Today’s Collector Conversation is with Wesley Smith, founder of Standard H, an automotive-inspired clothing brand. Wesley has worked in fashion and menswear for 30 years, and he’s also a big watch enthusiast.

During his recent visit to Chicago, we sat down to talk about both. First, we get nerdy about t-shirts. The simplest garment there is, but dozens of decisions go into making one, whether it’s from Uniqlo, Buck Mason, or Standard H. How can you tell if it’s a good t-shirt? Besides his own, what’s Wesley’s favorite?

Then we talk watches. What bugs us about the Lange Saxonia Annual Calendar; how to fix IWC; loud rotors; a TAG Heuer Carrera we’ve both owned; the spec sheet-ification of watches; the problem with most midsize watches; and more. The first ~20 minutes are clothing talk, then we get into watches.

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Show Notes

• Standard H website; on Instagram

• Standard H Avant t-shirt

• Real Review: Lange Saxonia Annual Calendar

• TAG Heuer CS3111 Carrera Re-edition from 1996

• My TAG Heuer Carrera ‘Glassbox’ Week on the Wrist

• Barrelhand

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• In today’s email: Why there's nowhere to try on a Royal Oak; Bulgari built its own movement while everyone else went shopping; Nobody's made a real midsize flagship, and Piaget should; Seiko is making more money than Richemont's watch division.

• I’m still working my way through Watch Brothers London’s guide to Saatchi and Vintage Collection Patek Philippe, but it’s worth the time.

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1/ All these events are good, but where can I try on a Royal Oak (or Alpine Eagle)?

There are SO many events this fall, it seems like my entire IG feed is either AI or someone promoting something they’ll be doing somewhere. To list a few:

I’m probably missing some local shows. Many of these have popped up even since I published the Great Big Watch Calendar earlier this year.

It’s obvious to point out that in-person is the new luxury, and that’s especially the case with watches, physical objects that need to be held to be understood. Brands want to meet customers IRL, and it’s also a way for us creators/influencers to try to make some $$.

And community is an excellent thing, but I also wonder if watches are uniquely good at delivering it. Like, you could also go to church or play intramural softball or something. Is the watch a ticket, or is it the main attraction?

Separate but related, two recent interactions:

• A subscriber reached out because they were visiting Chicago for the weekend from a small (but lovely!) Midwest town and asked for tips on where to try on a Royal Oak. Good question, sadly without a good answer. The closest AP boutique is 718 miles away.

• I was going back and forth with another local enthusiast about the Chopard XPS Alpine Eagle “Mountain Glow.” How does it wear?, they wondered. It’s hard to explain because it’s 41mm, but the effective lug-to-lug is longer since the first bracelet link doesn’t articulate. Sadly, the closest Chopard Boutique is 523 miles away.

Look, if you’re traveling from flyover country to pay your respects at Journe, I get it’s part of the experience to make the pilgrimage to Miami or L.A., explain your unrivaled passion for Mssr. Journe, get spat on, and head home. But for pretty much every other brand, asking someone to travel just to try on your watches is a lot. (Especially when another watch newsletter is nailing complaints about retailers to the door like the 95 Theses once you do walk into those ADs.)

Right now, some brands would rather parachute in for a pop-up. It generates content from collectors and influencers, and maybe that’s all that matters. But it comes out of the marketing budget, and I’d be careful not to mistake all that content for actually getting to know a local collector base.

2/ A midsize postscript

In last week’s piece, I unfortunately forgot to include the new Bulgari Octo Finissimo 37 (it’s since been added). It may be the most instructive example of a larger point I wanted to convey. While many brands (IWC, Parmigiani, AP, Vacheron) looked to existing movements to power their midsize offerings, some didn’t. Rolex, Moser, Bulgari, all took time to build their own. It’s no coincidence these are also the ones that were “late” to the party.

Taking the time to develop your own movement instead of hopping on a trend and quickly finding a caliber to match is worthy of praise. For years we asked, where is the smaller Bulgari Octo Finissimo?? The watch is cool but the 40 wears like a gladiator’s cuff.

We finally got the answer this year, and it was worth the wait.

Despite dropping the diameter to 37 (and the movement itself is 5mm smaller!), Bulgari actually managed to increase the power reserve from 60 to 72 hours (both run at 3 Hz). In his article for 1916 Company, points out this was done by increasing the height of the mainspring to improve torque. Further:

“In the BVF 100 [the movement in the OF 37], the ratchet wheel is made of spring steel, and clipped into position. This reduces the thickness of the ratchet wheel and allows a taller mainspring without an increase in thickness overall, which contributes to the longer power reserve.”

There’s also the price: $16,600 in bead-blasted titanium, comfortably below offerings from Moser, AP, Vacheron, and others. Bulgari knows its place and is owning it.

The Finissimo 37 is still a bit wide for me, but I wouldn’t be mad if that new Minute Repeater 37 chimed in my backswing.

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3/ Give me a ‘flagship’ midsize watch

Last week’s study also showed that there’s a wide-open lane for a true flagship midsize integrated bracelet.

What I mean: Beyond the direct comps like the Royal Oak 37 vs. 41 (or Overseas 34.5 vs. 41), some brands offer a “flagship” with specs and finishing above and beyond: the Audemars Piguet RO Jumbo 16202 or Vacheron Ultra-thin Overseas 2500V. Elsewhere:

• The closest midsize flagship is probably Vacheron Constantin’s 222 at 37mm, but not quite. You could also argue the Land-Dweller 36 is the best expression of the current model, since, as commenters pointed out last week, Rolex could’ve used the extra mms in the 40 to beef up power reserve.

• One most notable exception: Patek Philippe’s 5610/1P, the 38mm Nautilus 50th Anniversary using the caliber 240. But that was also limited to 2,000 pieces and about as obtainable as a direct answer from ChatGPT (Patek also offered the 5810/1G as a companion in 41mm).

No brand has had the conviction to invest in a true midsize flagship, instead sizing down mainly as a hedge. One that I think is well-equipped to deliver: Piaget.

The modern Polo79 is technically 38mm, but that thing’s an absolute gold brick. The vintage Polo was 34mm, quartz, and slim as an AmEx.

Piaget is all about elegance and ultra-thin, and leaning into that for a refined 36mm Polo79 could bring its modern watches into the collector conversation (under $100k would also be nice). They could even do it in the old rectangular shape.

4/ Seiko and Citizen 📈

Here’s my semi-regular reminder to pay more attention to Seiko and Citizen. Seiko published some financials last week: it’s estimated to sell ~$1.5b of watches this year, up 33% over last year.

Enthusiasts complain about price increases, but the business is working: It’s going to make 2x the profit of Richemont’s watch division, and the stock is up 4x over the past year.

While the Swiss have spent the past decade making their watches harder to buy and calling it desirability, Seiko’s selling watches simply by being available. After all, there’s a reason 11 of the 14 best sellers on Teddy’s website are Seikos.

Citizen Group is no different. And maybe it’s the last gasp of summer, but I’ve been into cheap watches recently. I briefly saw the new Citizen Promaster Dive at Windup Chicago, so just requested a sample. It’s the first time I’ve ever requested anything from Citizen.

Any talk of a slowdown in watches is really myopically focused on a few of the mid-luxury European brands.

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5/ Microsnobbery is in

And old-fashioned snobbery is out, according to the Washington Post:

“Every snob, I’ve noticed, seems to come paired with a reverse snob: someone equally certain of their superiority, but convinced that theirs is about authenticity, not status.”

Taste has become democratic, and everything is acceptable, so everyone invents their own standards of exclusion instead of subscribing to some handed-down truth.

This happens in watches all the time.

Read more

Just think about all the midsize time-telling integrated bracelets we’ve gotten over the past few years:

• Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF 36 (2022)

• Vacheron Constantin Overseas 34.5 (2023)

• Rolex Land-Dweller (36 w/ 40mm in 2025);

• IWC Ingenieur 35 (2025);

• H. Moser Streamliner 34 (2026);

• Girard-Perregaux Laureato Fifty 36 (2026)

• Bulgari Octo Finissimo 37 (2026)

Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe have long offered a range of sizes for the Royal Oak and Nautilus. We could name others, down to the ubiquitous Tissot PRX.

These midsizers are often advertised—and priced—as the sized-down equivalent of their big brothers. For example, the Vacheron Constantin Overseas 41mm is $29,200 and the 34.5mm is $26,600.

But are they really the same? Salim () recently noted the discrepancy between Overseas movements:

• 41mm (cal. 5100): Geneva Seal, 60-hour power reserve

• 34.5mm (cal. 1088/1): non-Geneva Seal, 40-hour power reserve

The caliber 1088 is compact and industrial, based on a Richemont-owned ValFleurier movement. In addition to better performance, the larger caliber 5100 shows the hallmarks of high-end industrial finishing and architecture:

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Similarities: Both have a soft iron casing ring to increase anti-magnetism. Both movements are index-regulated: the cal. 1088 has an Etachron-style regulator, while the cal. 5100’s regulator is built and finished to meet the Geneva Seal.

Finishing: The cal. 5100 has twin barrels; a more complex bridge architecture with wide, polished anglage; mirror-polished screw and jewel sinks, along with polished screws. In contrast, the ValFleurier cal. 1088 has a simpler layout with narrower bevels and unpolished countersinks. The cal. 5100’s Geneva stripes are crisp and broad, giving the entire movement more of a glow:

Movements are just one part of a watch, and with integrated bracelets, fit and finish of the case and bracelet are also important. We want the design, the vibe, the tie to Gerald Genta (or whoever).1 But movements still matter.

Many of you know my penchant for smaller watches, so I get asked about these a lot. Many/most brands didn’t start taking midsize watches seriously again until a few years ago. That meant finding external or shared suppliers—Vaucher and ValFleurier appear a few times below—for movements to fit these slimmed-down dimensions.

And that means trade-offs.

Take Audemars Piguet: When AP updated the Royal Oak in 2022, it chose the calibers 5800/5900 for the midsize. They’re based on Vaucher movements, the same used by the Parmigiani Tonda PF 36. But they were chosen for their thinness—just 3.9mm—compared to the AP caliber 3120 (4.26mm) in the previous generation. Thinness is more important than some blind obligation to “in-house,” so it’s a reasonable trade-off.

But does the price follow? The Royal Oak 37 is 95% the price of the 41. The Overseas, Tonda PF, and Ingenieur are ~90% of their full-size counterparts. The Streamliner 34 costs exactly the same as the Streamliner 40. One brand charges 93% and gives you the exact same caliber—no compromise. You can probably guess which one wears that Crown.

But that’s just one percentage. The other one is harder to put a number on: How much watch are you actually getting?

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DIFFERENT MOVEMENT, REAL DOWNGRADE

Vacheron Constantin Overseas

41mm ($29,200) vs. 34.5mm ($26,600; 91% of full-size price): As discussed, the Overseas 41 features the top-line cal. 5100, the only movement in our survey with the Geneva Seal—an external set of requirements largely related to finishing and available to watches made in Geneva. The cal. 1088 is serviceable, but it’s a clear step down from the cal. 5100.

IWC Ingenieur

A performance compromise

Read more

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In the Field

The “field watch” is my favorite kind of watch. It’s not a complication like a chronograph. Unlike dive watches, there’s no generally accepted ISO definition. It’s based on the old military-spec watches for forces in the field, foot soldiers far greater in number than divers or pilots—matte dial, hacking seconds, Arabic numerals.

The field watch is, frankly, kinda boring.

There’s often an inverse relationship between price and execution. Timex manages a better field watch than Patek Philippe. The most expensive field watches ever sold at auction are far cheaper than record-breaking divers or chronographs. A handful of Rolexes with mountaineering provenance have reached six figures—or a rare white “albino” Explorer—but that’s about it.

I recently talked about a few of my favorite field watches from Rolex, Hamilton, and IWC on the YouTube channel—

But when I think field watches, I think Hamilton. On July 4, I wrote about the rise and fall of the American watch industry. While the Swiss industry began to dominate in the early 20th century, Hamilton still produced more than 1 million timepieces for the American military during World War II, from wristwatches to marine chronometers. After the War, it continued to make simple mil-spec watches for the many troops fighting the many conflicts of the new global superpower.

But the Swiss franc enjoyed a low exchange rate post-WWII until 1973, making its watch exports very competitive.

Hamilton shut down its Lancaster, Pa. manufacturer in 1969, then Swatch Group (SSIH) acquired the brand in 1974. The Swiss conglomerate introduced the Khaki Field collection for civilians in the 1980s—33mm watches inspired by those mid-century military-issued watches.

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What Hamilton kept

It’s odd that Hamilton’s never really produced a 36mm Khaki Field, which I’d argue is the Perfect Size for a field watch. The standard Khaki Field Mechanical measures 38mm, but has a lug-to-lug that spans the length of a dachshund.

