That was prior to when Citizen released the novel Calibre 0200 movement and timepiece collection in 2021, which demonstrates an exciting new direction for the company.Ĭitizen explained that its teams have been busy developing specialized watch movement assembly lines in Japan that are designed to build a much higher-grade movement than historically available from assembly lines. That said, the last-known Citizen Campanola watches were mechanical and used Swiss Made La Joux-Perret automatic movements. Citizen does have the elite Campanola name, but those products are associated with a very different look, for the most part, and have typically featured special forms of high-end quartz movements. Citizen does not currently have an analog to Seiko’s Grand Seiko brand. One question Citizen may seriously have to consider in the coming years is if a sub-brand is a good idea for its fancier mechanical wristwatch models.
In markets such as the U.S., consumers can have a different relationship with brand status and popularity as a factor when making luxury watch purchase decisions. Internally, in Japan and other markets, this fact presents zero marketing challenges. This is an important distinction to make because the company that is the official maker of Disney character timepieces will have the same brand name on automatic watches intended for serious collectors. Rather, most of the recent Citizen watches until now have featured the brand’s high-tech movement technology focused around Eco-Drive and that has made a lot of innovations in the world of GPS, connectivity, and miniaturization over the last several years.Ĭitizen isn’t going to stop making high-tech watches, but it is going to refocus some of its bandwidth on enthusiast-oriented mechanical timepieces.
This is despite the fact that Japan’s Miyota (a large volume manufacturer of mechanical and other watch movements) is part of the Citizen Group.
Citizen is no stranger to mechanical movements - as indicated in this recent Citizen post on aBlogtoWatch here - but it has been over a decade since Citizen has introduced a new mechanical watch movement. The two most important things Citizen shared with aBlogtoWatch during our recent call with its headquarters in Japan is that we will see a larger volume of high-quality mechanical movement production in the near future and that the Swiss-style watch movement beautification techniques it adapted from in-group watchmaker La Joux-Perret are entirely accomplished in Japan.
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