The Heart of the Matter: How Citizen Watch Company Scales with Soul
An eye-opening trip to the Japanese brand’s factories emphasizes that people remain at the core of watchmaking, no matter how many timepieces you produce.
By Cait Bazemore
Contributor
With origins dating back over 100 years, Citizen officially adopted its name in 1930 with the aim of bringing watch production to Japan and creating timepieces for citizens of the world, decades before global travel became widespread. This forward-thinking mindset around inclusivity and diversity has propelled the brand from a successful, local Japanese manufacture into a horological giant, all while keeping people a core value.
When it comes to the largest watchmakers in the world, Citizen Watch Company ranks among the top, alongside its Japanese counterparts, such as Seiko and Casio, as well as the Swatch Group. This massive, vertically integrated conglomerate is a dominant leader in accessible and commercial wares, producing roughly 200 million watches and movements annually.
This spring, at the height of cherry blossom season, Citizen opened its doors for the first time in ages. At the brand’s opening panel at its Tokyo headquarters, the brand made the bold claim that it would be “pulling back the curtain on the genius of Citizen.” And, man-o-man, did the brand not disappoint.
Over the course of the week, we visited just two of the brand’s impressive 17 factories located throughout Japan’s breathtaking landscape, merely brushing the surface of Citizen’s deeply rooted watchmaking prowess and the people behind it.
Dials Made at the Base of Mount Fuji
Given Citizen’s decade-over-decade growth, the brand is vigilant about updating and expanding its facilities. Our areas of focus were the Kawaguchiko Factory, its dial factory, which is scenically located near Mount Fuji, and the Saku Factory, its movement factory, situated in Nagano, Japan.
Arriving at the Kawaguchiko Factory is the stuff you dream of when you think of a Japanese watchmaker – an industrial building set in a picturesque scene straight out of a postcard. The beauty of the surroundings extends into the facilities, where many of the dials reflect the vibrant colors of the country and Japanese culture, from washi paper and Fujifilm to more traditional mother-of-pearl and lacquer.
However, for Citizen, the art of dial making is not just aesthetic; it’s a crucial part of the functionality of its Eco-Drive watches, where the degree of the dial’s transparency or opacity is vital for the brand’s signature light-powered technology to function properly.
In fact, most of these dials require an elaborate 15-step process to complete, including injection molding, pad pressing, screen printing, laser cutting, and final steps such as applying indices, all done by hand. One expert is assigned to execute each step, meaning roughly 15 sets of hands touch each dial Citizen produces.
Calibres for Citizens of the World
The Saku Factory is one of the newest additions to the Citizen family, opening just a decade ago in 2016 and housing the production of Miyota quartz movements, Eco-Drive movements, and mechanical calibres for Citizen’s own watches as well as the countless other brands it supplies.
Designed thoughtfully from the outside in, just like each of Citizen’s watches, the facilities are the brainchild of a team of both traditional architects and landscape architects combining 26,000 trees, shrubs, and flowers of 110 species with strategically placed buildings forming a circular shape that mimics the form of a movement when viewed from above.
From the moment you enter the building, the experience is equally remarkable, with the movement motif continued through a stunning art installation dubbed “Light is Time,” consisting of 25,000 mainplates hanging from the ceiling in a thoughtful arrangement.
Behind the doors of the beautiful entryway, you’ll find over 80,000 square meters of factory floor operating 24 hours per day, thanks to the roughly 200 employees who work around the clock in three shifts, with the final assembly and quality assurance carried out by just 22 highly trained individuals.
The Soul of Watchmaking
You’ll notice the emphasis I continue to place on the people – I haven’t yet mentioned the machines. This was perhaps one of the most surprising and striking elements of visiting Citizen’s facilities: Even at a mass scale, the brand ensures that hand-done work is an essential part of watchmaking.
“When we’re deciding if we’re going to use a machine or do work by hand, it really comes down to weighing cost and quality because we want to keep our products accessible and well-made,” explained Shoichiro Morita, a leading movement engineer at Citizen. “We’ve developed a great deal of our own machinery since our early days when we began producing our own parts, and here, there’s a bigger upfront cost, but long term, this helps us to produce high volumes. For things done by hand,” he continued, “we must invest in upfront and continued training to carry out this work – we weigh all these factors.”
Part of Citizen’s success lies in its ability to constantly refine its workflow. Rather than fully replacing machines or building new ones, the brand takes great care to perform regular maintenance and upgrade existing machines with modern components whenever possible, enhancing the efficiency and lifespan of its production line.
For example, lines can now produce three to four different types of movements, with the time for switchovers reduced from 90 minutes to 15 minutes. On the handcraft side of the business, training programs can range from 3 months to several years, depending on the skill.
Considering the statistics around Citizen’s sheer production volume of both watches and movements, as well as the brand’s perceived reputation in the market, I expected the experience of visiting its factories to be cold and sterile with highly automated production lines, lacking the warmth and finesse of smaller independent brands still performing many tasks at the workbench. I was blown away to discover my assumptions were entirely wrong – don’t judge a book (or in this case a watchmaker) by its cover.
To learn more about the brand’s watches and technologies, check out the Citizen website.