On the rare occasion Hamilton has made a 36mm Khaki Field, I’ve scooped it up, and that Engineered Garments limited edition is my favorite modern Khaki Field.

That is, until this year’s Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical 250, a special edition to mark the U.S.’s 250th anniversary. The 250 comes in two flavors:

• A limited edition of 1,776 that comes with an extra leather NATO strap and watch roll; and

• A non-limited edition that doesn’t come with those extras but is otherwise the same. It’ll be produced just for 2026.

Both are $725, and you can still buy the non-limited version at retailers or online.

The 250 is based on the Hamilton FAPD 5101, which was produced for one glorious month, September 1970—the same month Ford introduced the Pinto—and issued to navigators in the U.S. Air Force.

The FAPD 5101 was basically a souped-up version of Hamilton’s existing military-issued watches (built to spec MIL-W-46374). It’s a larger 36mm parkerized case that’s dull and corrosion-resistant; fixed lugs; an acrylic domed crystal; hacking movement adjusted to better accuracy than those other mil-specs—these were for high-flying navigators, after all, not your average infantryman.

Specs: Hamilton faithfully recreated all these features in the 250: 36mm (46mm lug-to-lug), 10.2mm thick, 100m water resistance (an improvement over the standard 50m), 18mm lugs, delivered on a soft cotton-canvas NATO strap with leather keepers. Hamilton’s 80-hour caliber H50 is inside, and there’s even a dust cover in a nod to the original.

The matte case mimics parkerization, the faux-aged lume works, and the syringe hands have a more dramatic taper than the standard Khaki Field.

The biggest difference compared to the original FAPD is the Hamilton wordmark at 12 o’clock, of course not on the old military watches. Hamilton uses a period-appropriate italic font that’s more squared-off than its modern logo. A solid choice, but man I would’ve loved to see Hamilton have the cojones to eschew a logo altogether or put it down at 6 o’clock.

No doubt about it, this is a watch for enthusiasts. Hamilton takes just a couple of liberties from the original:

• Lug width: The 250 is 18mm, while the original FAPD was 16mm. It’s a fine choice—the 18mm width already feels slightly narrow with the long lugs.

• Seconds hand: The other thing that stands out is the large lollipop counter-balance on the seconds hand. It’s bigger than the original, and the only component that really feels like Hamilton took from the standard 38mm Khaki and slapped into the 250.

On the Wrist

I borrowed a friend’s Khaki Field 250 for the better part of a month, and found myself reaching for it all the time. It’s the perfect summer watch. I swam, ran, biked, and generally galavanted around with it.

There’s no screw-down crown, which any Redditor would scream at you is the Khaki Field’s original sin, but I find manually-wound movements and screw-down crowns fundamentally at odds with all that screwing/ unscrewing.

The boxed, domed, acrylic (plastic) crystal is perfect for the 250. The biggest flaw of modern Khakis is the flat sapphire crystal, which makes a vintage-inspired tool feel unmistakably modern. In some of my photos, you can even see the scuffs that accumulate on the crystal, easily buffed out with toothpaste or Polywatch. A domed crystal also adds something to the overall shape that I think makes most watches better. It feels more organic, sloping naturally instead of ending abruptly.

The cotton strap is softer and more comfy than any NATO—this is why I sell a cotton canvas in the Unpolished Store, and if Hamilton sold this material as a two-piece strap, I’d have some competition—and doesn’t tilt too far into military cosplay for me in the way NATOs do. It’s not as long, so there’s no tail to tuck into the keeper. I found the limited-edition leather NATO unwearable, obscuring the lovely, compact dimensions of the 250.

The fixed bars are a practical mark against the 250, but that’s also the point. Hamilton was right to include them, and plenty of custom makers can make straps for fixed bars.

Will I buy it? $725 for the platonic ideal of a field watch isn’t a big ask in 2026. That said, I already have, by my count, 6 field watches, one of which is another Hamilton, so I need another one like the Dodgers needed Tarik Skubal.

Nothing to add

Most Swiss watches today trade on luxury and heritage. We call some of them “tool watches,” but that’s mostly a reference to a long-gone history of actually using them to do something.

The field watch is different. You can dress up a diver or chronograph in gold or diamonds and it still kinda works. But dress up a field watch too much, and it becomes something else, too fancy to really be for the field.

That’s why the Khaki Field 250 works. Hamilton didn’t add anything—it went back to September 1970 and took away what worked back then.

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Let me know if you enjoyed this review, and which watches you’d like to see next. Thanks to my friend Dan for letting me borrow his 250 for the better part of a month.

Get in touch:

• tony[at]unpolishedwatches.com

• Instagram

• My favorite, tap the heart or leave a comment ❤️

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John says his collecting philosophy is that “a collection should tell a story. He’s got a different approach to acquisition—he buys watches, usually mid-century chronographs, in pairs. He looks to pair the steel tool watch with its dressier counterpart.

We talk about what you learn that you might not otherwise by hunting pairs; why John loves these boomer chronographs; how he’s seen watch collecting evolve over 30+ years; what he thinks about all these little dress watches; and a whole lot more. John’s from my hometown of Indianapolis, so it was a pleasure to have him on to talk watches.

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I’m going to continue publishing these shorter ‘collector conversations’ in between full podcast episodes—let me know if you’re enjoying them, and what other topics you’d like to see covered.

Show Notes

• John Cote on Instagram

• The Boomer Watch Is On Sale, Unpolished

• American Pocket Watches: A Primer For The Wristwatch Collector, John’s article on Hodinkee

• A Very American Way to Lose an Industry, Unpolished

• NAWCC Forums

• John’s Wittnauer chronograph pair—he wore the black dial when we chatted:

“The art we keep will stay in the canon; the art we discard will be lost to history. A tiny proportion of the art we inherit will be treasured and valued, and a bit more will find a good home elsewhere, perhaps slowly accumulating historical value even if it loses cultural cachet. But most of it will probably acquire signs of physical deterioration and neglect.”

This applies to watches, too, and it’s one reason to be thoughtful about what we collect. Because the stuff we don’t keep, the stuff we overlook or simply miss, that’s what’s lost.

In today’s letter: The most impressive dive watch ever made is 40 years old, sub-$10k, and I sure hope it isn’t forgotten. (Also, if you squint, you can find its DNA in a modern Moser.)

ICYMI

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Porsche Design created some of the most innovative watches in the world in the 1980s and 90s. Today, it’s basically caught in the middle of making watches for (1) Porsche guys to match to their cars (mostly corny), or (2) watch guys who are nostalgic for those 80s-90s watches (sometimes corny).

Chris, aka , recently put together an excellently researched piece on the history of Porsche Design.

It starts with a bit of myth busting, always fun—dubious origin dates, model names, founder stories. But beyond any myth, Porsche Design’s contribution to watches is very real. Read his whole piece.

It’s easy to undervalue Porsche Design because it was a design studio—not watchmakers, manufacturers, or craftspeople. It didn’t exactly do anything first, even though it was successful with early commercialization of titanium and blacked-out watches. As Chris writes:

“It wasn’t production control Porsche Design was seeking. It was creative control.”

This is why its 20-year partnership with IWC, from 1978 through 1997, represented its creative peak. IWC provided the production and watchmaking. Günter Blümlein, at the helm, was a commercial genius with an eye for creative talent.

To me, this is best illustrated with one watch: the Ocean 2000. I haven’t found a decent guide detailing the evolution of dials, bracelets, and design so here it is.

💸 There are also a few on the market right now, featured at the end for paid subscribers.

The Ocean 2000; or, how is the most innovative diver ever made 40 years old?

The IWC / Porsche Design Ocean 2000 was officially introduced to the public at 1983’s Basel Fair. However, a Porsche Design press release announced it in 1981, and PD sold it through its own channels for a couple of years.

The Ocean 2000 was originally built to meet German Navy (Bund) specs, and these military-issued examples are particularly collectible—distinguished by a flat sapphire crystal, black bezel, and orange hand.

Specs: They’re impressive: 2,000 meters of water resistance at 42mm diameter and only ~11mm thick.1 Push-to-turn bezel. Titanium case and bracelet, a case shape that’s UFO-meets-pebble, but a stark design to remind you it’s German. Fluid and futuristic in a Disney World Tomorrowland sort of way.

Modern comps: I can’t think of a modern watch that matches these specs in an equally compact package?

The Ocean 2000’s bracelet is unmistakable. A few weeks ago, I put a question to followers: What’s the most recognizable watch bracelet ever?

I expected about five answers (three of them being Rolex bracelets), and I was mostly right, but one answer with multiple responses surprised me: The Ocean 2000.2

That hidden-lug, integrated bracelet design, with the bead-blasted titanium wrapping around your wrist like an armadillo giving you a hug.

This bracelet was also one of the Ocean 2000’s weak points and underwent multiple redesigns, resulting in four distinct styles—more on those below.

First, let’s look at the Ocean 2000’s evolution—

Ref. 3500 (Early 80s)

• ‘Porsche Design’ only. The earliest examples, produced in the early 80s before IWC officially introduced the Ocean 2000 as part of its own lineup.

• Script: When IWC added the Ocean 2000 to its lineup, it featured script IWC, International Watch Co., Schaffhausen at 12 o’clock (the “Fadenscrift”), and Porsche Design at 6 o’clock.

• Bracelet: Geometry 1 or 2 (more below)

• Collector’s tip: The market doesn’t always get that those early Porsche Design-only Ocean 2000s are rare and only made for a couple of years, so sometimes you can scoop one up for the same price as a later example. Because of the clean look and history, I think these Porsche Design-only Ocean 2000s should get higher prices.

Ref. 3504 (mid-80s to Early 90s)

• Dial: IWC / Porsche Design dual branding lockup at 12.

• Bracelet: Geo 2/3 (service swaps can also muddy these timelines)

Ref. 3524 (1990s)

• Dial: Inverted Porsche Design by IWC branding (don’t you love the jostling of corporate egos in the dial evolution??).

• Bracelet: Geo 3/4

Lume note: The Ocean 2000 uses tritium lume until the very latest ref. 3524s, which use Luminova. That means most dials are signed T Swiss Made T, and Swiss Made can tip you off to a service dial. I see a lot of bezels with relumed triangles.

Ocean 500: The mid-size option

• Introduced shortly after the Ocean 2000, the Ocean 500 (refs. 3502/ 3503) is the 34mm counterpart, with its lesser water resistance also in the name. Still pretty impressive for a midsize diver. Dial variants follow the same general pattern as the Ocean 2000. There’s also a two-tone version that’s pretty ugly in a 90s TAG Heuer kinda way.

• It’s the one I want! While the Ocean 2000 has a sleek look, the bracelet means it wears larger—I’ve tried on a few, and I’d bet the effective lug-to-lug is 50mm+.

The Ocean Grails

In 1985, IWC began experimenting with a new titanium blackening process called TiCon and produced a few Ocean 2000s and 500s with this process. It quickly realized the thin coating would wear off and it couldn’t be easily reapplied. Super rare watches today.

Know your Ocean bracelets

On the Ocean 2000, bracelet evolution is almost as important as the watch itself:

• Geometry 1 (Early 3500): One push pin in the center, with links held together by a spring-loaded pin. A paperclip could be used to remove links.

  • Problem: These spring-loaded pins wore down or corroded over time.

• Geo 2: Held together by two metal pins. A special claw tool was provided to remove links, but still had the same durability problem as Geo 1. Introduced 1984.

  • Fun fact: Lothar Schmidt is listed as the inventor on the patent for this design. Schmidt would go on to acquire Sinn in 1994.3

• Geo 3 (Ref. 3504): Solid pins. The full set came with a special tool to remove links, but other tools can be used today. Introduced 1991.

• Geo 4 (ref. 3524): Same pin system as Geo 3, but the gaps between links are smaller. Introduced 1997.

Straps, too: The Ocean 2000 could also be delivered on a Velcro strap with a special titanium end link. IWC forums suggest these end links can still be bought directly from IWC, but I’m not 100% sure.

Collector’s tip: In a service, IWC can change older Geo 1-2 bracelets to the latest Geo 4, but it requires swapping out the entire midcase. This seems to typically require a trip to Switzerland, which means more $$$. It’s the classic collector dilemma: Do you prioritize originality or practicality?

The End of Porsche Design and IWC

The very success of Porsche Design watches like the Ocean 2000 proved to be the undoing of its collaboration with IWC. Georges Kern, CEO of IWC, later said in a 2002 interview:

“[Porsche Design by IWC was] overshadowing the IWC brand and had reached a dangerous proportion.”

By the 1990s, “Porsche Design by IWC” had a hierarchy problem—the licensed name meant more than the manufacturer’s own. Porsche Design was 20% of IWC’s production. You can see it on the dials: IWC is up top in early refs, then a shared lockup, then by IWC is demoted to 6 o’clock in the final ref. 3524.

