In the past year, I’ve run into too many watches to count that each remind me of how quickly and completely small affordable brands are chipping away at the fortress of high-end brands and its high walls of trinkets and accoutrements. Not too long ago, a mechanical GMT immediately ate up a few paychecks, a tourbillon required mortgaging your house, and hearing a chime emptied your bank account. Slowly at first then all of a sudden, that’s changed, and things that were once exclusive to the upper echelons of watchmaking are now relatively affordable. More and more, I see less and less rationale for the incredibly high prices demanded by luxury watch companies.

Let’s review. Right now, you can get a perpetual calendar for under $10k, a chiming watch for under $5k, and a tourbillon for under $4k. Never mind dials, where you can get aventurine, meteorite, or malachite for a song. Meanwhile, supposed haute horlogerie brands are using remontoires, foudroyantes, and heliotourbillons. They quote unparalleled accuracy without providing details. They introduce “groundbreaking” new materials with opaque marketing. The only true claims they seem to have now are hand finishing and a few esoteric mechanisms of dubious efficacy and even less necessity.

15 years ago, the current state of the industry was not something many could have predicted. But as platforms like Kickstarter and AliExpress — that is, the internet — lowered the barriers to entry and brought on an explosion of small brands, the market started to change. With more affordable mechanical timepieces abounding, the consumer base grew dramatically. That larger consumer base meant that the effort necessary to develop more affordable perpetual calendars, tourbillons, and GMTs was suddenly worth it. With that wave, too, came a willingness and ability of smaller brands to push into things like artistic dials, novel materials, and proprietary hardware.

I won’t sit here and suggest that a $4k tourbillon is as well executed as a $40k tourbillon, nor that a watch that chimes at the hour is as impressive as a grande sonnerie. I’ll also freely admit that I adore brands like Grönefeld, I love the IWC perpetual calendar, and I think the Code 11.59 has become AP’s best collection. But the now-affordable complications suggest a shift in the market, an accelerating and significant encroachment upon the domain of high-end watchmakers. As the horological house of cards continues to fall, we’ll undoubtedly see more brands pushing the envelope at more and more accessible price points as the old guard holds tight to their ever-thinning claims and justifications.