You will have to excuse this part of the stickfight rant, golf tees personalized as I am ratted. “Some customers have questioned us if Connected would work well with an iPhone. The new Calibre E4 range runs Google’s Wear OS 2 version (a Wear OS 3 update is coming later in 2022)-all the more reason for Tag Heuer to tout its own companion app for those customers. A range of watch faces means you can create a more traditional luxury watch look, but there are more modern options too. You don’t get the apparently never-ending customization range offered by Apple Watch and its straps, but Tag Heuer does offer plenty of variety for its Connected range. It’s a smart move when many are turning to Apple Watch’s Fitness app for on-wrist exercise advice-especially when you consider that 70 percent of Tag Heuer Connected users have iPhones, rather than Android devices. Liam Casey’s Chinese factories make products for Apple and Beats.

It’s Casey’s 18-year-old business, PCH International, that indirectly employs these and 25,000 other industrial workers in China — as well as 4,100 directly employed staff in Shenzhen — to make high-spec consumer electronics, computer, medical, telecom and other technology products for companies such as Apple, Beats by Dre and a well-known payments company. Again, seemingly superfluous extra stages have been built in to the production line to optimise quality: small lint cloths are temporarily inserted below the cellophane wrapping of major-brand headphones, to protect the box from scratching, before other workers subsequently remove them; another pair of workers hand-cuts the corners from the cellophane wrapping, so that it will heat-shrink to a cleaner seal. Water resistant to 30 metres, this is a surprisingly sporty piece from Patek for the more traditional Calatrava line. The arrival of Patek’s new Calatrava caught many by surprise considering the company said it wasn’t going to release any new watches this year. Built to mark the opening of the Patek’s new production building in Plan-les-Ouates on the outskirts of Geneva, the limited edition 6007A-001 Calatrava has a 40mm polished steel case and blue dial encasing the Caliber 324 S C self-winding movement with a power reserve of 45 hours.

This week, TAG launched three additions to the line that introduce new colours as well as a new Helios watch face: two stainless-steel options with a deep blue ceramic bezel and either a steel bracelet or blue rubber strap, and a third option of lightweight sand-blasted titanium on a black rubber strap. The first thing you notice about the production line is how many pernickety, pedantic steps the factory has added to the apparently straightforward process of making a mass-market consumer-electronics accessory. He tells his local driver, in English, that the next stop is Shenzhen’s Futian free-trade zone, where PCH does indeed own two facilities, amounting to about 90,000m2: they belong to a packaging subsidiary called China Turnkey Solutions (CTS) where, as he puts it, “we manage the whole out-of-the-box experience for brands.” Up to 3,700 workers in two buildings pack up to a million units a week, making CTS Futian’s largest employer. The workers here, about 800 in a six-storey building, are mostly young Chinese migrants to the metastatising metropolis who sleep in dormitories just across the street when they are not making accessories and products for a range of big-brand clients.

So pause a moment to celebrate the ornately overthought workmanship being built this dusty December afternoon into one under-appreciated premium accessory in a buzzing, yet strangely voice-free, Shenzhen factory floor: the young woman whose sole task is to place masking tape temporarily over a metal joint in the one-in-a-thousand event of a glue drop spilling; the twentysomething man wearing glasses who hand-aligns components inside custom die-cut moulds more tenderly than any industrial robot; the woman responsible simply for ensuring that the manufacturer’s slogan is laser-etched at just the right depth on a seam hidden underneath the finished product. You’ll recognise the finished product — you’ve doubtless stroked it, folded it, felt it satisfyingly snap into place, lifted its tactile form before flicking it thoughtlessly aside for the more urgent task of assaulting clans, curating playlists, enhancing selfies. You can find much more competitive prices for high-quality umbrella products. You’ll find the latest western toys like Lego and Barbie alongside the hottest video games and electronics. Their orders on major western retailers’ websites appear instantaneously on monitors here in Shenzhen.PCH’s warehouse inventory software, PackFlo, generates an ID number for each customer’s cardboard box, prints an address sticker with local return address and a packing note, and sends that box to a wall built of numbered containers each containing a distinct product or component.