Originally Posted by tony20009
Tag watches are quite well made and from a practical perspective, as a watch one will wear frequently, you should have no concerns about choosing one.
As goes build quality, it's on par with Longines or IWC or a great many other watches....After all, at a certain point, it's not all that difficult for any watch company to put together a solid watch. Rolex have a slightly higher build quality, but the increase in build quality results from the thing being "over engineered" or "over built." The sorts of extra steps Rolex take are irrelevant for most folk's daily wear needs. although it's nonetheless true that they are more solidly made than a great many other makes. The exception would be when it comes to dive watches where pretty much all of them are superbly well/strongly put together.
When you start speaking with casual and/or curatorial watch collectors, a variety of attributes that transcend the build quality come under discussion withing the guise of the term "quality." Those factors have to do with a bunch of what I'll call esoterica that the typical, non-collecting watch buyer need not consider. They include things like the movement's design, various dial treatments, complications, the demonstrated ability of the maker to produce various types of watches and watch movements, aesthetic design attributes, whether the watch has various certifications, the nature and extent of hand craftsmanship, and so on. By and large, while all that sort of stuff is nice and it will drive the price of the watch upwards, it won't make the watch perform any better. On most of these less practical factors, Tags aren't in the same league as IWC, but they are, outside of the movement itself, on par with Omega. (Tag's movements perform just fine, as well as anybody else's, but they aren't "special" in any regard.)
Occasionally, one'll encounter watches (mostly not from Tag, Longines or IWC) that have Geneva seals, Fleurier quality or chronometer (or the German equivalent) certifications. Some companies, like Patek and JLC do their own, in-house testing/validations that correspond to some or all of those third-party certifications.
It's true that a watch having any of those third-party certifications will be a very high quality watch. It's not so, however, that a watch lacking the certifications cannot be as high a quality of watch. For example, there are only four brands of watch that are even eligible for the Fleurier quality certification because they are the only ones in the geographic area that allows them to be submitted for that certification. More companies are eligible for the Geneva Seal, but still the limiting factor is geography. Chronometer certification is available to any Swiss made watch, but lots of very fine watch companies don't bother submitting their watches for that series of tests.
On the matter of value retention, I wouldn't encourage anyone to buy a Tag, Longines or IWC if that's among their top three criteria. Holding value over a long term is something very few watches do. If that sort of thing is paramount, there are really only two major brands worth considering: Rolex and Patek. Outside of that, one needs to be very knowledgeable about watch collecting -- informed on the level of an expert watch appraiser at an auction house -- to know what to buy and what not to buy so as to expect a gain in the price of the watch. Even with Rolex and Patek, the whole value retention thing is more about minimizing losses than it is about making gains on the resale.
In short, if you are buying the watch to wear and enjoy, forget about resale value. If you are buying a Tag to make money on the resale, get over it. It won't happen, at least not for 30+ years, and even then, only if you buy certain ones that have something very unique about them. The thing is that Tag isn't a maker who does much of anything that's particularly unique. They make watches to be worn and that the owner can trust will not give them "drama" over the course of their ownership experience. All in all, Tags are nice watches to wear but they aren't, for the most part, collectors' items.
All the best.
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