Shenzhen Meigeer Watch Co., Ltd makes excellent watches. They're a fairly straight forward company, conducting themselves in a professional manner; actually manufacture their own watches and sell more than 75% of their timepieces domestically (in China).
Like many Chinese companies, they face tremendous obstacles establishing their brand identity. Those obstacles include a stigma associated with the words "China Made"; Swiss domination of the affordable luxury market and the company's own reliability on OEM clients. They make watches with other people's logos on them.
To sample their products, I purchased eleven models: four automatics, one solar, and six quartz. They furnished eight Nakzen, two Megir and one Ruimas. Each watch compared favorably to higher quality Asian watches in performance and craft.
In their high-end watches, they use 316L marine grade stainless steel to produce their cases with sapphire crystals. They avoid the use of metal injection modeling and deploy machine metal methods (primarily stamping and machining) instead. This fact alone puts them in a class equivalent to many Swiss and Japanese models.
In their lower priced quartz movement line, they use hardened mineral glass and 304 grade stainless steel.
They have their own a design department, so they can provide ODM (original design manufacturing) to customers like Guess. Their production management group interfaces well with the designers and that ultimately determines the type of movement they use. For example, the majority of the watches use Miyota/Citizens movements. They also purchase Sea-Gull and Shanghai movements in one-off situations.
I placed the images of five of their automatics and one Solar below. Further down you can see a catalog image of one of their Megir watches that comes with a Sea-Gull movement.
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Breguet Tribute Tourbillon Watches
Is Meigeer a Company to get excited about?
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| Seagull 1612 movement |
In my experience dealing with Chinese watch companies, I found two tiers. The top tier belongs to the six established companies that sell watches starting in the $10,000 range. Sea-Gull is a bit of an exception. They were the state-owned company that had to build watches for the people. Some of that "have-to" mentality still exists there, but not much.
The lower tier belongs to high-volume, low quality companies with little to no knowledge of the business they're in. They're oblivious to the customers needs. They typically don't produce their own watches and "beat the bushes" for customers. It's not a pleasant experience for a start-up.
Meigeer has the ability to become an exception. They're not a gigantic company, they make excellent watches, but they do not have the management skills or the vision to create a global brand. They want to become globally recognized as do many Chinese companies. It's a crap shoot if the make it.
Brands:
Nakzen is the Japanese subsidiary of Shenzhen Meigeer Watch Co., Ltd. located in Guangdong, China. Meigeer also owns Swiss watchmaker Ruimas. The company's Chinese subsidiary markets their Megir brand.