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?

Read more

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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🎁 Unpolished Members get: (1) Welcome Care Package; (2) 10% off the Unpolished Store; (3) $50 off Watchcheck, + 2 newsletters/week, and all comments, Q&As. Find info on all your benefits HERE.

• 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!”:

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

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

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• 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

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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.:

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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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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

UNPOLISHED STORE

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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.

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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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After the New York sales put an exclamation point on the spring auction season, it feels like time for a Market Update, but I’m struggling to find a register that strikes a middle ground between:

• Breathlessly cheerleading mega results for Journe, Voutilainen, vintage Calatravas, Rolex Bubblebacks, etc.

• Throwing a wet blanket on the whole charade, droning on that the “market’s too hot,” like an economist who’s predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions.

What paid subscribers are reading:

After all, auctions often have very little to do with the watches. Watches are mostly stripped of history, context, or anything else—placed on a tray with only an estimate, and, eventually, a price that supposedly defines their value. We look on as a few far-flung billionaires chase a quartet of Voutilainens to $1.9m, $1.8m, $1.2m, or $1.1m, reaching for words like rarity or condition to call it Culture, pretending that spending is taste.

GQ’s Cam Wolf wrote that 70 watches have already sold for $1 million this year, almost equaling the 80 from all of 2025.

Scroll the catalog like a feed

There seems to be no common thread running through what performs well right now, except that scrolling through an auction catalog feels more and more like scrolling on Instagram. If it pops on the feed, it pops on the rostrum. A rare Journe (or not rare), a Patek Philippe Calatrava with Breguet numerals or sector dial. Bubblebacks, apparently.

As for Voutilainen, he’s probably made ~1,200 watches, a fraction of Journe’s ~20,000.1 But rarity also passes for importance. It’s much easier to explain that a Voutilainen is a piece unique than it is to wax poetic about Kari’s dual-wheel direct impulse escapement, or, at least, it’s easier to fit into an auction headline or Instagram caption.

• On one hand: This rarity means every time a Voutilainen comes up, it’s a chance to get a rare trophy from a modern master.

• On the other: I can’t shake the feeling that this also means a small cabal could ensure every Voutilainen becomes record-breaking or headline-grabbing.

We call this the “watch market,” but it’s not a market. The number of collectors buying trophy watches at $1m+ must be vanishingly small. WatchPro and Eric Wind pointed out that the number of registered bidders at Phillips Geneva was slightly smaller this May (1,815) compared to last November (1,886), and certainly down from 2021 (2,311).

The current indie boom was built, in part, by big players like Phillips and 1916 Company. They admirably championed indies when no one cared, they told their stories in lot descriptions, and bought up inventory. Surely, not even they knew the ceiling, or 1916 wouldn’t have sold so many of their Journes back when an entire Journe-dedicated sale of 40 watches achieved the value (~$15m) that a single Souscription Résonance almost hit last weekend.

Seeing red

Perhaps the most confounding results of the weekend, to me:

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In today’s newsletter: The latest Unpolished pod with Canada’s best indie watchmaker; when does a Rolex stop being a Rolex?; close-up with a trio of vintage Reversos; big-time job listings, and your chance to buy my favorite accessible Universal Geneve.

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.

PODCAST

Meet Canada’s Best Watchmaker

Click the image to watch on YouTube →

This week’s guest is independent watchmaker Bradley Taylor. Bradley recently announced the Ardea, a watch built almost entirely by Bradley in his Vancouver workshop. It features a retrograde seconds, a silver dial with guilloche by Bradley, all packed in a 38 x 11mm case ($82k in platinum, $62k in steel).

Bradley went to watchmaking school in Le Locle, Switzerland, worked in after-sales service, and earned certification from Patek Philippe before setting off on his own in 2020. We discuss his favorite Patek Philippe calibers to service, his journey to independent watchmaking, and creating the Ardea.

There’s no shortage of high-quality, time-only watches, so I put the question to Bradley: Are there too many? He said:

“Initially I agreed when I heard [this critique], ‘yea, there’s too many.’ But then, I thought, isn’t this great? … I think it’s a really beautiful time in watchmaking where you’re seeing a lot of the smaller watchmakers actually be in a position to create something, and with the rise of social media and online content, there’s ways to find people who are interested in your work.”

