Inside Tudor's notoriously secretive watch factory

Today Tudor has invited GQ inside its section of the campus to see how it designs, tests and assembles its watches - a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's factory Its early advertising billed Tudor firmly as a watch for the working man, depicting coal miners, stone masons and construction workers alongside straplines highlighting durability: "Shock treatment at the coal-face"; "Punished without mercy!" Advertisement Rolex and Tudor evolved side by side, sharing innovations, components and even model names - until 1999 Tudor sold its own Submariner - but the Tudor brand lost its appeal around the turn of the -millennium and in 2004 was discontinued in America.

Is a Tudor really as reliable as a Rolex? What is the manufacturing relationship between the brands? And how exactly does Tudor keep those prices down? Today's tour seems designed to put all that to bed - and this transparency resonates with Tudor's new core frequency of straightforwardness The only time Tudor uses its own dedicated equipment is to test unique functions, such as the alarm on the Tudor Heritage Advisor Remarkably, given its lounge-size proportions, this is where every in-house movement used in a Tudor is assembled, before going upstairs to be cased up into a watch.

The omnipresence of Rolex throughout this tour invites a question: why buy a Tudor when for a couple of thousand pounds more you could actually buy a Rolex? "Tudor offers a great level of quality at a price where Rolex has no offering, so we're complementary," says Tudor spokesperson, Christophe Chevalier. . Source