It often shows up, heavily modified, as brand-specific variants. It’s an off-the-shelf standard for third-party watch companies. The ETA 2824-2, available for a long while from the Swatch Group, has long been regarded as the workhorse caliber to judge all others. But let’s start gently enough with a caliber we can all agree has some real horsepower.ĮTA 2824-2/Sellita SW200-1 - Mainstays of the industryĮven if you don’t own one, you certainly know what it is. These blurred lines play a large part in the world of workhorses. More so, as the watch industry changes and grows, definitions for “independent”, “in-house” and “expensive” are also shifting. But to get a lay of the land, we’ll need to look at many different calibers, some of which you might not consider eligible.

Can only off-the-shelf movements be workhorses? Can companies make their own proprietary workhorse movements? How expensive is too expensive? I’m not attempting to write a treatise on watch lexicon here (there are enough of those articles already).

The definition changes from person to person, with many a heated debate stemming merely from semantics. To answer that, we might start with trying to define what a workhorse movement actually is. All this begs the question: what is the future of workhorse movements? And new proprietary calibers are redefining the specs we’ve come to expect from “standard” movements. Seiko is actively shifting the price of its 6RXX movement family into Swiss workhorse territory.

Established but previously lesser-known movement manufacturers like Soprod are coming onto the scene. Sure, we’re familiar with the old standards like the ETA 2824-2 and copycat Sellita SW200-1, but the landscape is changing. Whether you love that one or hate this one, as a genre, they power the vast majority of watches made.

Seiko ne calibre watches