Listen to our entire chat below, or wherever you listen to podcasts—Spotify / Apple / RSS:

When Does a Rolex Stop Being a Rolex?

Ah, the old Ship of Theseus. Even a California court is weighing in on the debate from your undergrad philosophy lecture.

Rolex recently won an injunction after suing a few resellers—Swiss Wrist, First Class Dials, and Austin’s Watches—for selling counterfeit watches, or at least watches with fake dials, bezels, cases, movements, or straps that still featured the “Rolex” mark.

The order prevents the sale of watches with these non-genuine parts, as well as those with “materially altered genuine parts.”

It’s the latest move by Rolex to clean up the secondary market, and it shows how it takes the position that a genuine Rolex watch isn’t only about its origin, but also its components. If too many parts have been swapped out of a Rolex, it’s no longer a Rolex. That means no aftermarket diamonds, no Rolex parts that have been “materially altered”; hell, not even a non-Rolex strap on a Rolex buckle or clasp.

It’s an increasingly important question in the world of resale and customization. After all, all the controversy around that tropical Omega Speedmaster wasn’t about whether it was an Omega, but how much of it was an Omega. Meanwhile, part of the fun of watches can be customization—whether it’s a buss-down Day-Date or a Seiko mod.

Rolex’s judgment suggests that sometimes this goes too far, turning otherwise authentic watches into something else. To me, the question is always whether a customizer is (1) actually adding value, or (2) free-riding off a brand’s IP. It sounds like these dealers (who I’ve not heard of?) were the latter. While the order doesn’t have any direct effect on other dealers, no doubt Rolex could use it as a stick in the future.

The Fashion Law has more, or read the consent judgment here.

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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 to see live stage talks from 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

The Roundup

🪦 Tania Edwards, who worked with Philippe Stern in the 1990s, gives a personal tribute. The former Patek Philippe President died on Sunday.

🏙️ Rolex unveiled a permanent clock in Rockefeller Center, in advance of opening its new Fifth Avenue Flagship.

🚂 A chance to get my favorite affordable Universal Geneve. The Ferrovie dello Stato, or Italian State Railway watch. Commissioned by the State Railway in the 1960s and produced in three different series through the 70s.

I once wrote that Tri-Compaxes were basically for fascists, but the FS was for the proletariat. “Say what you like about Mussolini, at least he made the trains run on time,” or so went the famous excuse for fascism under Benito Mussolini. The saying was propaganda, but the FS keeps on chugging.

This particular UG FS is a Mark 1, identified by its smaller 34mm case and faceted lugs. The white enamel dial looks to be in good condition. These Mark 1s are much rarer than later series, and this is one of the better chances I’ve seen to own an FS recently:

🔄 Reverso Minute.

I’ll have a short auction recap this weekend, but I was glad to see a couple of Reversos perform well at Sotheby’s:

• First Series sold for $23k

• Second Series Gubelin sold for $22k

The case on the First Series is pretty soft—the lines on the Second Series show more definition—but First Series Reversos with Tavannes movements were produced for only a couple of years (~1931-33), making them much rarer and more collectible.

Even better, Sotheby’s provided detailed photos in their listings, illustrating something important about buying Reversos that not many people know:

Read more

Canada isn’t exactly known for its watchmaking, but today’s guest is changing that, one handmade watch at a time.

When I saw Bradley Taylor announce his latest watch, the Ardea, I knew he’d be a good guest.

It’s a well-made, time-only watch—in vogue right now—but completely his own. The Ardea ($62k in steel; $82k in platinum) features a retrograde seconds that snaps back to zero every minute, and almost all of the components are made by Bradley in his Vancouver workshop.

Bradley went to watchmaking school in Le Locle, Switzerland, and earned his Patek Philippe Level II certification before setting off on his own in 2020. We talk about his journey to becoming an independent watchmaker, the challenges of running a solo workshop, his thoughts on the market for high-end (and high-priced) indies, and where he fits in. Then, we dig into his latest release, the Ardea.

