For a long time it was difficult to find these watches at reasonable prices eg 100 Euros. Many of the German dealers (Skytime, aloha!!!) put ridiculously high reserves or starting prices on what are Asian movement watches. German dealer Muffel´s Shoppingmeile has recently listed them at fair prices.

Since I made my first posting I should point out that I have purchased 3 more of these: 2 Karthagos and one Reference. (I already had a Karthago and a Klassik.) The Klassik keeeps very good time. Two of the Karthagos loose about a minute a day. The third Karthago keeps good time. The Reference gains a little (about 20 seconds a day) (which would be within Swiss standards). The first Karthago had to have the flip date function repaired, but that could have been due to my attempting to make an adjustment between 9pm and 4am--and owning quite a few watches with complications I should have known better but I cannot say I was not the cause of this malfunction. The Karthago rose gold is very pretty but it is disaappointing that at these prices 2 of 3 (one of the latter recently acquired) lose about a minute a day. For what it is worth I noticed that what looks like the same watch as the Karthago is being sold under the Trias brand, another ostensibly German watch with Asian movements. (On a sidenote, I bought a Trias that gained 2 HOURS (not minutes) per day.) I sent it back for service and it still gained an HOUR a day. I ended up just taking it to a local (Indianapolis) watchmaker who seviced it to get it working reasonably.
I thought it interesting that on the Roebelin & Graef web site http://www.roebelin-graef.com/ the service is listed as USA address:
Roebelin & Graef
Waterford Building, 9th Floor
1171 King's Road
Miami, Florida 33126 USA
Email: info@roebelin-graef.com

the name Roebelin is near to the name Gübelin (same level as Bucherer) which is a chain of high-quality jewellers and watchmakers in switzerland. as many chinese are now allowed into switzerland as "tourists" they bring home many ideas about names.
me personally I wonder a bit about the criteria a guy from china has to fulfill to get a permission to leave the country for switzerland.
recently I was amazed of seeing some chinese in a jewellers, only looking and grasping every snip of paper that was for free; I asked a young lady seller, and she told me in summertime they are the new pest, buying nothing, asking a hundred questions in double-broken english; she told the manager about it, and the manager said they're not allowed to do anything about it due to our strict racism legislation. one trick though is allowed: out of a sudden the staff doesn't understand a word of english, german or french...

I've returned to this thread after quite some time and read it from where I left off. Its interesting to see "roccosilvershein" (sounds like a clowns name!) who is no longer on ebay, at least w/ that user id come to the defense of Montres Allison AND post a link to his web site of junk and speak so highly of him, his products and deliver a threat about a law suit. This is interesting because my cyberhome, PMWF would get similar posts by newcomer(s) whenever we had a discussion about MA which always found his products to be tinny to say the least. We always surmised it was old TA himself posing as someone who found MA's to be true to the hype and tried to convince us they are as good as stated. The MO is identical to what we saw on the forum including threats when the poster became rebuffed.
If its too good to be true it usually isn't. Some people try to make a living off others not knowing that.

"But one thing I would be interested in knowing is how some of the designs of these Asian watches came to fruition. Some are obvious copies of Vacheron Constantin and other Swiss makes" jethro, I'll answer this question. The Chinese buy Swiss manufacturing machinery and then try to backwards engineer (primarily) ETA movements. The problem is, they do't do a very good job of replicating the Swiss movements. On the outside, the movements appear very similar, but once you take them apart, you see where the Chinese manufacturers cut corners at every possible opportunity. The result is a very inferior movement. "6 figures and more for a watch that is around an ounce or so of gold even with parts assembled by hand is outrageous and bears no relationship to the value of the piece." jethro, I think you oversimplify what goes into the design, manufacture, sales and support of a fine swiss watch. The commodity value of the gold in the case is far from being the only cost. If you look at the amount of work in R&D, developing new movement designs & new complications, developing and testing new materials, doing reliability studies, hand decorating and polishing each component, performing rigorous inspections and quality control throughout the assembly process, etc. Then add the enormous cost of building, training and maintaining worldwide maintenance centers and an authorized dealer network to support the customers. Add to this the cost of worldwide multi-language multi-channel marketing and it adds up to a substantial investment. The watches aren't cheap, but they're worth what the manufacturer asks. Value is the important measure, not price. The Chinese-manufactured watches have very few of these costs. They steal most of the designs they manufacture, so they have no R&D overhead. They don't worry about trivial issues like reliability, quality or finishing detail. The product only needs to work long enough to get it into the customer's hands. It isn't expected to last 100+ years like a fine Swiss watch. Since the product isn't engineered or manufactured well, there is no sense spending money on a network of service centers and dealers to support the customer after the sale. They aren't seeking a lifetime relationship with the customer like many Swiss companies do. After all, what are the chances a customer of one of these Chinese-watches would ever buy a second Chinese watch after the horrors of owning the first?.... nil. Gee, the bargain of owning one of these cheap Chinese-manufactured watches doesn't seem such a bargain now. In addition, a Rolex, Omega, JLC, Patek or other fine Swiss watch can be worn for 50 years and then sold for more than the owner paid (in many instances). That "6-figure" watch you referred to ended up being an investment, not an expense. After 50 years, I'll let you guess what the Chinese-made watch is worth. Greg