The Eterna Epilogue

Porsche Design also wanted more control. The Porsche family bought Eterna in 1995 to build its own in-house manufacture as the IWC partnership was winding down. It’s an odd, intriguing epilogue to IWC–Porsche Design. I’d mostly written this era off, but in that article Chris says he has a deep fondness for Eterna–PD as a clean expression of the original ethos at accessible prices. The ref. 6501.10 is the obvious successor to the Ocean 2000:

Both of them wanted more control, even though the partnership that made them both worth remembering was built on the opposite—each doing the one thing it did best and outsourcing the rest. That’s been the trajectory of the entire industry over the past few decades: everyone reaching for control over manufacturing, marketing, boutiques.

Today, some of the watches that remind me most of the old Porsche Design–IWC approach come from microbrands like Ming with uncompromising designers who mostly outsource the making. (Some are really marketing departments that market themselves as designers, but that’s another letter).

The Ocean 2000 showed how a real, military-issued diver didn’t have to look like a Milsub. It’s titanium, minimal, rated to 2000m, and still one coherent idea. Since the split, neither IWC nor Porsche Design has made anything half as interesting as the Ocean 2000.

A modern Moser footnote: I recently spent about a week wearing around the new H. Moser Streamliner 34. It’s one of the better renditions of the we’ve-gotta-do-a-sports watch—different enough that it’s not a Genta rehash. The shape and bracelet already reminded of the Porsche Design Ocean 2000, perhaps with a sprinkle of the Ebel Wave. Then, Justin Hast mentioned that a designer who worked at IWC in the 1990s works at Moser today. It’d certainly make sense, and there are only so many watch designers (and watch companies) in Schaffhausen.

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The Ocean 2000 Market Right Now

Here are 5 Ocean 2000s and 500s for sale right now:

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A few months ago, I ran a piece about what vintage dealers can’t sell right now. It’s one of the more popular newsletters this year, so here’s Part 2.

I asked a few more dealers the simple question: “What are some watches you’ve had listed for a while that no one’s paying attention to?”

Here’s what they said.

Geneva-based dealer Robin Mann said that his focus, vintage Rolex, has been slower, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to go deal hunting.

“It’s the optimal time to buy, but it’s easy to get lured into lower numbers and try to snag a deal,” Robin said. “The reality is that the best examples have largely held their value and still move reasonably quickly.”

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Mike Nouveau agreed. He told me that more affordable 1970s Cartier watches tend to move faster than earlier Paris-made Tanks from the 1950s or 60s. People come to him asking for the most accessible Cartier and can be surprised when a pre-70s Tank costs $15k+. Most Tanks kinda look the same, so it can be hard to convey the rarity and handmade quality compared to the Swiss-made watches of the 70s and later. (In 1972, the separate branches of Cartier London, New York, and Paris began to consolidate under a single umbrella, centralizing production in Switzerland and scaling up operations.)

Nobody Wants a Simple Lange

“Lange gets a lot of love for the Lange 1 and its more complicated models, but its entry-level pieces get less attention,” says Evan Jarzynski of Ticking Time Homme. He mentioned the old three-hand 215, 216, and 219 Saxonia series, in production from 2007–2024. “I’ve had two for sale over the past year, and both sat for months despite being priced attractively relative to the market.”

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Pratt (1938–2009) was a British watchmaker, known in collecting circles for his work with Urban Jürgensen in the 1980s and 90s, his friendship with George Daniels, The Oval, or the reconstruction of Harrison’s H4 chronometer. He was one of the finest watchmakers of his generation, completely committed to the craft of watch and clockmaking.

Mary Pratt grew up surrounded by her father’s work. Like any kid, she says she didn’t fully understand the magnitude of his work at the time, even if the watches and clocks in their home always seemed interesting.

Nowadays, she runs a production company in New York. But a few years ago, she began to discover and document her father’s work in earnest. Now, there’s a Wikipedia page for Derek Pratt. But for the more personal stories, Mary started a newsletter, The Watchmaker’s Daughter—covering his love of bicycles, weather vanes, or their shared affection for Swatch.

Pratt was a historian of the craft—fluent in the techniques of Breguet, Harrison, or Tompion—and intent on carrying forward the tradition. Horology is overly or at least improperly used today, but Pratt was a true horologist, dedicated to the measurement of time, and the design, construction, and preservation of timekeepers.

Pratt has become especially known for his work with Urban Jürgensen, where he was technical director from 1982–2005. He became particularly well-regarded for the guilloché dials he made, crafted with antique engine-turning machines.

When his workshop was cleared out after he died, drawers full of discarded dials were found. While they appeared perfect, close-up inspection revealed the smallest of errors that had caused Pratt to reject them.

But his dial work was just the surface.

The Oval pocket watch for Urban Jürgensen was Pratt’s masterpiece, which sold for $4.2m in 2024. He began work on the pocket watch in 1982, endeavoring to complete it all—case, dial, movement—by hand. The Oval movement features a tourbillon, detent escapement with remontoir (incorporated into the tourbillon cage, a first), thermometer, and moonphase. It wasn’t ultimately finished until 2005 by Kari Voutilainen.

Perhaps because of his mechanical inclination, Pratt also appreciated other quirky inventions: his Wankel-engine Mazda, Dursley Pedersen bicycles, or water clocks.

I recently caught up with Mary to talk about her father, his watchmaking, and what it’s like growing up when your dad has a standing Sunday morning phone call with George Daniels.

Excerpts from our conversation below.

The Ref is a weekly story about a sometimes-forgotten watch or moment in history. Previous editions:

• The Steel Lange That Was Never For Sale | Ref. 01

• A Very American Way to Lose an Industry | Ref. 06

• The Most Badass Watch You Can Buy | Ref. 07

On clocks in the house

“I never had any aspirations to become a watchmaker, but exposure to watches, craftsmanship, and antiques definitely shaped me and my interests. I was surrounded by clocks and watches growing up.

On the hour, the whole house would ring. When I was young, my dad did a fair amount of clock repair. His first workshop was a room in our apartment, and the whole house was filled with clocks he was working on or monitoring for accuracy.

It was a great education for my eye from a very young age. It gave me a curiosity about all kinds of beautiful objects, not just watches and clocks.”

On Derek’s friendship with George Daniels

“[Pratt and Daniels] had their Sunday morning phone calls, which were famous in the horology world. They spoke every Sunday morning for years. To me, these are just childhood memories. They’d send each other faxes of sketches. George could come across a bit gruff on the phone. Once he called, we’d see my dad two hours later, if we were lucky.

I remember meeting George Daniels, and he was rather intimidating. Gravelly voice, very serious, always dressed in the best tweed, everything tailored.

My dad had a nice, calm voice, a pleasant demeanor talking to George. They probably talked about horology 99% of the time, and the rest of it was cars, motorcycles, and bikes. He was in his element, and genuinely loved talking shop.

On the day I was sworn into the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, [clockmaker] Andrew King told me a story about how he and Daniels were visiting Derek. Derek spotted my sister and me across the footbridge, and went to say hello to us. Daniels was not too pleased about this—probably thinking something like who’s more important than I am.”

On Derek’s work with Urban Jürgensen

In the 1980s and 90s, he was very actively engaged with Urban Jürgensen as technical director. These were some of his most productive years and innovative years. He hand-built movements with hundreds of components. It’s where he developed his remontoir that used a Reuleaux triangle, a shape he’d long been fascinated by.

On other clocks she remembers

There was this medieval clockmaker, Liechti, that made simple, ornamental iron clocks with floral embellishments. He was quite fond of them, charmed by them. I remember these distinctly as a child!

On her relationship with her dad’s work

The fact that he was so respected by his peers—as a child I just knew him as my dad. As I grew older, it’s been amazing to realize the level of respect he was shown and continues to have in the arena of independent watchmakers, the incredible refinement in his craft. He always strived for absolute perfection and went to great lengths to get there.

His guilloché work stands out. It cost him a lot of time and energy, but it’s something he really valued. The level of perfection—and the number of pieces he rejected—is just staggering.

Find Mary at The Watchmaker’s Daughter.

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Further reading:

• Derek Pratt: The Forgotten Watchmaker, A Collected Man

• The Greatest Unknown Watchmaker—Derek Pratt, SJX

• Inside Derek Pratt’s Oval Pocket Watch, Phillips

• Remembering Derek Pratt, British Horological Institute

• Derek Pratt, The Complete Horologist, British Horological Institute

• Derek Pratt, Wikipedia

Get in touch:

• tony[at]unpolishedwatches.com

• Instagram

• Leave a comment or tap the heart if you enjoyed this post

In today’s newsletter: The latest episode of the Unpolished Podcast with David Concannon; an interview with a Rolex sales associate on what it’s really like to sell Rolex; Lorier watches are back and I talked to Worn & Wound about its acquisition; Tudor just did the best creator partnership I’ve ever seen; and Mark Cho wants to know your ideal watch size.

He’s Been to the Titanic 5 Times | Unpolished Podcast

David Concannon is today’s guest on the Unpolished Podcast. Find it below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It’ll also be on YouTube shortly (Amtrak WiFi not ideal for uploading a 56-minute episode).

David is an explorer, attorney, writer, and watch collector. He’s been on five dives to the Titanic, and led the expedition that recovered the Apollo engines that launched men to the Moon. He’s a member of The Explorers Club, the society that counts famous astronauts and mountaineers among its members.

As part of his membership, he works with Rolex on the Explorers Club Grant, which puts Rolex watches into the field. We talk about that program, what it’s like working closely with Rolex, his first watch, pairing watches with his expeditions, and a whole lot more.

It’s an awesome discussion, and I hope you enjoy it.

Subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS:

The Roundup

A fashion journalist interviews an anonymous Rolex sales associate, behind Lorier’s acquisition, the best watch brand-creator partnership I’ve seen, and what’s your ideal watch size?

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I’m excited to be joined by David Concannon. He’s also an accomplished attorney with 30+ years of experience, and has a hell of a watch collection.

As part of his work with the Explorers Club, he works with Rolex on its Explorers Club Grant, which puts watches in the field. We talk about that program and what it’s like working closely with Rolex.

We discuss his first Submariner, collecting watches, what watch he plans to take on his next expedition, and a whole lot more.

Subscribe to the podcast to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS

For those of you listening on audio, the Unpolished Podcast is also now published as video on our YouTube channel HERE.

Show Notes:

• David Concannon on Substack

• Relics of Apollo, Part 1, 2, 3 (David Concannon)

• Rolex GMT-Master recall ad (Hodinkee)

• Early Rolex Le Mans ad (Ad Patina)

• The Explorers Club

• Rolex Explorers Club Grant

• Carl Spencer’s Rolex Sea-Dweller (Hodinkee)

Subscribers also get (1) 10% off in the Unpolished Store, (2) $50 off a service at Watchcheck, and (3) access to all comments and Q&As.

Last fall, I was having dinner at a Thai place on the Lower East Side, and stopped to compliment a 1016 I thought I saw on someone’s wrist. As I began my sentence, I looked down and realized the guy was actually wearing a Lorier Falcon. For $500, it was tough to beat.

Lorier is beloved by a certain segment of enthusiasts for its well-made homages to the past that aren’t too on-the-nose, many priced around 500 bucks.

But Lorier had its problems, the biggest one being that it was always sold out. Lorier had been curiously quiet over the past few months. Then in June, news leaked that it’d been acquired by Worn & Wound, and the official announcement came earlier this week. Husband-and-wife founders Lauren and Lorenzo Ortega remain partial owners, and Lorenzo is staying on as Creative Director.

I’ve met Lorenzo and Lauren Ortega a couple of times. I appreciate their design sense, their steadfast commitment to Hesalite crystals, even if this put me in the minority (and this is one of the changes to its revamped lineup of watches).

Following its acquisition by Worn & Wound, Lorier is re-releasing its core collection of watches, with pre-orders opening on Monday July 27 at 1pm. Learn more on Lorier’s website.

The Astra, Falcon, Neptune, and Hyperion will all be available. They start at $699, with the Hyperion GMT at $799. A slight bump in prices, but Worn & Wound says it’s made refinements to materials and construction. As we get into in our conversation below, that also means a change in crystals.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Worn & Wound co-founder Blake Malin about the acquisition. Our conversation, below.

Unpolished (U): Why Lorier, and why now?

Blake Malin (BM): We’ve been working with Lorier for years now. We released our first limited edition with them in 2020. We were catching up at Windup New York last year, and they’d said they were looking for an exit or a strategic partner to scale the business beyond where they were. We weren’t proactively looking for a business to acquire. But given our relationship, we were able to work something out that made sense for everybody.

We think Lorier’s an incredible brand. Our audience is really over the moon with them. When you go to Windup, obviously every booth is pretty busy, but some booths are pretty ravenous—I think about Brew or Christopher Ward. Lauren and Lorenzo are one of those teams that the community has a very close relationship with. It’s something we’ve admired for a long time, so it was really exciting to hear it was something we could be involved in.

