean, look, it’s very interesting what you’re saying because, as you say, there were signifiers in the watch world that meant this is an expensive watch. And for years Lapis, malachite, whatever it was, that meant it was a lot of money. And Dennison has, I mean, we changed it. We were the first, I think, microbrand or brand really to do a relatively affordable Lapis dial. But Dennison has just changed the game and what’s happened is that those things which represented luxury are now commodities. So what really counts now is design and creativity. Those are the real signifiers, I think, of luxury now.

AM: This all leads back to the other difficult topic: pricing. So, we have a US$4,000 watch, a US$5,700, and we have US$9,700. So, is this a stair that goes to infinity? Is the 10th one going to be worth a million dollars? Tell us about the pricing strategy because I want to just put it out there, and I want to talk directly to the people who talk about Toledano & Chan pricing in a negative or a questioning way.

But, I will say, if there is nothing more true in a capitalist economy than that the market sets the price, and if this watch was priced at US$4,000 and the cheapest one you can get on the secondary market is US$7,000, that watch was underpriced or that watch was fairly priced and the demand is very high. So I think that kind of extinguishes some of the subjective complaints about it. But tell me about the pricing difference between the B/1 and B/1.2, and then from these two to what comes next.

PT: Well, there’s a couple of things. One is that on the Lapis watch, I think we may have underpriced it a little bit in terms of bearing in mind the cost to us, et cetera. It comes down to, honestly… Well… Because because we’re sh*t businessmen. That’s the first reason. But also, I feel like you look at the way watches are priced now, and it’s just it just seems to be untethered to reality and we wanted to make something that was beautiful and interesting and as perfect as we could get it.

Look, I know US$4,000 is a lot of money, and it is. So that was that cost. Then the B/1.2, US$5,700, well, a bunch of reasons. Everything is more expensive. The movement is more expensive. We re-engineered the bracelet with a better clasp and that’s now more expensive to make. The factory is now charging us more because as Alfred said, they’ve seen that it’s a success, and it’s a pain in the ass to make. The crystal took a long time and was expensive to develop and make. And the Tahitian mother of pearl is actually a little bit more expensive than Lapis. So there are a bunch of myriad reasons. But I understand it’s a lot of money. But, you know, we’re trying to make the best thing we can.

AC: It is also worth saying that, irrelevant of the country of origin, I think we’re making the best that we can make in any place. It doesn’t matter whether it’s China or Switzerland.

AM: And, in fairness, made in China is proudly stated on the spec sheet, which is something that I welcome.

AC: The fact that we can manufacture this in China doesn’t mean it’s cheaper than it is made in Switzerland.

PT: Well, it does mean it’s cheaper for the end user, but it doesn’t mean there’s a difference in quality necessarily.

AM: The point of this was not to have you apologise for your pricing, which is a tone I would object to because I feel that this was an example of a watch that was offering extraordinary value. I know I’m going to sound biased, and I’m going to sound like I’m in with these guys and that there’s some vested interest. No, truly. When this watch was offered to me at US$4,000 it just felt like a deal.

JH: It’s going to be very subjective to the individual involved, I think because we all have different parameters internally about what feels acceptable and what doesn’t. To me, looking at the product, and handling the product, it feels like it offers real value. In-hand, visually, and aesthetically, the volumes involved, all is quite appealing especially with it all coming together to make a US$4,000 watch for that first piece.

I think as well, from the brand perspective, you had no background, you had no back catalogue. There was no history there for people to buy into. Let’s not forget that in the watch world, we do think about brand first, probably, when we think about putting money down on the table. So you didn’t have that to trade off of. So really, it was product and it was your personal reputations, I’d say, that people were trading more on. And, as a result, that felt really quite reasonable.

PT: One thing I would add about the price is that for us when we increase the price, there is a reason for it. That’s something we’ve talked about a lot. So, the meteorite is $9,700, which is a lot of money, but the material is extraordinarily expensive. So we want to be able to justify why things cost more. We would never have made the same watch with just a different dial and said, this is now five and a half grand because it wouldn’t be fair.

JH: And you have to factor in the R & D and rising costs of making it.

PT: That’s the other thing. When people get upset about the price, they also don’t think about the fact that Alfred and I have been basically working on this for four or five years now. We’ve not taken a cent. There’s the R&D, there’s the development, there’s our time. So these are all business costs that people don’t think about.

AM: Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking us through this, it is a short history of Toledano and Chan, it’s wonderful to have this completely dynamic, and wildly unpredictable journey in such a short time to run through.

PT: Thank you so much. Thanks, guys for having us. And that was, I mean, I found that a really invigorating conversation, honestly. That was great.