Richard Mille

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Your accusations are essentially without foundation and totally without merit.

I find your posts to be a 'love/hate' relationship with Richard Mille watches.  You have bought a RM010, which by your own admittence runs just fine; yet you wish to trawl the archives here and find almost every instance of someone complaining about their RM watch.  You have not noted the incidence over time, whether the individual has repeated the complaint, or the degree of seriousness.  You have not undertaken a search on other forums and noted complaints.  You have not noted whether the individual has re-posted that everything with the watch is now fine.  Lets say there are 10 to 15 complaints on the 1000's of RM watches that have been manufactured.  If this was a representative capture of everyone owning a RM watch AND filing a post with a complaint, the failure rate at n=1000 is 1.5.  That is unbelievably small.

Further, remember that most of the time (no pun intended), RM watches involve something new in terms of finish or construction.  If you are using a well worn movement, with standard technology, and throwing that movement in a new case, then sure, the likelihood of failure or problem with the movement is less.  New surface finishes, new materials, new movements require time to sort out what is wrong - perhaps only a significant number of years down the track.  Couple that in with the idiosyncracies of a watch that is hand made, and you wonder why the problem rate is not higher.

You make the classic case of inferring individual facts onto your situation rather than looking at the average or marginal rate.  How do you ever get on an airplane?  It is the same mentality - if one airplane has a problem today, then mine probably will next time too. 

What matters is that RM watches put the problem right when it arises.  I bought a tourbillon from another manufacturer.  It started losing time after one month of purchase.  It had to return on two further occasions before it was running with precision.  The whole process took 18 months.  Why did I persist - I loved the watch in spite of the problems and now it runs with unbelievable accuracy.  In some sense, and this is not an excuse, you have to love the watches you own in spite of the problems.  If you are going to agonise over the issue that your RM MIGHT stop/fail/run slow/tarnish at some point in the future, my advice to you is buy a Casio G-Shock and be done with it.

I know that Richard would love to have absolutely every watch he produces run perfectly first time and for the known future.  However, no manufacturer can claim that, and hence, you are left with the second best world for everyone: all manufacturers and watch owners alike.

Richard prices watches on the cost plus mark-up.  His watches, as the numbers above suggest are very reliable.  If they were not, why would so many people buy them and continue to buy them??? 

His watches are innovative, exploratory, unique in design, and the Richard Mille watches business model opened up a whole new avenue for watch manufacture that others have borrowed off.  Before dragging up a few ad-hoc statistics and internalizing the argument to relate only to you, I would kindly suggest you consider wider arguments before posting such unfounded allegations.  Richard does not need to respond - the Richard Mille watch on your wrist, along with thousands of others, is the only response he needs to consider.

Andrew H