U: Is there something that makes you confident this will be a good fit, or that you could grow the brand together?

Anytime you get into business with anybody, it’s kind of like a marriage. We already like them a lot, so strictly from a personality fit, it made sense.

From the brand perspective: the challenge Lorier had faced historically is keeping inventory and ironing out logistics to supply the watches their customers demanded. Over the last 10–15 years, Worn & Wound has developed a set of skills, from logistics to customer service to warehousing, shipping, marketing, and communication. So it presented a perfect opportunity to take this brand that has a ravenous fan base demanding more watches and pair it with an organization that can really be helpful in scaling the business to meet that demand.

Q: What’s the vision for the brand going forward?

The plan for the brand is to do more of the same as what they were already doing. We’re not looking to change it. They have such a strong brand to begin with. The products are great, and they have a really great community. We just want to do more of it. We want to iron out the pipeline of inventory to make sure there aren’t long periods when they’re sold out of everything and provide more opportunities for people to buy their watches.

For the relaunch, we’ll have four of their core watches: the Falcon, Astra, Hyperion, and Neptune. Those will all be re-released with minor changes. Little tweaks to improve the case or the materials. Not radical departures from what they’ve done in the past.

Q: Anything big in the pipeline you want to tease? New models?

Right now we’re just trying to meet demand, releasing the core models people have been asking for.

We’re actually moving away from acrylic crystals to sapphire. I don’t know if the community will be torn on it, but I think it’s going to be a material improvement.

U: I do love brands that still use acrylic, and I’d always appreciated Lorier using it. One of the first times I ever talked to Lorenzo was for a story about sapphire and acrylic crystals.

I’ve been in the same boat. I love acrylic crystals. It’s challenging—some people who buy them don’t know how to maintain them or what to expect, and it can create education issues. And with sapphire crystals, a lot of manufacturers have gotten so good at replicating the acrylic look. So that’s what we’re going for. But we’ll see—I’m sure some diehards will wish it was still acrylic.

Q: Anything you’ve learned about taking over a brand like this that you hadn’t expected?

We’ve taken over the customer service aspects for the brand since the acquisition, and getting that ramped up—their audience, their customers have a very close, very personal relationship with them.

Observing a lot of these micro brands from afar—a Brew or Baltic or Autodromo—I assumed it was a very different relationship to what we have with our customers in the Windup Shop. But it’s clear there’s a deep and meaningful relationship with their customers. A big part of their fandom of the brand is the people behind it. So the depth of that relationship was a little bit more than I even anticipated.

Q: Favorite Lorier watch?

Other than the limited editions, I have the Hydra Zulu. It’s one of the few watches that mixes traditional lume color with a creamy faux-lume color. That’s probably my favorite one.

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• 2026 GPHG nominees are out. One of the fun things is the “leaks” of future releases for the rest of the year as brands have to submit to be considered for awards. A couple I spotted from Toledano & Chan and Christopher Ward, above. Gotta admit, I kinda dig the CW Loco Classic even though it’s obviously very Breguet. The Toledano & Chan gets that zebra look through a clever play with finishes, mixing polished and frosted titanium.

  Watchlist: A couple quick picks from eBay. Links below for paid subs only.

  • Harvard clamshell chronograph, for those of you who “went to college in Cambridge”. Uneven dial patina, but sharp case. Clamshell cases are the first real waterproof chronographs—most associated with Gallet, but used by a bunch of brands. They’re smaller, maybe 35mm if measuring for an MLB roster, but a solid chunk of 1940s steel:

  • An exotic Zodiac Sea Wolf, one of my favorite eBay searches. Also little watches—pretty much any 36mm diver watches wear small—but slept on as one of the original divers:

    Watchlist links for paid members only. Upgrade for $8/mo or $80/year:

• Worn and Wound officially announced its acquisition of Lorier, which we covered a few weeks ago. I’ve already talked to founder Blake Malin about it, and will have more later this week.

• A fun game to add to your daily Wordle routine: Analog Watch—read three clocks as fast as you can.

New to Unpolished? Start here:

Stern Dials and the Supplier Shortcut

The Ref is a weekly story about a sometimes-forgotten watch or moment in history. Today: One big order shows how a supplier’s stamp matters far less than the brand’s brief.

In the late 1970s, Cartier placed an order for 150,000 dials to Stern Frères. The order was for its breakout Must de Cartier collection, the affordable, mostly quartz watches that helped revive Cartier.

At the time, this was 10x Stern’s entire annual production capacity. Its production and workforce had been decimated by the twin quartz and currency crises of the 70s.

With all that going on, it was the kind of order Stern couldn’t refuse. So it said yes, and quickly spun up an entire new facility in Gaillard, France, outside of Geneva.

There’s this oft-repeated advice to collect suppliers. It’s something I’ve even repeated before. The Swiss industry has historically been an établissage system, where a central brand brings together parts from external suppliers and artisans. So if you know the name of Patek Philippe’s case or dial makers, you can get Patek quality without Patek prices, or so the thinking goes.

But that advice isn’t exactly right; at least, not always.

For most of the 20th century, Stern Frères was the most famous dialmaker, and one of the most important suppliers, in Switzerland. It made dials for Patek Philippe 1518s, Rolex Day-Dates, cloisoinné enamels for several brands. It’s the supplier family that became so important it acquired Patek Philippe in 1932. The fourth generation still runs the show today.

Read more

📆 Happy World Emoji Day. Look at that calendar emoji, and you’ll get why. In today’s newsletter:

• I filled out a MoonSwatch 1969 application so you don’t have to.

• The real story behind Walt Odets’ famous Explorer review.

• A map to Unpolished’s best stuff.

A few of you have stumbled into this newsletter from this Huckberry YouTube video or the most recent video on the Unpolished channel. If that’s you, check out the new Start Here guide at the end of today’s email.

A new store in Chicago

Yesterday I visited Ad Patina’s new storefront in Chicago. Hundreds of old magazines everywhere you look—1970s Car & Driver, 80s Vogue, 90s Nat Geo. Dozens of his favorite ads are framed throughout the store. Watch ads, but also cars, design, and Absolut Vodka, with all kinds of ephemera scattered across drawers, shelves, and tables.

These ads are cultural artifacts that put objects within the context of their time and place. The copy is undeniably succinct and occasionally brilliant. A Porsche “kills bugs fast;” Pirelli’s tires on a Ferrari are “a generous contribution to the performing arts.” Many are important in their own right, not just as supplements to something else. A copy of MJ’s first Sports Illustrated cover recently sold for $230k.

Ad Patina’s store is in a 1920s building with hardwood floors and a farmhouse-style sink in the back. Coincidentally, there’s a watch repair store next door, even if they’re only good for the quick battery change. Congrats to Nick on the awesome new space. Reach out to Ad Patina on Instagram or via his website if you wanna visit.

I filled out a MoonSwatch ‘1969’ application so you don’t have to

Q1: Have you ever gifted a golden table clock to a president?

You may have seen that Swatch is releasing another MoonSwatch. This time, it’s gold. You have to fill out a 32-question application for a chance to win. Most of the questions are funny, though some suggest an earnest answer (none were given on my application). This generation will recall the day it had to answer “what would you do with a MoonSwatch 1969,” the way mine had to answer the common application’s “why do you want to go to [X] University?” I proceeded without much thought, and finished in about eight minutes.

Fill out the application here, if you must.

👑 Speaking of golden table clocks and presidents, Trump’s annual disclosure lists Rolex in the amount of $25,000, for the 10 U.S. Open box tickets he received—he sat in the brand’s box during last year’s final. No gold desk clock, I guess? The line item is right below FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who gave 10 tickets for the final of this weekend’s World Cup.

🧑‍🚀 In other Speedmaster news, Sotheby’s sold a bunch of Buzz Aldrin’s stuff. His 1990 Speedmaster sold for $45k, but the coolest item was no doubt this Buzz Lightyear signed to “The Real Buzz!”:

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A New Event for Collectors, By Collectors

The Escapement is the first collector-focused event built for enthusiasts of all types. It’s not a trade show. Come for live talks by independent watchmakers like Rexhep Rexhepi and Romain Gauthier. Plus, get hands-on with watches from Greubel Forsey, Simon Brette, and some of today’s most important makers. All in an arena and format that’s never been done before.

It’s not all watches: Saturday night will feature a comedy headliner, while Sunday will have a closing concert. Friday is VIP day, all day, with an opening-night Gala. Saturday and Sunday are General Admission. Join us: November 20-22, Etihad Arena, Abu Dhabi (UAE):

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The Roundup

The real story behind the most infamous watch review ever. Psychologist and author Walt Odets died last week. Here’s a 2025 NY Times profile. In addition to his profession, he was a prolific watch reviewer, maybe the first. I found a single podcast interview with him here. For a man who was eulogized across the watch internet, his detachment from it all in the podcast is beautifully quaint. He struggles to remember the names Hodinkee or Jean-Claude Biver!

Much has been written about his impact, and of course he’s influenced my perspective. I’ve repeatedly quoted his reviews for the Chopard L.U.C 1860, Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin, Lange 1815 Up/Down, parts 1 and 2 (his balanced POV surely part of the reason I now own the latter).

• Find his entire archive on TimeZone here, hopelessly formatted as it may be.

A footnote to his wider impact: Odets wrote for TimeZone, perhaps the first real watch blog, owned by Richard Paige, a fourth-generation watchmaker and retailer in San Francisco. So much is made today about conflicts of interest in watches, and it’s certainly a bigger and more complicated industry than in the 1990s. But here we had a talented writer/technical tinkerer who partnered with a retailer to create detailed reviews we still refer to as the gold standard 30 years later. The kind of tie-up that YouTubers would scream about today.

Odets’ most famous review was his takedown of the Rolex Explorer (part 1, part 2). But in an interview years later, Paige said he “set the whole thing up—the whole thing was orchestrated by me.”

Paige openly admits his bias: on the TimeZone forums, most posts were arguing about Omega vs. Rolex. Enthusiasts basically thought luxury watches began with Seiko and ended with Rolex. Paige wanted to change that.

No conflict, no interest, as the saying goes.

He knew Odets was more familiar with Patek Philippe, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and Lange, and if Paige gave him a Rolex for a review, it wouldn’t hold up. So he gave him an Explorer I. From there:

“Walt did what he does best. He honestly critiqued the watch using the higher standard of much finer watches as his point of reference.”

Paige says he even got an email from Rolex HQ about the review, asking for Walt’s home address. “It seemed likely to me they might actually go after Walt,” he said. Paige never responded.

Sure, conflicts of interest can be bad. But instead of always blaming the conflict, maybe what we really need are more people with the cajones—backed by actual knowledge—that Paige and Odets had to say whatever they wanted.

One last irony: Paige said that Odets began reviewing a wider array of watches, and eventually admitted the Rolex was a pretty good value.

🎨 FP Journe as art. Art newsletter brought to my attention that auction app Fair Warning recently sold a Journe Chronomètre Bleu Byblos for $600k. This is the 99-piece limited edition made for the 2015 opening of its Beirut boutique, basically a CB with a partially openworked dial. The Appraisal said it’s the first time the well-known, one-lot-at-a-time art app had sold anything in the collectibles/objects space. And it did well—Sotheby’s sold a Byblos for $537k just a week before. More on watches-as-art in the coming weeks.

🇺🇸 Flags and hand-finishing—a chat with 1776 Atelier. I’ve been curious about 1776 Atelier, the newish American watch brand that, as the name hints, is unabashedly American. has a good interview with co-founder Jason Lu. His partner, Zach Smith, will be familiar to Unpolished readers, see Forget American, These Guys Just Wanna Make Great Watches.

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Unpolished: Start Here

At the beginning of the year, I started paying for Claude Cowork. I fed it all my old articles. At first, the goal was to build a better search engine for myself to sift through 5+ years of newsletters—a “RAG” in AI-speak. Then a few weeks ago, I saw ScrewDown Crown use the same setup to create a “start here” guide for his web of tangents, asides, and often-insightful philosophical takes on collecting. That quote about great artists stealing started ringing in my head, and I thought I should do the same for Unpolished—so I did.

The first bits are copied below, and the full Intro to Unpolished is below. It’s also pinned on the homepage if you ever need to find it.

I’ve been writing about watches for the better part of a decade. This all started as a newsletter—the first time I hit send, it went to 51 people. Eventually I became an editor at Hodinkee, then I launched Unpolished in January 2025. Before that, I was an attorney.

What is Unpolished?

Unpolished is a 2x/week newsletter for watch enthusiasts. Most issues are built around a main piece, along with a handful of shorter hits—market notes, recs, whatever’s worth flagging. It’s pretty casual, but calls out bullsh*t when we see it.

It doesn’t run ads from watch brands and is supported by paid subscribers, in addition to selling a growing array of straps and accessories in the Unpolished Store.

