Richard Mille

ei8htohms
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you are being quite naive

Hello Eric,

As someone intimately involved with the watch industry and a student of quality improvement, I can't help but feel frustrated when I read posts such as yours that speak in such naive absolutes.

Nothing is 100% preventable, ever. Even with the most rigorous, insightful, ruthlessly applied and fantastically expensive-to-the-point-of-multiplying-the-cost-of-the-product-1000-times-over quality assurance program ever conceived, you could be handed back a watch that is freshly manufactured or freshly serviced and something can fail by the time you get it strapped onto your wrist. Welcome to the real world, you should try observing it in detail some time!

This is not to say RM is doing a stellar job at satisfying all of their customers (obviously that is not the case because of that little "all" word I threw in) and I'm confident they can do better. No brand wants to read about problems with their watches or service on public discussion forums, but the smart brands would rather read about it and learn something from it than have the discussion go away when the failures have not. The latter ultimately leads to the customers going away, and that is a bad thing.

If we want to encourage RM (or any brand) to read the comments though, it helps if we modulate our criticisms, stick to the facts and, most relevant here, stick to what we know and not pretend like we are in any position to dictate to them what kind of changes need to be made to their quality assurance/control processes. It just makes us look silly frankly.

_john