For more on Bradley or to get in contact with him: bradleytaylor.ca

Thank you to The Escapement for sponsoring today’s episode. For more info and tickets, visit theescapement.com.

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

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The Roundup

⚡️ The new Ming x J.N. Shapiro. I had the chance to see the new Ming x J.N. Shapiro Lightning, which features a titanium guilloche dial that’s turned by Josh Shapiro and then heat-treated by Ming Thien. It’s a smart way to bring Josh’s old-school guilloche work into Ming’s modern world. In press images, the dial looks super vibrant, and it can be. But as you can see above, it’s also subtle at certain angles and in certain light. Something I wouldn’t mind wearing one bit. Other watchmakers have toyed with turning titanium blue under high heat, but not like this. It’s a clever mix of old and new processes, of Shapiro’s handwork and Ming’s science experiments.

Sometimes, watchmakers are so precious about “craft,” but the Lightning shows Shapiro and Ming just want to make cool sh*t. The Lightning is currently sold through the next couple years of production—it’s limited by production, but not a limited edition. Ming says that probably means ~10 dials a month. CHF 6,250—More on Ming.

⚙️ The newest Claude model renders a fully functional mechanical movement. Pretty cool.

🎧 Bonus Podcast: This week, I published a “bonus” episode with Trevor Wynn, host of Paré Paré Podcast. Trevor was in Chicago during Memorial Day weekend, so we sat down for a short chat at Huckberry after filming a YouTube video. We talk about Trevor’s brief foray into acting, leaving your passion behind, some of our favorite 1990s watches from Rolex, IWC, TAG Heuer, and more, and other updates to Trevor’s collection.

Listen below or find the feed on Spotify / Apple / RSS:

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Rolex, in the Founder’s Own Words | Ref. 05

The Ref is a weekly story about a sometimes-forgotten watch or moment in history. Sunday is the perfect time to step away from the feed for a few blissfully naive minutes to remember the watches that were. Ref. 05 takes a look at Rolex, in the words of its founder. Previous editions:

Rolex Jubilee Vade Mecum is a limited-edition set published in 1946 to mark Rolex’s 40th anniversary. Only 1,000 numbered copies were printed, and I’ve seen them in English, Spanish, French, and German. It contains four volumes in a slipcase:

• Book I: Step by Step, written by Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf, includes a brief biography, his philosophy, and company history.

• Book II: The Evolution of the Wrist-Watch Chronometer, covers Rolex’s early efforts in watchmaking and precision.

• Book III: How the Waterproof Watch Came Into Being, explains the creation and mechanics of the waterproof Oyster case.

• Book IV: The Story of the Self-Winding Watch, details the development of Rolex’s automatic Perpetual movements.

Rolex published the set, and Wilsdorf was the consummate marketer, so no doubt there’s some legacy building. For example, Wilsdorf insinuates that Mercedes Gleitze was wearing a Rolex Oyster around her neck on her first swim across the English Channel in 1927, when it’s commonly acknowledged she wore it on her later “Vindication Swim.”

The set is also far from a detailed account of all things Rolex. It’s only 100 pages total, there are no details about the watches, and few dates or figures. Book I is written by Wilsdorf, but in general terms. The other three volumes are largely company lore that seems aimed at retailers, though ads from the time also pitched it to customers.

That said, Wilsdorf was famously elusive and private, and Vade Mecum is the only book he ever wrote, so it offers a peek into his mind.

Founding myths—true or not—define a company’s culture and values, and persist long after the founders are gone.1 They also guide priorities as a company grows. Vade Mecum feels like one of the primary texts for building the myth of Rolex.

Here are 7 things I learned about Rolex and Wilsdorf from Vade Mecum:

1/ Wilsdorf Already Had His ‘Three Factors’

Let’s begin at the end. Wilsdorf signs off with the following:

“On summing up the reasons underlying the universal prestige Rolex enjoys—apart from the chronometry of our movements—it must be attributed to three factors:

(1) To the Oyster known everywhere as the permanently waterproof wristwatch, for the making of which no plastic materials are used,

(2) To our increasingly popular automatic ‘Perpetual,’

(3) Lastly, our constant care to bring out new and pleasing models, sober and harmonious in design and in true Geneva style.”