What I cover

I love vintage watches: Cartier, Rolex, Patek Philippe, but also Movado, Longines, and Gallet. Neo-vintage: 1990s Chopard, Lange & Söhne, and Blancpain. Plenty of modern coverage too—much of it focused on independents—but always with an eye on what came before. That back-and-forth between past and present is the whole point of Unpolished.

A few themes you’ll see come up again and again: constantly questioning what it means to be collectible; skepticism toward hype and the social pressure that distorts everything; a running argument about what “good taste” actually means versus what we’re told it means; the difference between rare and important.

That’s all informed by reporting with real names and numbers instead of vague gestures at “the market.” I talk to plenty of collectors, dealers, and independent watchmakers who know more than me.

Where to start

The thesis pieces, to understand how I think about collecting:

• 47 Unpolished Rules for Watch Collecting—buy what you understand, and other practical and theoretical rules to guide your collecting (or not).

• How to Actually Develop ‘Good Taste’—understanding what moves you and when you’re being moved for the wrong reasons.

• Are You Playing the Game You Wanna Play?—What happens when numbers replace judgment—and how to take it back.

• Rarity is Overrated—is it rare or is it obscure?

Here’s the full map:

Podcast + YouTube, too

• 🎧 Unpolished Podcast: A regular chat with collectors, watchmakers, or insiders, as well as audio editions of select newsletters. Subscribe: Spotify / Apple / RSS

  • Listener favorites: Bradley Taylor; Wei Koh; Jack Forster; Ben Dunn (Watch Brothers London); Nicholas Bowman-Scargill (Fears); Steven Holtzman (CD Peacock); William Massena

• 🎥 Also on YouTube. Subscribe here.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

I’ve been writing about watches for the better part of a decade. This all started as a newsletter—the first time I hit send, it went to 51 people. Eventually I became an editor at Hodinkee, then I launched Unpolished in January 2025. Before that, I was an attorney.

What is Unpolished?

Unpolished is a 2x/week newsletter for watch enthusiasts. Most issues are built around a main piece, along with a handful of shorter hits—market notes, recs, whatever’s worth flagging. It’s pretty casual, but calls out bullsh*t when we see it.

It doesn’t run ads from watch brands and is supported by paid subscribers, in addition to selling a growing array of straps and accessories in the Unpolished Store.

What I cover

I love vintage watches: Cartier, Rolex, Patek Philippe, but also niches like Movado, Longines, and Gallet. Neo-vintage: 1990s Chopard, Lange & Söhne, and Blancpain. Plenty of modern coverage too—much of it focused on independent watchmakers—but always with an eye on what came before.

The back-and-forth between past and present is the whole point of Unpolished.

A few themes you’ll see come up again and again: constantly questioning what it means to be “collectible”; skepticism toward hype and the social pressure that distorts everything; a running argument about what “good taste” actually means versus what we’re told it means; the difference between rare and important.

That’s all informed by reporting with real names and numbers instead of vague gestures at “the market.” I talk to plenty of collectors, dealers, and independent watchmakers who know more than me.

Podcast + YouTube, too!

• 🎧 Unpolished Podcast: A regular chat with collectors, watchmakers, or insiders, as well as audio editions of select newsletters. Subscribe to the feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS

  • Listener favorites: Bradley Taylor; Wei Koh; Jack Forster; Ben Dunn (Watch Brothers London); Nicholas Bowman-Scargill (Fears); Steven Holtzman (CD Peacock); William Massena

• 🎥 Also on YouTube. Subscribe here.

Where to start

The thesis pieces, to understand how I think about collecting:

• 47 Unpolished Rules for Watch Collecting—buy what you understand, and other practical and theoretical rules to guide your collecting (or not).

• How to Actually Develop ‘Good Taste’—understanding what moves you and when you’re being moved for the wrong reasons.

• Are You Playing the Game You Wanna Play?—What happens when numbers replace judgment—and how to take it back.

• Rarity is Overrated—is it rare or is it obscure?

🧑‍🏫 How Tos and Collector’s Guide—practical and specific:

• The Unpolished Guide to Selling a Watch

• How to Collect: The Vintage Rolex Daytona

• How to Hunt for Watches on eBay

📚 If you want reference guides for some of my favorite watches:

• Collector’s Guide: 1970s Cartier (Hodinkee, but useful)

• Collector’s Guide: The Chopard L.U.C, and One of the Best Automatic Movements Ever Made

• Quick Study: Omega Seamaster Chronographs with Caliber 321, one of my favorite midcentury chronographs.

• For Your Reference: The Vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso

• For Your Reference: The Vintage Tudor Ranger

• For Your Reference: The Movado M95 (by Rich Fordon)

🗣️ Reporting and takes, the stuff that gets the most comments:

• The Boomer Watch Is On Sale, but is anyone buying it?

• The Closest Look You’ll Ever Get at a Steel Patek Philippe 1518, an exclusive look at the most expensive watch to sell in 2025.

• When a Watch Becomes a Trophy, what happens when a Chronomètre Résonance becomes ‘the $14 million Journe.’

• Beyond Unpolished: Let’s Talk about Restoration, Eric Ku on why he ‘f*cking hates’ that word—and what collectors get wrong.

• The A. Lange & Söhne Conundrum: when world-class watchmaking meets modern luxury headaches.

❤️ Other favorite reviews/watches:

• Patek Philippe 5000 vs. Lange 1815 Up/Down (1990s Rematch) | Tudor Black Bay 58: Gilt vs. Burgundy | Berneron Mirage 38 and 34—All Gold, No Notes (Almost) | Sinn EZM1 | Universal Genève Ferrovie dello Stato

📍 The Ref., a weekly Sunday story about a forgotten watch or moment in history:

• When Damage Became Tropical | Error-Proof or California Dial? | The Steel Lange That Was Never for Sale

📈 Reader favorites—some of the most-read issues:

• 26 Incredibly Niche Watches I Love

• Watch Prices Are Insane

• 10 New Watches I’d Actually Buy at Retail

🔎 This map is pinned, so you can always find it on the homepage. You can also scroll the archive here. There’s also a search box in the top right, though I often find it easier to append “site:unpolishedwatches.com” to a standard Google query to search the archives (that trick works for any site).

Get in touch

Drop me a line or reply to any newsletter and I’ll respond.

• Email: tony[at]unpolishedwatches.com

• Instagram

• Leave a comment on this, or any other newsletter. I try to respond to all of them. Read through, and you’ll also see that some of the best articles began as reader comments or questions, so every comment section is also a suggestion box:

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💕 Tap the heart on your favorite posts. It helps me understand what you’re actually enjoying so I can do more of it, and it helps others discover the best Unpolished has to offer.

The latest YouTube video, about watches I’d actually buy at retail is up now. Watch it here.

Let’s talk about badass watches. I use the term not lightly, but specifically. These are tool watches, but real ones, not the saccharine marketing concoction of today, wherein these supposed instruments are too often paired with high polish and five-figure price tags.

I saw a buddy wearing an old Doxa Sub 200 T-Graph at Windup Chicago this weekend. That’s a badass watch:

I recently said I’m not worthy of wearing a Sinn. Most likely, because I’ve had too many jobs that require knowing what a KPI is, where a deck is a slideshow and not a part of a boat. These feel antithetical to the purpose of the German toolmaker Sinn.

The most Sinn of Sinns is the EZM1, or Einsatzzeitmesser (“mission timer”). Another highly specific tool from the country that gave us the eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher (“egg clacker”).

The EZM1 (ref. 503) was made for German special units in the police and Federal Border Guard, introduced in 1997 and produced through 2004. The titanium case measures 40mm (46mm lug-to-lug). I strapped this one on Friday night, and when I looked up the specs on Saturday morning, I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn it’s supposedly 16mm thick.

The lightweight titanium, short, downturned lugs—I thought it felt at home on my 6.3-in wrist, but look at the photos and tell me if you disagree. The case design is very close to old compressor cases used by Heuer and others, which will make even more sense in a moment.

The EZM1 uses the Lemania 5100, but with a quirky setup. It’s got a central chronograph hand and minute counter, along with the pushers and crown on the 9 o’clock side. All of this to be more legible and usable for those German special units.

The domed crystal, bi-directional rotating countdown bezel, red date at the so-odd-it’s-right 3:45—it’s all so perfectly instrumental. A few weeks ago I expressed distaste for a red-and-black FP Journe, but that’s because I believe the only allowable expressions of this color combination come from Sinn and the Chicago Bulls.

There’s also a copper sulphate capsule inside, which permanently binds to any moisture that dares enter the case, viewable through a window in the lug:

Getting to know the EZM1

There are a few dial evolutions of the EZM1. The earliest (~1997-2000) used tritium lume. These are the best. The one I photographed has aged to a warm hue, the markers and hands like a perfectly toasted marshmallow against the stark matte-black dial.

EZM1 dial types:

• 3H dial: featuring a small red circle at 6 o’clock enclosing the 3H (the symbol for hydrogen-3, aka tritium). As the tritium ages, these feel like real vintage watches.

• “Ar” dial: Around 2000, Sinn and watchmaking more broadly shifted from tritium to non-radioactive Super-LumiNova. It swapped the 3H for an “Ar” to signify its use of Argon as a dehumidifying gas within the case.

  • Super-LumiNova doesn’t age like tritium, so these dials tend to keep a crisp white look.

Beyond the lume changes, there are a couple of military-issued EZM1s:

• ZUZ dial: Early examples, issued to the German customs authority, or Zentale Unterstützungseinheit Zoll. According to BroadArrow.net, 22 examples were originally made for ZUZ. Another 50 or so were then sold into Japan as a limited edition. Apparently, the ZUZ officer who originally commissioned the watch got wind of this, said NEIN, and bought the rest from Sinn, which then trickled into collector hands.

• ZTZ dial: A batch of 10 examples was also made for the Zentrale Technikgruppe Zoll (Central Technology Group, the covert technical unit that works alongside ZUZ), three of which had the crown on the right. Sinn Grails!

(These German words have made me realize the letter “Z” is woefully underutilized in English.)

A pair of Sinn EZM1s for sale right now | Watchlist

Since only a few thousand were made, it’s not easy to find an EZM1—not many make it to the United States. Sinn also made a few reissues, but they never quite captured the magic of the original. Luckily, a couple are on sale right now in the U.S.:

Read more

📆 I hope to see many of you at the Windup Fair in Chicago this weekend, including at the Friday night party I co-organized, sponsored by Atelier Wen and Formex. RSVP HERE.

🎁 Unpolished Members get: (1) a Welcome Care Package; (2) 10% off in the Unpolished Store; (3) $50 off Watchcheck, along with 2 newsletters/week, comments, Q&As. Find info on all your benefits at THIS LINK.

Is the boomer watch gone for good?

One day, I can’t remember exactly when, I started calling old Heuers “boomer watches,” my humble submission in the never-ending parade that is one generation groaning at the cringe of the one before it.

To be clear: I like Carreras (some of my best friends are Carreras!) A few of the early vintage watches I bought were manual Carreras—a 7753N, 2447N, “poor man’s” Heuers. Despite growing up in Indianapolis, it wasn’t the racing provenance that pulled me in. I just liked the design. Clean, minimal, and confident in itself in a way a Daytona never was, which needed all those tachymeters and text.

But at some point, “the market” stopped paying up for Heuers. You can get a vintage Carrera for about the same price in 2026 as in 2016, while is up 15,497% and $FPJ about as much.

This malaise may have started with vintage Heuer, but it soon spread to Omega Speedmasters and vintage Rolex and don’t forget Breitling and anything associated with Steve McQueen or race cars. While the geezer watch was taking over the Lower East Side, the boomer watch was stalling out like an old Mustang.

The collecting world shifted its focus forward, to the “neo-vintage” watches of the 1980s and 90s, along with the indie boom that started in that era and continues to today.

It all made me wonder: Is the boomer watch gone for good, or does it have a few more turns of the Twist left?

What even is a boomer watch?

“A gilt dial Submariner is kind of a boomer watch, but I love that stuff,” Trevor Wynn of Pare Pare Podcast confided in our recent podcast episode. I asked him for a few more examples of classic baby boomer watches. “Maybe a vintage Breitling Navitimer or Omega Speedmaster,” Trevor, who’s in his late 30s, replied.

He pointed me to the archetype of the NASA astronaut who drove a Chevy Corvette C2 (which many Apollo-era astronauts had through a famous $1-a-year lease program) and wore a Speedmaster. Guys that were heroes to an entire generation.

The baby boomer watch is downstream of who that generation idolized—astronauts, divers, drivers, Newman. It’s the mid-century golden age of utility-meets-design, something that deeply appeals to the nostalgia of those who grew up to see us take to space and the deep sea. It’s a Navitimer, but not a Nautilus. A vintage Rolex Submariner, but not a King Midas.