I thought I would add a few comments to the remarks by jacketwatch and Greg: the point I was trying to make was re value and perhaps I was windy and did not make my points too succinctly. I think that both the fairy tale high listed MSRP high starting price or reserve watches with the Chinese movements and German Sounding names which come primarily from German dealers and supposedly German manufacturers (and I wonder if Trias and Aeroma, etc which claim to be German even assemble their Chinese parts in Germany, or maybe they just place the watches in the boxes there) are not a good value when one considers what goes into these Asian watches. They are basically pretty and mechanically have quality control or lack of it from poor to fair with an occasionally decent one thrown. They are worth something but not the starting prices the German dealers usually(not always) have. Likewise I think that many (not all) the Swiss pieces that are going for $100,000 and up do not have research and engineering costs that would justify these prices. The Swiss manufacturers are not analagous to Ferrari, Lamboghini, Aston Martin, etc. which do have very high R&D (though some also spend a lot of their budget on promotion). The Swiss ran into a real big problem with their own design of the quartz movement which nearly put them out of business, as manufacuturers do not need to and do not buy Swiss ETA movements for their everyday watches. To have something to sell the Swiss decided to promote watches with "complications" and get everyone to think that they had something unusual and peculiar to them. In both the low end (with the crazy MSRP) and the high end there is an artificially controlled market somewhat like the diamond market controlled by DeBoers or maybe the US pharmaceutical manufacturers with their lobbyists' influence on congress and not like the gold market which is governed by supply and demand. I think an interesting example of how this is artificially controlled from one of the lower end watches is the Steinhausen Flying Tourbillon which originally sold for several thousand dollars adnd now is in the hundreds. [by the way for information interests as a matter of intellectual curiosity, I would like to know who really owns Steinhausen--is it owned by a company owned by the Chinese Government, or is it Gadget Universe or who in fact. I have seen their shipping prices for wholesale and they ship their watches by the thousands]. I do understand Greg's point about the reverse engineering. However, I would like to note what happened in the electronics (radio) area. Fifteen years ago companies like Grundig had Chinese owned companies make their medium end shortwave radios. They had quality control problems. They overcame these and eventually started selling their electronics under their own label and some of these get good ratings. This has not occurrred with automobiles or watches. It is interesting to make an electronic journey if you can figure your way around eBay China and see all the fake Rolex, Breitling, VC, PK, etc. watches which have starting prices for under 450 Yuan (app $50US) and then are taken down in a day or two while others stay up indefinitely. Re fidbald's statement that I am engaged in selfadvertisement [sic]--that is not the case at all. I do not deal watches and have only occasionally sold new watches for which I had duplicates that were just collecting dust. I just happen to think Lobor is a good value and if someone wants a striking watch that is not junk at a fair price that is an alternative. I do not have any for sale. The German Lobor sellers (they must not have a counterpart to the FTC as in the states) show a high MSRP The watch is actually made in Hong Kong not Germany with primarily Swiss or Japanese (I think like the Miyota) movements as far as the automatics. My remark on conglomerates is based on the fact that almost all the Swiss watchmakers are owned by a handful of non watchmaking interglobal corporations, and are not the quaint little hands on manufacturer nestled in some valley in Switzerland where the owners actually worked on the watches. And if anyone wants to see how rough and what league the Swiss play in just list a watch and compare it to one of theirs naming their watch in your listing, such as like saying it has a hack mechanism like "..." and you will see their trade association get that listing pulled faster than you can blink for a complaint about trademark infringement even though you are just mentioning a feature similar to one of their watches, not trying to pass one off as one of theirs. This is on ebay.com. I think they have some problems on ebay.com.cn I was curious about the references to montres allison as I had not seen one. I did a searchon eBay.com and found a listing Item number: 280138503317 which claims a "Suggested Retail Price: $20,995.00" and a buy it now price of US $850.00 being sold by timingiseverythingnj I do not know anything about the watch or the seller, bu I would be amazed if anyone that was sobedr ever paid $20,995.00 in US dollars for one of these. And memory serves me there is a Federal Trade Commision rule that makes it unlawful to advertize things with grossly exaggerated MSRPs. Exscuse any typos I did not catch but this is rather windy and never intended it to be this long, but there were several areas I wanted to cover.

