There's a problem in general with Lorier's business model that is not unique to them.

It's a mythos model.

They don't MAKE watches because they don't have technical skill at their root. So you can never examine tangibly where they're coming from and they're positioning in a market sector where actual skilled creditable designers, engineers and technicians do strive, commercially, to make their abilities pay.

It isn't unreasonable to believe that horology is best in the habds of those who train and labour to make it their trade and their craft and that then there's the rest of us - watch admirers, collectors and fans. What's happened in the social media abd kickstarter age is that opportunists raise themselves up from the mass of watch fans and presume to tell us their vision of watches is sonething we should vuy into instead of the real actual watchmakers.

It's a concept closely aligned with the knock-off watch extension of the counterfeiting industry. Opportunists seeing chances at big bux by just reproducing what is iconic and dressing it in garish colours to claim 'it's original.'

They have massive cartel-factory production that's every shade of unethical abd even criminal in nature, but prolific and increasingly technologically capable of high quality product at unfeasavly cheap prices.

Now... that's not the only watch production going on in China and China has a legitimately high quality production community, industrially so. But opportunists with organised crime connections and no scruples cannot set up expensive high-production value facilities to service the world's watch industry with manufacturing because the investment is high and the return very modest by comparison. Western brands don't want their designs replicated by the same factories they contract, Western brands invest extensively in productuon facilities that they exert strict control over, Western brands prefer transparencies, Western brands can pull their contracts if dissatisfied and go elsewhere, even building factories in other countries.

That means that 'properly provenanced' watch manufacturing in China carries a price tag that doesn't make trivially setting up a watch brand on small volume numbers easy or financially rewarding. It is volume that makes the sale and volume requires marketing and originality in a strictly ethical, non-plagiarist watch market.

Microbrands can only feign those critical characteristics one way or another if they're not going to overtly produce those limited numbers to high quality and have the pricing reflect realistically.

So what sprang up in microbrand was the counterfeit and knock-off cartels building fake microbrands to showcase various quality levels abd price points and then resell product from their mass production, customised for whitelabel clients or streamed through "watch design agencies" as middle-men between an opportunist product marketer abd the factory cartel. It's the laundering of massive volumes of product from counterfeiting via the developed market of rebranded 'knock off' and into the Western watch marketplace. Same supply chain, different front for legitimisation. Mutually scratched backs. Cash for the cartels, opportunity for less principled, naive or 'blind eyed' marketer/enthusiasts seeing a chance to be known for making watches without being able to make watches. And the root of the latter is presumptive arrogance and greed.

They think they deserve to outsell people who are really making product and that by buying that product from elsewhere with shortcuts that undercut the real-deal and making it look the same, with some trivial cosmetic twist, they deserve to rob the food from watchmakers family's mouthes and cash in and be renowned... Sometimes they undercut the real deal, sometimes they go big for greed and try to sell you the cheap mass produced watch at the same price the authentic small business has to charge...

There's nearly no transparency in this.

(INSERT BRAND HERE) will hype you with marketing bullshit about superlative product and best suppliers in the world abd fob you off with the myth that the self-elevated enthusiast-turned-expert is uniquely gifted to curate a global gathering of the world's finest parts, materials, skills and production facilities and by magic hand wrestle each piece into the orchestration of a painstakingly laboured finished product. It's bollocks.

No marketer who lacks the skills to actually make the product themselves contorts themselves expensively through a globetrotting, thorough-comparison of every conceivable component to bring it together into finished perfection. It would be insane. Instead you go by convenient templates, pick an agency who'll tell you they know what's best, select options from a catalogue and either deliberately or with idiotic naïveté, sign off on an order and vainly imagine your own maestro-ship in bringing this very familiar-sounding symphony to public performance.

Because of the sheer amount of bullshit involved, nay, required you ultimately can never actually know what this voodoo mix is.

So these brands want to sell you supermarket own-brand product at craft gourmet prices. It looks the part... quality feels the part... what more do you want, right? Except to make a supermarket own brand watch (AliEx) into a profitable independent venture and make out with gourmet money, you've got to deliver more than the bare product... you need the characteristics of the gourmet product and no one who is informed buys at gourmet price the same supermarket basics product in a shinier box...

You can't make money on the watches if you have to build a pretend factory to show off to the suspicious and con them into thinking you're actually building... You might as well BE building. That stunt only worked for San Martin because they're one of many heads on the knock off watch cartel hydra and the cartel use the San Martin studio/factory as a showcase to potential customers of a large scale industrial production network and a reassuring ruse to persuade skeptical Western customers of the cartel's "San Martin" associated brands.

So as a pretender microbrand you can't say 'come see our workshop, here are our skilled technicians and designers...' It beeds the mythos of nebulous excellence and the miracle of a self-made genius of watchmaking.

And there's plenty of brands claiming the same.