Right artist, right piece

But reducing someone’s taste simply to the cruel, pre-determined fate of the generation in which they were born is terribly reductive. So I reached out to Rob S., aka Bazamu, no less than GQ’s 2022 Collector of the Year. Over 15+ years of collecting, Rob’s shown an admirable lack of ageism, indiscriminately buying watches from the 1940s to the 2020s (Leo, take notes).

He’d already been teasing me about the idea of the boomer watch (“If the Carrera is a boomer watch, I must have an old heart,” he’s written).

Rob, who’s in his late 30s, doesn’t sort watches by decade, but has a buying philosophy he borrowed from the art world: “right artist, right piece.” He explained:

“You can buy a Picasso, but if it's the wrong period or style, it isn't held in the same regard as his best works. That’s informed which brands and references become interesting and worth exploring, regardless of production period or style.”

He tries to find pockets of value for watches that deserve more appreciation than they get. In his early collecting days, that was vintage Heuer, Omega, Universal Geneve, Tudor, Longines—“blue blood historical brands that live in the shadow of vintage Rolex despite their horological and historical merit,” as he put it.

Like many of us, he became neo-vintage- and indie-curious, so applied the same logic. As Journe and Voutilainen exploded, he instead explored early Lange, Urban Jürgensen, 90s Blancpain.

“There are so many interesting brands that are the ‘right artists’ and should be collectible but don't reach the heights of the handful of brands that popular dealers and collectors myopically obsess over,” he said.

One example: “I love to tell people the story of when I bought my Urban Jürgensen Reference 2, as it garnered a collective shrug from just about anyone I spoke with (including Auro Montanari). One of my closest friends in the watch world called it an ‘old man’s watch.’

However, I thought it was an incredibly important watch—a 38mm platinum perpetual calendar, largely handmade by Derek Pratt during the early 2000s of independent watchmaking, all for the price of a 6239 Daytona. In my mind, it was the quintessential ‘right artist, right piece.’”

The money’s changing hands

Still, you can’t escape the generational math. Boomers are, actuarially speaking, headed for the exits. They’re sitting on $110 trillion of wealth—lucky them. As they die, they’ll pass on the loot to their kids or grandkids—lucky us. Fancy banks and consulting firms call it the Great Wealth Transfer. Even if it turns out these buggers are living a long time, so that transfer is happening more slowly than expected, it’s already having an impact.

“Millennials don’t want to buy what their parents are selling,” art market observers have noted to the Financial Times as that industry sputters through its own turbulence. While the previous generation of collectors looked to mid-century blue chip names, young collectors often want something different: dialogue, community, connection to feel something. Sound familiar?

In the world of watches, this is something indies have been happy to serve up, with a healthy emphasis on craft, too.

Just this week, Phillips gave us some numbers from its spring sales to illustrate the growth of younger clients:

• 40% of purchasers were first-time buyers

• 33% of bidders were millennials and gen Z (up from 25% last year)

• 70% of lots sold online (up from 62%)

These new collectors are bringing their own taste, biases, and opinions—often different from their parents.

Dead, or just cheap?

“I think it’s a great time to buy vintage Rolex sports models right now,” my pal Max Braun said just the other day on the Hairspring podcast, as he and co-host Erik Gustafson discussed this very topic. He said this applies especially to watches with radium lume from the 1950s and early 60s, but it’s applicable across the board.

“Compared to 10 years ago, values are down considerably.”

Take this crispy Submariner Big Crown 5510 (above), which might’ve pushed $1m in the late 2010s. It sold for “just” $448k at Sotheby’s in June. It’s in outstanding condition, from the family of the original owner. Exactly how you dream of finding them. But the person with $400k to spend on a mechanical mid-life crisis is spending it elsewhere.

Even for those of us who haven’t cashed out our SpaceX winnings, Max said run-of-the-mill vintage Rolex also presents buying opportunities. To wit, you can find:

• Submariner Date 1680s at $15k

• Explorer II 1655s in the low- to mid-$20s.

• 4-digit Daytonas for under $100k

Prices that are awfully similar to 10 years ago. Gustafson, ever the contrarian, isn’t so sure:

“The question in my mind is if the marketing machine behind vintage Rolex is going to regather momentum, or if it’s going to become the Model T of collecting, where the population that cares about it dies out.”

Comparing a 70s Sub to a Model T—harsh! He’s hinting at our hard actuarial fates. And yet.

It’s hard for me to fathom a world in which anything that says Rolex on the dial goes the way of the Model T, but then again, maybe people used to say that about the Model T. I find vintage Rolex watches to be some of the most wearable old things around, and in many cases, more wearable than those delicate, ultra-thin, neo-vintage whatevers. They certainly need to be serviced less, and those service invoices will have one fewer zero, too.

These are great watches, but today’s generation of astute collectors may on the whole assign less value to them compared to those who came before.

I asked Rob if his more modern escapades had crowded out his vintage watches. No way, he said:

“I can't imagine selling off the vintage watches in my collection (Heuer, Omega, Longines, UG, etc.) to shift into indies. My tastes and interests are always evolving, but there's a comfort that comes with rediscovering something like a simple Carrera after wearing watches on the other end of the horological spectrum.”

Instead, much of the churn in his collecting comes from selling things to avoid feeling duplicative. Selling one Lange to buy another, for example (instead of offloading a Speedmaster or two).

Ahoooga! goes the Model T

Gustafson’s Model T line was still ringing in the back of my head like its iconic Ahooga! horn. While it’s not as popular as it used to be, it turns out the Model T keeps chugging along. Some young collectors have taken an interest, even if it’s mostly a car for those with an AARP card.

But the Carrera, Speedmaster, Submariner, et al. don’t necessarily have that problem. What I mean:

• It’s easier to strap a 36mm Heuer Carrera to your wrist than it is to drive a Model T down Lake Shore Drive.

• These are models that still exist in the modern catalogs of these brands. Ford sells F-150s and Broncos today, not Model Ts.

Watch collecting is already based on nostalgia, while the modern industry mostly repackages and sells its heritage with inflated diameters and longer power reserves. It’s a different dynamic.

Collectors always have a fetish for firsts, and as long as the Daytona is a going concern—and one that resells for 2x retail—it’s easy to imagine a pipeline that will feed some subset of buyers toward the older stuff.

The myth of McQueen or the men on the moon may fade, but the objects remain.

“The Carrera has aged incredibly gracefully,” Rob said. Perfect proportions, pure aesthetic. And prices for Carreras and Speedmasters remain relatively attainable for vintage-curious collectors.

Give it time

Let’s not write off the boomer watch so fast.

One of the hottest watches right now is the original Patek Philippe Calatrava 96. I can point to more than a handful of auction results from the past couple of months—$127k, $480k (!), $153k, $123k—of a little 96 selling for more than a Daytona. Bubblebacks, too.

Forget Boomer, these are Greatest Generation watches from the 1930s-40s.

Almost nobody alive has any personal memories of a 96. And that’s exactly why it’s cool again. No dad’s-watch baggage. Historically important, and a perfect little dress watch for a 22-year-old.

A decade ago, while everyone was chasing Daytonas and Big Crowns, these were the watches everyone figured might go the way of the Model T.

But give anything enough time—long enough that nobody even remembers what a Boomer was—and some kid’ll scroll past an early Navitimer for the first time, swearing he’s the first one to discover it.

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The Roundup

Universal Geneve is really staffing up for its relaunch.

Also, the Swiss suck at naming conglomerates. We get Richemont (literally translated, “Rich Mountain”); Swatch Group (which Joe Thompson himself called dumb); and now House of Brands. Whatever happened to Verixxotle?

A Longines 13ZN ‘Doppia Lancetta’ on eBay. Bidding sits around $21k as I write this. For paid subscribers, here’s the link:

“It’s much easier to sell a watch at $100k than 10 watches at $10,000.” That’s how William Massena put it when explaining why brands keep pushing prices up. His 2023 monopusher chronograph with Sylvain Pinaud (CHF 130k) sold out in 56 minutes. But his 2024 chronograph with Albishorn ($5k, and a watch I adore), took a year to sell through. The Albishorn added a clever complication, reduced the thickness, but no one bought it.

“We’re making watch collecting a rich man’s sport,” Massena warned. Full story in Robb Report.

Before we get to the story of American watchmaking as a story of the American spirit—good, bad, and always enterprising:

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👀 First look: Berneron bracelet. Since Berneron has posted images of its upcoming gold bracelet, which fits both the existing Mirage 38 and the to-be-announced Miroir, here are a couple photos of the stainless steel prototype shown during Watches & Wonders:

The story of American watchmaking is a very American story.

1876. It’s the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The United States is celebrating with a Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, its first world’s fair, to showcase its industrial prowess.

A statement that, yea, we might’ve had that row amongst ourselves, but the New World is the future.

Probably to show off, but in that demure Swiss kind of way, Longines sends one of its new fully machine-made lever-escapement watches to be displayed at the Centennial Exposition.

But instead of coming back feeling good about its position atop the watchmaking world, Longines and the rest of the Swiss attendees sail home scared by what they’d seen in Philly. Writes one:

“I’ve been examining the products and tools of the Waltham Watch Company, and I must admit I was filled with admiration for their watches, and for its splendid machines and tools. We have been left behind by our New World competitors.”

Waltham is showing the first automatic screw-making machine at the Exposition, pumping out a screw every five seconds.

But this was America, so its unbridled confidence in itself was doing some of the heavy lifting the machines hadn’t quite figured out yet.

After the Exposition, Longines’ Technical Director, Jacques David, stayed in the U.S. for three months to study its watchmaking industry and tour its factories. He returned and wrote a detailed report, one that was kept secret until 1992 (now translated here). The translator called it “the most important document in the history of modern watchmaking,” and David the “father of modern Swiss watchmaking.”

The report is blunt. David doesn’t hide the truth, writing that Swiss watch exports to the U.S. have declined, and that they soon “will be reduced to zero”:

• Feb. 1875 exports to U.S.: Chf 743k

• Feb. 1876: Chf 401k

• Feb. 1877: 170k1

He ends with a warning to his Swiss colleagues:

“Let us take their tools, imitate their workmen and their methods, but especially let us group together to obtain the kind of progress that the individual industrialist, in his tiny room with his own efforts, cannot achieve.” [emphasis mine]

Not so fast

David was something like an Alexis de Tocqueville of the nascent watch industry. After touring U.S. factories, he was able to see it more clearly than it saw itself—good and bad.

What he saw was something more complicated and unstable than a booming industry ready to conquer the world.

What David sees is something more like a gold rush or the AI frenzy. He lists 15+ watch companies that have started in the past few years, before pointing out that many have already disappeared or are in liquidation.

One, Cornell Watch Company, was actually most useful as “an instrument for land speculation.”

But the winners are winning big, and the biggest is Waltham. In 1865, its capital triples in just 12 months. Waltham is the OpenAI of ‘65, raking in cash, and as other enterprising Americans see its success, they race into the gold rush that is the watchmaking industry. Most fail.

David didn’t come to look at the watches, but at the factories that made them. The Americans had taken the industrial method already making guns and blue jeans, and pointed it at the craft of watchmaking.

David notes that Waltham and Elgin had technical offices comparable to those in the new industrial behemoths of Europe, and “there is no example in the watch industry."

American factories hired employees who knew nothing about watches, often women, and paid them 70 cents a day, operating machines that did one thing and one thing only.

The system ran on seven rules: machine everything, kill hand work, standardize sizes, keep caliber numbers down, build in huge quantities, and the big one—make every part identical so any piece drops into any watch.

This was interchangeability. The idea was that, by obtaining uniformity across manufacturing, these factories could produce millions of watches at a scale the world had never seen before.

But here’s the catch: It wasn’t true yet.

Correcting the Record

While Waltham showed that uniformity was possible, it wasn’t real yet, and wouldn’t truly arrive until the turn of the 20th century. In 1876, smaller parts—pivots, balance staffs, jewels—were still turned and fitted by hand.

So the Americans faked it.

The fix was a system Waltham called the Record, which David explains at length. For every single movement, a worker measured the pivots on all five wheels, logged the exact dimensions, all tied to the movement's serial. They did the same for the impulse pin. Then they picked jewels to fit that one watch, pulled from bins sorted by hole size.

If a part breaks in 5 years? Just send the movement serial to the factory, and they can pull these measurements and cut a piece to match the size.

While the American system touted uniformity, the Record shows that each watch was still unique, requiring a precise, individual measurement.

David writes that “this is a special operation completely unique to the American factories and which has had a great influence on the success that their movements have obtained.”

The Americans hadn’t achieved true interchangeability, but hacked it together with very detailed bookkeeping.

And it worked. From the outside, it already looked like a well-oiled industrial machine. On the inside, one of America’s booming industries hung together on a ledger and workarounds with plenty of ways to fall apart.

