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A big American retailer calls the watchmaker shortage the industry's biggest structural problem

Burdeen's is putting 7,000 square feet behind the argument, but the training numbers show the bottleneck is not recruitment, it is bench space.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 3 min read · 16 August 2026

• Matthew Burdeen of Burdeen's Jewelry has told Watch Insider that the shortage of qualified watchmakers is one of the industry's biggest structural problems.
• American training programmes are tiny by design: the Watch Technology Institute states it takes an average of 10 to 12 students a year.
• Demand for places is not the constraint, with Fortune reporting 560 applicants for 27 spots at Rolex's Dallas training centre in 2024.

A retailer says the quiet part

Every few months somebody in the trade says out loud what most of us have worked out from the other end, which is that getting a watch serviced has become slow in a way that has nothing to do with parts. This week it was Matthew Burdeen, chief executive of Burdeen's Jewelry in Chicago, who told Watch Insider in an interview that the shortage of qualified watchmakers is, in his words, "probably one of the biggest structural problems in the watch industry".

The argument he makes is a simple piece of arithmetic. According to that interview, people entering the profession are barely replacing the watchmakers retiring out of it, while watch sales have grown enough to push service demand past what the existing bench capacity can absorb. Two curves moving in opposite directions, and no amount of enthusiasm from the customer side changes either of them. Burdeen's own response is to spend money on it: the company is building a 7,000 square foot facility for watchmaking, service and operations, due in 2027.

The numbers behind the complaint are small on purpose

What makes this worth more than a shrug is how tiny the intake actually is once you go and look. The Watch Technology Institute at North Seattle College, one of the better-known American programmes, states on its own site that it accepts an average of 10 to 12 students a year, that the certificate runs eight quarters, and that graduates have seen an 87 per cent employment rate over the past five cohorts. It also notes, drily, that employers frequently contact the school about openings.

Ten to twelve a year. That is a rounding error against the number of watches sold in a week, and it is not a failure of the school, it is what training a watchmaker properly costs in time and bench space. The programmes are small because they have to be, and the trade has never solved the problem of scaling something that requires one person standing over another person's shoulder for two years.

The demand side is not short of interest either. Fortune reported earlier this year that more than 560 people applied for 27 places at the Rolex watchmaking training centre in Dallas in 2024, which is not the application ratio of a profession nobody wants to enter. That is the detail that reframes the whole conversation: the bottleneck is not recruitment, it is capacity to teach.

Where this actually lands, for us

The consequence arrives on the customer side as a wait. A service that takes months rather than weeks, an independent watchmaker who has closed their books, a brand that will not release parts to the person down the road who could have done it faster. We have written before about why your local watchmaker cannot get the parts, and the two problems compound: restricting parts to authorised networks concentrates all the work onto the smallest possible number of benches, at exactly the moment there are not enough of those benches to go around.

Burdeen's point is that retailers and brands have to fund training and build career paths worth choosing, rather than treating service as a cost centre that somebody else will staff. That is easy to say and expensive to do, and the retailers with the scale to do it are the ones least likely to feel the pain first. Still, a jeweller putting seven thousand square feet behind the argument is a more interesting statement than another panel discussion about the future of the industry.

The uncomfortable version of this, and the one nobody in the trade says on the record, is that the shortage is partly a pricing signal that has not been allowed to work. If servicing were priced at what the scarcity of the skill actually implies, more people would train for it, and rather fewer of us would be sending a three-thousand-dollar watch back to Switzerland for a clean. I am not sure I would enjoy living in that world either. But it is worth noticing that we have collectively decided the wait is more tolerable than the bill.