I can’t tell you how sad it makes me feel when someone reduces all of my work to an “Aliexpress case”. When you call me a larper and an embarrassment, you’re not insulting a marketing department or some huge corporation. You’re directly insulting me. I’ve always been transparent about the parts I use, how much they cost, and the fact that some of them come from China. Not Aliexpress, but factories that manufacture watch components. I don’t think that should invalidate every prototype, every sketch, every failed attempt, every jig, and all of the work that goes into the things I do beyond the case itself. I’m a one-man band, just a guy doing his best to achieve his dream of making watches. All of my dials are cut on my own laser machine, hand-drilled, hand-sanded, and hand-painted under a microscope. Sometimes it takes days to finish a single dial, and I am incredibly lucky to have found people who appreciate that work. If everything were as simple as you say, everybody would be doing it. Creating a worthwhile physical product is difficult. It takes years of learning, thousands of mistakes, and a level of commitment that most people never see. To top it all off, you mention how you want to do the same, and how you: “just need a garage, a lathe, and a pad printing machine so I can finally free myself from the shackles of other people’s taste in this matter” I’m 24, still immature in many ways, but old enough to understand how difficult it is to create something with your own hands. Whether I like a person’s work or not, I know how much effort, sacrifice, and vulnerability goes into putting it out into the world. It took everything in me to get where I am today. Years of saving to afford more than €20,000 worth of equipment, years of tinkering, starting from absolutely nothing, not to mention all the sleepless nights and stress that went into creating something like this. You don’t have to like it, but you don’t need to belittle it either. It’s very hard to gain confidence by tearing down the work of other people, but getting shit done is something else entirely. (I’ll use this day to post more about the costs, how much I make exactly per watch, how much money I made so far, and how I’m still about 11000€ short to just pay off my gear, let alone all the time sunk into this black hole of a hobby, it’s far from glamorous, so I’m excited to share)