On the Ball

For all the clever bookkeeping and hand-fitting, the American system eventually achieved what it set out to—it just took a disaster to get there.

On April 18, 1891, a mail train collided head-on with a passenger train near Kipton, Ohio. Nine people died. An investigation placed the blame on the conductor’s watch, which, without the conductor realizing it, had stopped running for four minutes and then started again.

The railroads brought in a young Cleveland jeweler named Webb Ball to figure out what happened and ensure it didn’t happen again.2 He created the standards that became the railroad chronometer system: 17+ jewels, accurate to 30 seconds a week, temperature compensating, Breguet hairspring, magnetic resistance, white dial with black Arabic numerals.

Waltham, Hamilton, and Elgin—the American Holy Trinity—all started making watches to this standard. By the early 1900s, the quality and uniformity had become real.

American railroad watches were arguably the best working watches on Earth.

The individual industrialist

In his final recommendation, David also saw the opportunity for the Swiss:

“Let us group together to obtain the kind of progress the individual industrialist, in his tiny room with his own efforts, cannot achieve.”

The American system drove towards industrial behemoths, each pursuing uniformity at massive scale. It’s a great way to make a million identical railroad watches, but not so good if the market turns or tastes change.

(It’s perhaps no coincidence that the next generation’s great entrepreneur, Henry Ford, was also a self-taught watch repairer; he visited Waltham in the early 1900s.)

This, of course, is when the wristwatch came along, and the Americans never totally adapted.

David made 10 specific recommendations, many of which came to pass: patents; standardize the screw and caliber sizes; regulate gold and silver to stop the proliferation of fake hallmarks.

But perhaps his most important was on the structure of the industry itself, and something the Americans would never copy: Cooperation to establish groups of manufacturers or associations. This begins to happen in the early 20th century with the formation of Ebauches SA, SSIH, and others.

It’s still the structure of the Swiss industry today: a broad base of manufacturers and suppliers, with a rotating cast of brands sitting on top. Even today, a new crop of independents is leveraging this very structure, drawing on a deep well of suppliers.

American spirit

The American watch industry’s greatest strength was also its fatal flaw: The audacity to build a world-beating industry in just 25 years, even if it was sometimes held together with duct tape and a dream. It’s the gold rush that filled 15 factories in just a few years, and saw many of them liquidated almost as fast.

David saw both halves in 1876. The Americans were winning big and building fast. They were also over-leveraged, unstable, and a little full of it.

And right there in his prescription, he made a recommendation that was very Swiss: Group together. Cooperate.

A new nation built by individual industrialists, each racing towards the same gold rush, could never.

The fall of American watchmaking isn’t some great tragedy, but another chapter in the American story. The United States built the foundation for the modern watch industry, but eventually wandered off towards building lightbulbs, skyscrapers, airplanes; Wall Street, nuclear bombs, and computers.

That restless, enterprising spirit is the entire American engine—why we’re so capable of building modern marvels, and why we often can’t hold onto them.

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Happy Fourth of July; happy 250th!

-Tony

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More on American watchmaking:

• Jacques David’s 1876 Report on Swiss and American Watchmaking makes for a fascinating read.

• Forget American, These Guys Just Wanna Make Great Watches, on Josh Shapiro, Zach Smith, and a new generation of American makers.

• Inside the Cottage Industry of American Watchmaking, a conversation with indie watchmaker Keaton Kyrick.

• Watchmaking’s Crisis—and Comeback, the closing of one U.S. watchmaking school and opening of the Rolex training center tell the story of a profession struggling to meet booming demand.

Subscribers get: (1) 2 newsletters/week; (2) 10% off in the Unpolished Store, and (3) $50 off any service at Watchcheck, and can access all comments and Q&As.

Real Review | A 3D-Printed Delight

The Ming Polymesh bracelet is as impressive and trippy as everyone says. Comfortable. An irresistible urge to stroke it in a manner usually reserved for matters more sensual.

It looks and moves like a textile strap, but has the weight to drape like a metal bracelet. The grade 5 titanium has a blasted-like finish, but isn’t rough to the touch—far too light and fluid for that.

There was a comment on a recent post that had THOUGHTS, which often makes for the best comments:

“Innovation comes from indies like Ming, who make stuff that doesn't look like everyone else's black-polished time-only offset-seconds walrus-clap-you-spent-a-thousand-hours-making-yet-another-also-ran rich person's speculative vehicle. Ming? A 3d-printed titanium bracelet that I can ‘add to cart’ for 1500CHF? That's actual, honest-to-god innovation.”

The commenter’s right. It’s made of 1,700 3D-printed parts—no pins, no screws—an additive process that deposits material layer by layer. The Polymesh is officially, according to Ming, “the world’s first bracelet-strap hybrid.”

The gaps between the links, if you can even call them that, are smaller than a human hair. My arm hairs haven’t suggested they’ve been so much as tugged by the Polymesh. Ming says a bracelet with such tight tolerances wouldn’t have been possible using traditional manufacturing.

It’s an impressive use of technology applied to bracelet making. When we say brands should be more innovative, this is what we mean.

There are still criticisms. I’ve been wearing the 20mm Polymesh with straight spring bars, designed to fit non-Ming watches—the follow-up to the curved-bar version Ming launched in 2025. It’s simply too long for my smallish (6.3in) wrists, and the long tail tends to slip out from underneath and make itself known. Ming clasps are also tricky until you get the hang of them. There’s a clip underneath the clasp that’s designed to keep the tail in place, and it works, but only to a point.

Luckily, Ming already offers a short option for the curved-bar Polymesh (currently sold out from the look of it), and I’m told the same will be quietly added for the straight version later this year.

Polymesh is secured like a strap, meaning there’s a pin buckle and holes. By my calipers, these holes are about 4mm apart, which can be a bit far for dialing in a perfect fit. (The average microadjust on a bracelet is about 2mm—e.g., Ming’s Starfield allows 1.25mm adjustments.) I’ve tried the Polymesh on a few watches, and sometimes I’m in between the perfect fit (he writes as it’s 95°F in Chicago).

Since it’s made like nothing else, the Polymesh also doesn’t look like anything else. I’ve seen plenty of great pairings on Instagram, but I struggled to match it with anything in my hoard of watches. I don’t own a titanium watch with 20mm lugs, and it looks off on a Khaki, Explorer, Black Bay 58, Seiko 5, Unimatic. It works on modern watches that are in the same space-age playground as Ming, but doesn’t always match with more traditional, meat-and-potatoes fare.

Polymesh also doesn’t taper, and I love a good taper. Founder Ming Thien has said scaling down the 3D-printing process will be difficult, which could mean smaller lug widths or tapers will take a while.

Most criticisms focus on the price: Chf 1,500, or about $1,800. This seems at least mildly offensive to those who readily point out that a 3D printer can be ordered for next-day delivery for a couple hundred bucks, ignoring that such printer is destined to a future of stamping out phone holders, cable organizers, and toothpaste squeezers.

Look at the competition, and the price feels less offensive. Tudor and Omega charge ~$1k for bracelets, which isn’t nearly as disrespectful as Omega’s $240 piece of Velcro. You could also buy a pretty good bracelet from Private Eyes (~$170) and a scary-good Oyster bracelet from Alibaba for like $15. But I’ve got about 15 bracelets lying around from all of the aforementioned categories, and the Polymesh easily wears the best, even if I personally don’t think it’s the best looking.

Polymesh feels like V1 of something important. Not just a bracelet, but an experiment in how additive manufacturing can be used in watches. On the Business of Watches podcast, Ming said he wants to explore 3D printing an integrated bracelet and case together. (I recommend listening to that full episode.) It’s the type of thinking that pushes watches forward.

Ming isn’t just rethinking the bracelet, but how watches are made. And that’s more exciting to me than whether or not I can pair the Polymesh with my Explorer.

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Find Polymesh on Ming’s website here.

UNPOLISHED STORE

This Isn’t a Normal Canvas Strap

It’s only 2mm thick. Most canvas straps are also lined with something like leather, which makes them thick, stiff, and unwearable.

Not these.

100% cotton. Stitched in the United States. Get the Unpolished Canvas Strap in charcoal, green, or khaki,—18, 19, 20mm, or 22mm lug width. The perfect easy-wearing summer strap:

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🙏 Paid subscribers: You can now find your discount codes for the Unpolished Store and Watchcheck ($50 off any service) on this page.

First Semester Recap

We’ve hit the halfway point of 2026, so this’ll be a semester report card instead of a June recap.

My main goal for Unpolished at the start of 2026 was to diversify the content: Spinning what’s already working in the newsletter into podcasts and YouTube videos. I’m less concerned about Instagram or short-form, but do test out new stuff.

So far this year:

✍️ Unpolished has published 52 times, including:

🎧 7 podcast episodes:

• Watchmaker Bradley Taylor

• The Psychology of Collecting w/ King Flum

• Neo-vintage w/ Trevor Wynn

• How to Sell a Watch w/ Wes Wynne

• How to Collect the Vintage Daytona w/ Michael Morgan

• Toledano & Chan

• Nicholas Bowman Scargill (Fears Watches)

Subscribe to the podcast to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS. I also publish audio editions of select newsletters there.

🎥 Future episodes will also be on YouTube, so make sure to follow the channel here. Next video will be coming after the holiday weekend.

Here are the most popular issues so far:

Brand de-consolidation, a platinum Nautilus, a new Tudor “dress watch” (kind of?) We haven’t gotten a midsize Seamaster, but about half of these predictions are right so far.

Zodiac Sea-Wolf, Gallet Clamshell, and the only Grand Seiko I really like—the most-viewed article of 2026.

A conversation with dealer Wes Wynne, and a supplementary guide—this one’s converted the most of you from free to paid subscribers.

Casual texts to a few dealers turned into this article about the stuff that’s not hot right now. A bunch of links, and even a few saved searches to facilitate your next hunt.

And one I wish would’ve performed better:

I asked a bunch of people, some watchmakers, but mostly not, what craft means to them. I’ve thought a lot about these human-centric words in 2026: Taste (and how to develop it), authenticity, craft. They’re buzzwords in watchmaking and everywhere else, supposedly the qualities that make us uniquely human and that AI can’t copy.

I’m not so sure, but hearing about how others think about “craft” was a fun exercise.

If you want to dig into the rest of the Unpolished archive over the holiday weekend, you can find it here.

Here’s what newsletter growth has looked like in 2026:

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🇺🇸 I’ll have a special July 4 edition that looks back at American watchmaking this weekend.

Thanks for the continued support,

Tony

Get in touch:

• tony[at]unpolishedwatches.com

• Instagram

• My favorite, tap the heart or leave a comment:

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Walking into Artifact New York is like entering a museum without any guide or placards. There’s a sense that all 3,000+ pieces in its archive have been thoughtfully chosen by co-founder Hugh Mo Jr. But for most of us who don’t know much about capital-F Fashion, Hugh provides the cultural context that explains why each piece was chosen.

Artifact acquires important vintage fashion pieces and rents them out to stylists for celebrity red carpets, magazine shoots, and other occasions where looking like you understand culture matters as much as looking good.

But inside, Artifact feels more like an archive. Hugh’s quiet and unassuming, even though his inbox is filled with rental requests for A-listers. The team of five has outfitted Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover, Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl shoot, and a whole lot more. It’s fitting that their New York City office overlooks the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Hugh’s interest in fashion and watches began around the same time.

“I convinced my mom to get me a modern Submariner when I graduated college,” Hugh said. From there, he started to notice watches in pop culture—Kanye, Tyler, the Creator.

He admits the first few vintage watches he bought after that, he “bought pretty incorrectly.” A Submariner ref. 5513 that had been polished and recut, but not in a good way. A 1970s Cartier Tank Cintrée that caused a year of headaches.

“But they’ve been welcome mishaps,” he said. “I could stomach those losses, and they ended up teaching me a lot about myself.”

Last winter, I visited Hugh at Artifact’s New York archive to chat watches and fashion. His instinct as a collector runs through both, prioritizing objects that carry cultural moments more than chasing the rarest or the flashiest.

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The Countdown is Unpolished’s regular collector feature. It’s a look inside the mind of an enthusiast with a simple 3-2-1 format:

• 3 watches that define their taste

• 2 objects they love beyond watches

• 1 piece of advice

Previous Editions:

• Inside the Mind of a Rolex Collector

• Designer, Architect, Self-Taught Watchmaker

Subscribers get: (1) 2 newsletters/week; (2) 10% off in the Unpolished Store, and (3) $50 off any service at Watchcheck, and can access all comments and Q&As.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE ESCAPEMENT

A New Event for Collectors, By Collectors

The Escapement is the first collector-focused event built for enthusiasts of all types. It’s not a trade show. Come for live talks by independent watchmakers like Rexhep Rexhepi and Romain Gauthier. Plus, get hands-on with watches from Greubel Forsey, Simon Brette, and some of today’s most important makers. All in an arena and format that’s never been done before.

