Ventura has gone bust!

[xevious]

Digital watches have been making a comeback, but it appears difficult to shake the 'cheap' image, due to the high availability of really inexpensive LCD watches. So Swatch and Fossil are making some "budget conscious" revenue from them... Casio is probably one of the few getting in at the higher price points, due to so many other features and the clear "rugged" appeal of their watches.

Ventura looks to have pursued the high luxury style angle... and it's hard to really make inroads in that market, with the perpetual solid entrenchment of analog watches. I'm sorry to see them fall... they had some really cool designs.

What of reliability? Aside from a few initial quirks, do the watches hold up well?

[rewolf]

Pierre Nobs, founder of Ventura, has put up a "Ventura Information" website.
http://ventura-watches.com/
Not much activity there, yet.

[xevious]

Ventura made some beautifully designed watches... I'd be leery of buying one now, though. Who knows how long the Ventura service center will be functional? The proprietary movement designs would severely limit your ability to get the watch fixed if anything ever went wrong.

Also, hearing reports of accuracy issues is a major disappointment. Digital quartz watches are known for being very accurate even at the cheap price points. So, for a high end digital watch to actually be less accurate in the same quartz movement category is confidence shaking.

Perhaps Ventura's pricing was too high to get enough sales volume going. I wonder if it was part of the "image cachet" that Peter was trying for, or if this was a side-effect of significant R&D costs on making the proprietary firmware. Personally, I think that with all of the digital watch movement manufacturing taking place for so long, that Ventura could have collaborated with a company already well established in the business, leveraging their expertise, reducing production costs, achieving a higher level of accuracy, and ultimately being able to deliver these designer LCD watches at a lower price point.

[rewolf]

Ventura is back, continue here: http://dwf.nu/viewtopic.php?t=3677