Pioneering Swiss watchmaking for 150 years. According to the official TAG Heuer website that is, because there is some discussion around the ‘pioneering’ part. Their latest in-house manufactured caliber 1887 movement seems to be based on a Seiko movement. Nothing necessarily wrong with that,?Ǭ† however, TAG Heuer’s press release stated that this caliber 1887 is a ‘designed 100% in-house’ movement. Even according to TAG Heuer’s CEO J. Babin, it is clearly not designed in-house, as the CEO himself is posting messages on several TAG Heuer forums to give an explanation to all TAG Heuer fans. His post on WatchUseek starts like this: “Hi, I’m J.C. Babin the CEO of TAG Heuer, and YES, the new Caliber 1887 is based on a SII (Seiko Instruments Inc.) TC78 platform developped and patented in 1997 (filing) and eversince produced in very limited quantities, apparently for Junghans and Seiko watches in Japan.”

I would have guessed he just would have send another press release, fire the marketing dude who came up with the one-liner and get a communication/PR professional to fix things with the heated forum crowd. Perhaps they’ve already done that, or would it be a coincidence that TAG Heuer’s website is not available right now? (Service Unavailable error)

TAG Heuer’s Caliber 1887 movement

Kyle Stults of Perpetuelle did a very nice job on describing the whole matter in a blog post on his website. Click here for Kyle’s article, “TAG Heuer shoots itself in the foot on Tag Heuer Caliber 1887 launch”. Also check-out TAG Heuer devote website Calibre11.com.

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