It’s not all watches: Saturday night will feature a comedy headliner, while Sunday will have a closing concert. Friday is VIP day, all day, with an opening-night Gala. Saturday and Sunday are General Admission. Join us: November 20-22, Etihad Arena, Abu Dhabi (UAE):

Buy VIP Tickets

General Admission

3 Watches

Cartier Tank Asymétrique

Hugh didn’t start with the Asymétrique—that Tank Cintrée came first. He was drawn to the Cintrée, in part, because that’s what he thought he should like. It’s the one “big collectors” talk about. He ended up buying a ‘70s Cintrée that taught him a lesson instead.

“I wasn’t so conscious of avoiding minefields at the time,” Hugh says. When he bought that Cintrée, he figured it’d be the first in a focused Cartier collection that would reach even further back into its history.

But then he sent it in for service, and it was gone for a year. Moisture exposure, missing gaskets, dial repairs.

“[Cartier] restamped the dial. Some dealers called it a service dial, and didn’t want to sell it,” he says. Eventually, he got rid of it. Instead of sending him backwards in Cartier’s history, it all made him look towards more recent production.

But he still liked Cartier, so soon after he landed on a CPCP Tank Asymétrique from 1996. He’d first noticed one at an auction preview, before the hype dragged prices of every Cartier up.

“That Cintrée ended up being quite formative for my collecting,” Hugh said.

It made him more condition and detail driven. “That 5513 and Cintrée made me realize that just getting a rare configuration or watch wasn’t enough.” Looking back, he admits he was an “eager beaver, hunting rarity for rarity’s sake.”

Patek Philippe 3971 Perpetual Calendar Chronograph ‘First Series’

“I was going through the first Futuregrail catalog and saw it,” Hugh said. This was in 2022, before neovintage Patek Philippe really took off. Hugh said he was attracted to perpetual calendar chronographs the same way he used to like Jordans, but only colorways Jordan actually wore—the lineage at the core of everything else.

Patek introduced the 3971 alongside the 3970 in 1986, the successor to the ref. 2499, and 1518 before that. The 3970/71 are identical, except the 3971 has a snap-on sapphire caseback (instead of solid gold). It’s estimated that only about 100 first series 3970/71s were ever made. Lucky for Hugh, he found this one just before they got white hot.

“I threw in a single bid and got it at the low reserve.” He didn’t exactly expect to get it, and ended up selling a Lange and a vintage Speedmaster to fund the acquisition. “It sped up my collecting in a way,” he said.

“Sometimes the power of getting to the next thing you want is enough to make you cut bait with whatever you have.”

🤓 Here’s my Collector’s Guide to the 3970

Rolex Daytona 6263 ‘Big Red’

“Anyone who doesn’t know watches would probably pick this as the best in the collection,” Hugh said.

It’s a Rolex Daytona 6263 “Big Red” from 1978. Black dial, bright red “Daytona,” Mk 2 pushers. Nothing special or unique about it, just a great vintage chronograph in solid condition.

“Sometimes, we get so crazy about, I want this 1-of-25 Lange, and forget to think about a watch’s enduring qualities or aesthetic appeal.”

When Hugh first got into watches, he’d see celebrities wearing a rose-gold Daytona on Oysterflex or something flashier like a yellow-gold Royal Oak 15202. It influenced him—“that’s where I thought my collecting would go.”

Eventually, his taste in watches and fashion evolved.

“I like lived-in things that show life,” Hugh said. “Now, I can’t imagine walking into a luxury store and buying new clothes.”

🎧 Unpolished Podcast: How to Collect the Vintage Rolex Daytona in 2026

2 Objects

Hugh collects fashion the same way he collects watches, where what the piece means is more important than the label.

Alexander McQueen Mask (from Autumn/Winter 1996 ‘Dante’ Collection)

“[Alexander] McQueen’s ‘96 Dante collection is probably one of the most impactful of the past 30 or 40 years,” Hugh said. The show was staged in a candle-lit church, where models walked down a crucifix-shaped runway to a soundtrack of organ music and gunfire. A skeleton was seated in the front row.

In the collection, McQueen wove together religious robes and iconography with military uniforms and imagery. It vaulted McQueen from a young British provocateur to visionary. The next year, Givenchy hired him as its artistic director.

This crucifix mask is the defining piece of the Dante collection. Fewer than a dozen were made, and only a few have reached the public. If it were for sale, it might cost $30k.

“It’s been spammed by pop culture,” Hugh said. David Bowie famously wore the mask. Nine Inch Nails used it in a provocative music video. And then, Kanye wore it. Some claimed Kanye’s was fake, but he rented it from Artifact.

It’s kind of like a “hype” watch—even as it becomes a cultural meme, the importance remains.

Raf Simons Bomber Jacket (from Spring/Summer 2003 ‘Consumed’ Collection)

“This is one of the things I prize most,” Hugh said. It’s a white bomber jacket from Raf Simons’ Spring/Summer 2003 “Consumed” collection. Simons is a Belgian designer—one of the most influential ever, having led Dior, Calvin Klein, and Prada—but collectors chase his early-2000s menswear under his own name.

The jacket is a collage: Corporate logos, ambiguous messages, bold graphics. The show notes read: “Today’s living environment is about consuming as well as being consumed; some suggest this could lead to an apocalyptic end, while others, particularly younger generations, take this reality as their cue to create new, more viable and flexible personas.”

“The jacket’s not the highest quality,” Hugh admits. But that’s not the point. He said it feels like something no one would do in fashion now, where everything is an official collab, and the runway is simply another branding opportunity.

1 Piece of Advice

“You’ll learn more, and it’ll be more joyful, if you surround yourself with pseudo-scholars,” Hugh says. They’re the ones most excited about the object, and they’ll make you appreciate it even more.

Hugh’s example isn’t a watch. On a recent trip to Vienna, he met a guy focused only on Margiela menswear from 1999–2008—a forgotten era with basically no resale value.

“But he’s so laser-focused on this one thing, talking to him inspired me in so many ways it felt like it paid for my whole trip.”

“It made me appreciate something that I only knew a little bit about. You can get that through books sometimes, but I usually get it from people.”

More:

• Artifactnewyork.com

• Find Artifact and Hugh on Instagram

• Hugh was recently on the Standard H podcast—listen here

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Get in touch:

• tony[at]unpolishedwatches.com

• Instagram

• My favorite, tap the heart or leave a comment.

• For leather and canvas straps stitched in U.S.: Shop the Unpolished Store

But you should probably just buy it used.

Luxury prices have become so luxurious that it’s almost a truism to point out their insanity. The problem isn’t price increases alone, but when the watches don’t really get better. Since this newsletter talks plenty about vintage and pre-owned, are there any watches I’d buy new for that glass of champagne and the promise of “building a relationship”?

Of course!

Before we get there, a few notes:

• It’s a brawl under $1k. The entry level of the Swiss industry is mostly sad. But it’s a lot of fun when you look at Asian brands (Casio, Citizen, Seiko), or microbrands that mostly produce in Asia.

• I limited my picks to one per brand, though I wouldn’t discourage you from a new Tudor Black Bay Chrono, 58, or 73. That said, if a brand makes one watch I’d buy at retail, there’s a pretty good chance it makes a few. This goes for Nomos, Tudor, Rolex, and plenty of others.

• There’s not much from like $10k-25k. Nothing pulled me towards the classic “mid-tier”—IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Omega, etc. (Okay, one JLC and one Omega juuuust missed the cut.) I also put the question out on Instagram, and they didn’t get a single mention.

• The brands subscribers mentioned the most, in order: Longines, Tudor, Rolex, Sinn, Nomos. A bunch of smaller brands also got multiple mentions, including: Frederique Constant, Farer, Serica, Baltic, Unimatic, Squale.

• I’m not talking about indies or limited editions, though there’s plenty of reasons to buy these at retail. Collective Horology has curated a solid roster of indies. Today, we’re focused on watches anyone could walk in (or click through) and buy.

More important than the what is always the why. As much as I like vintage and pre-owned, I get that they can’t match the feeling of having your name on the warranty card and peeling those stickers off for the first time. As one subscriber told me:

“A watch I’m buying to mark a significant moment in my life I’ll always buy new.”

Subscribers get: (1) 2 newsletters/week; (2) 10% off in the Unpolished Store, and (3) $50 off any service at Watchcheck, and can access all comments and Q&As.

Anything ‘under a Few Hundred Bucks’

Let’s start affordable and work our way up. As another subscriber put it:

“I’ll buy new: (1) if it’s cheap (< $400 for me), (2) for a special occasion, or (3) if it trades close to MSRP.”

Once you get below a certain price, it’s not worth the hassle of pre-owned. Go forth, buy your Casio F-91W, G-Shock 5600, Swatch Gent, Citizen Eco-Drives, etc. fresh out of the box. These watches are, as Jack Forster recently wrote, “almost pure signal.”

Guilty pleasure: I picked up a MoonSwatch 1965 at an airport last year. For $265, you could do worse, though I’ll readily admit a MoonSwatch is hardly pure signal.

Timex Marlin Hand-Wound

Our first mechanical pick.

People are sometimes surprised that I like Timex, but I like Timex! It makes a ton of watches, and many of them are deliberately trendy.

But the Marlin Hand-Wound is a classic, a watch that looks more like something my grandfather would’ve worn while selling insurance door-to-door than some TikToker making ends meet on affiliate links.

When it came out in 2017, the Marlin was the first mechanical watch Timex had made since 1982. Timex says it’s $259, but the street price is more like $209.

A generous subscriber recently gave me a limited-edition Marlin for The New Yorker’s 100th anniversary. It’s got plenty of flaws: The small crown is partially recessed and hard to wind. It’s on time about as often as a flight out of O’Hare. The leather strap is only slightly better than what you’d get from a Canal Street knock-off.

But the seconds hand is capped with a bagel and isn’t that delightful? Sure, I fondly remember the days of getting a mechanical Seiko for $64.99—

But those halcyon days are sadly gone, a casualty of some cruel combination of inflation and brands “pushing upmarket.” The equivalent today is more like $250.

At this price, I wouldn’t recommend: Tissot PRX. I’ve owned a couple, and they never stick. Feels like it’s trying to be something else, and the fit and finish don’t match what some competitors offer. Check out some of those microbrands, maybe a Brew Metric? I almost forgot about Unimatic, but they just dropped their Swimming Pool capsule, which looks like more fun than downing a pack of High Noons.

Hamilton Khaki Field Quartz

The most basic of recs. The Khaki Field comes as an automatic, manual, and most recently, quartz. I have an automatic one, albeit a limited edition, but the Khaki Field’s not really about the movement, so I don’t have a problem going quartz.

I spent a bunch of time with a few Khaki Quartz samples last year—both 33mm and 38mm. I can pull off either on my 6.5in wrist. With new purchases, I usually say to go for the bracelet, but the Khaki Field’s an exception. Hamilton’s bracelet is kind of like an airport lounge in 2026—good in theory, underwhelming in real life. I also wish the Khaki Field Quartz had a domed crystal instead of flat, but it’s a solid field watch.

$445 on Hamilton

Sinn 544 RS

As a general rule, any website that’s as charmingly outdated as WatchBuys is worth buying from. That’s the site where you can buy Sinn and a few other German brands in the U.S. Sinn introduced the 544 this year, an update to the 244, but in steel.

The predecessor Sinn 244 Ti, made from 1994–2007, is rad. The simple Sinn for those of us who can’t pull off an EZM.1 The baby 344 (25mm!) might be even better. But pre-owned Sinns can be genuinely tough to find, and not many make their way to the States.

The updated 544 is 38.5mm, larger than the old 36mm, and I don’t really like hooded lugs, but a few watches get a pass. One is the Rolex Bubbleback, another is this Sinn.

$2,170 on Watchbuys.

Longines Spirit Zulu Time 39mm

The Longines Spirit Zulu Time is kinda like every Wilco album after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Longines today might not be hitting the same highs it used to (the 13ZN being its Yankee), but the music’s still good, sometimes even surprisingly so.

I’d almost forgotten that I covered the Spirit Zulu Time 39 for the Mothership in 2024. I liked it then, and I like it now, though I had a fair amount of nits. To be expected for a watch that’s $3,550.

Fun fact: that titanium Zulu Time, when sized to my wrist, weighs the same as my 80s Rolex Explorer with its solid-link bracelet (96 grams). When did stainless steel get so heavy?

It’s a flyer GMT with a ceramic bezel. The bracelet’s solid, though you’ll have to break out the tools for any microadjustment. Longines makes good watches at a fair price, sadly held back by the nonsensical boardroom strategy that it must be a mid-range luxury product, totally at odds with the brand’s historical significance.

$3,550 from Teddy

Tudor

[Below: More watches I’d actually buy at retail from Tudor, Rolex, Cartier, and Lange.]

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