Jethro stated: "if you can figure your way around eBay China and see all the fake Rolex, Breitling, VC, PK, etc. watches which have starting prices for under 450 Yuan (app $50US) and then are taken down in a day or two while others stay up indefinitely." If you look for Chinese replica/fake watches on the U.S. eBay site, I think you'll notice quite an improvement from a year ago. The blatent Rolex/Omega/Patek/Vacheron replicas are being removed quickly and the cheap fake antique Omegas are almost all gone. Most of the fake/repro accessories such as fake winders, straps, buckles, boxes, etc. are also gone. In fact, if you see any fakes which seem to "stay up indefinitely" as you mention, please contact me directly and I'll try to assist getting them removed. Very interesting comments about the Swiss watch industry. While I share your thoughts about Swiss quartz movements, I tend to believe the development costs for some of the higher-end mechanicals are much more than you might realize. When you stop to consider the development and production costs of the hyper-expensive models must be amortized across just a handful of watches produced, you quickly come to the conclusion that these models are not extremely profitable... in fact, many LOSE money for the manufacturers. If it takes a watch development team a a couple of years and millions of dollars to design and produce a new movement with multiple complications, that R&D cost is often spread across just a few hundred watches or so. These money-losing endeavors are often embarked upon by the brand not in pursuit of profit, but for the publicity that the achievement brings to their other more affordable mainstream models. I think we're in agreement about the general low-quality of the Chinese movement watches and the deceptive marketing practices being used to sell them. These fake MSRP numbers are an ongoing battle and fall into 2 categories: 1) Sellers who make up their own ridiculous bogus MSRP numbers that occur nowhere in manufacturer literature, websites or anywhere else. (e.g., there were some sellers auctioning Chinese-manufactured "Geneva" watches with fake MSRPs of several theousand dollars, though these supposed MSRP prices were nowhere in manufacturer websites or literature) 2) Sellers who quote unreasonable MSRP prices that are listed on a manufacturer's or internet marketing company's website or literature. An example would be any of the high listed MSRP prices of Jeanneret and other similar brands on the web. In the case of the first category (fictional MSRP prices), eBay has recently been taking action and removing these auctions while suspending many of the sellers. Most of the worst offenders are now gone. The second category is more difficult. Since there is a published MSRP on a website or in manufacturer literature that the seller is quoting (even though it is bogus), the issue can't really be tackled by eBay as a rules infraction. Rather, it becomes a task for the FTC or a civil class-action suit brought by buyers. I'd like to see either the government or a class action attorney go after these sellers. They're doing a lot of damage to the marketplace. Greg

Greg;
For some reason I can not copy the auction numbers over to the US site, where they are recogized in the "Advanced Search" option. Also search by member name seems not to be working also. So site is http://itempage.auction.co.kr/DetailView.aspx?ItemNo=A098830793&frm2=through Click on to any of the three "flashing" watches on the right, halfway down the page, and you will see all of his fake watch auctions.

'a hack mechanism like all expensive watches such as R**ex'

abuse of name/name-spamming .

or to make it clearer for you: if you had a Fiat Punto advertised "races along the highways like a Ferrari testarossa", it would most probably be pulled as well.

I purchased a Roebelin and Graef watch about a year ago. I wanted a watch that was inexpensive, with an unfamiliar name but looked like it might be expensive. I bought the Confidence watch and have had very many positive comments on the watch. The watch also keeps good time, contrary to another post here. I didn't think I was getting a $2000 watch for a tenth of the price, just a very good looking watch for $200.

Hello All,

I purchased a Roebelin & Graef watch about 2 years ago. The watch is loosing 1 hours a day. Very poor. I was hoping although the watch was about $200, it would tell better time.

My question, is it worth finding a local jeweler to fix the watch or the movement is so poor that it is not worth it? Thoughts.....

Most times the Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price and the Actual Selling Price vary dramatically. However, research is the key. Prices vary based on the sellers purchase price. Some pay more than others to buy and resell these watches. When you see varying prices either they paid more to resell this watch, or they simply want to make more money. Again, the best advice, research. The average selling price, the seller, and all costs involved in your purchase.
That is the best way to guarantee a good purchase.

hi can anyone please tell me whether these watches marked up by the seller as worth 1300euro's are in fact worth the [ buy it now price ] that are stated .i'm interested in a roebelin & graef speedway stal blue thanks to anyone that can help.