This is even echoed in the set’s structure. Book I is about Wilsdorf, by Wilsdorf. After that, each volume focuses on Rolex’s three brand pillars: (1) chronometry (accuracy), (2) waterproof (Oyster), and (3) self-winding (Perpetual). Also note it was in that order, and Wilsdorf makes it sound like Rolex’s automatic movements are becoming more popular, but their success isn’t yet guaranteed.

It’s the exact same messaging we see in this year’s campaigns around the 100th anniversary of the Oyster case.

Wilsdorf emphasizes his prescience in seeing the potential of the wristwatch. Whether it’s that innovative vision, or simply beating us over the head with this messaging for 100 years—or most likely, a combination of both—this commitment to the bit is what makes Rolex so impressive.

2/ I Finally Learned Where ‘Oyster’ Comes from

In Book I, Wilsdorf begins:

“I was born on March 22, 1881, of Protestant parents, the second son of a family of three. My mother’s early death was soon followed by that of my father, and, at the age of 12, I was an orphan.”

Wilsdorf was born in Bavaria, a historically Catholic region. His father had a successful hardware business, but his uncles liquidated it after his parents died. Young Hans was then put in a boarding school of “excellent repute.”

Wilsdorf says he liked math and languages, which drove him to travel. He began his career in Geneva as an apprentice at a pearl exporter.

Surely, this background in the pearl business is where he’d later find inspiration for the Oyster name of his waterproof cases.

In 1900, Wilsdorf got his first job in watches in La Chaux-de-Fonds at a watch exporter.

3/ Wilsdorf Thought Wristwatches Were Fashion

By 1905, at the age of 24, Wilsdorf had moved to London, where he started his own watch company, Wilsdorf & Davis. Alfred Davis was the money guy; Wilsdorf had the ideas. He writes:

“The first specialty we adopted was the travelling watch, called the portfolio watch, cased in the finest quality leathers….However, even at the time, my chief concern was the wristlet watch to which I devoted all my youthful energy and optimism.”

He writes that in 1905, the wristlet watch (or wristwatch) wasn’t popular, mostly an object of derision, and “contrary to the conception of masculinity.”

But Wilsdorf says he saw the potential of it to “bring about a certain revolution in the industry”:

“By its very nature, it called for more frequent renewal. More exposed to damage than a pocket watch, it was not of a type to become a ‘family heirloom.’ It was destined to become a modish accessory, an object submitted to the vagaries of fashion, calling for change and variety.”

Today, we wax poetic about the enduring nature of mechanical watches, and there’s some truth to it. But in the beginning, Wilsdorf saw them as something very different, at least as compared to pocket watches.

This also helped me understand why, especially in the early years, Rolex introduced hundreds of sizes, styles, and models. Wilsdorf saw them as fashion objects.

4/ The Importance of Aegler

Quickly, Wilsdorf strikes up his most important partnership:

“After founding my firm in 1905, I went to Bienne and placed with Hermann Aegler the largest order ever booked for wristlet watches at that time. The order amounted to several hundred thousand Swiss francs.”

Wilsdorf & Davis was an importer of Swiss wristwatches, which it then sold to retailers across Britain and other markets in the British Empire. Wilsdorf says they became particularly popular in Australia and New Zealand.

He emphasizes the importance of this partnership with its movement manufacturer Aegler, which eventually became Rolex Bienne. In 1919, Wilsdorf set up Rolex Geneva. He did this so Aegler could focus completely on manufacturing, while Rolex Geneva could design and launch watches “according to the traditional style of the ‘City of Watchmaking.’”

This division remained important to Rolex. It didn’t officially acquire Aegler until 2004; before that, it was officially a separate entity, even though it’d been producing movements exclusively for Rolex long before that.

5/ The First Rolex Ad Campaign Cost $900k (in 2026 Dollars)

As Wilsdorf & Davis grew, he wanted a name to put on dials. He was very proud of “Rolex,” a word pronounced the same in every European language and easy to memorize. But it didn’t pick up immediately.

Wilsdorf writes that:

“Despite the qualities of this trade name [Rolex], it took 20 years of hard work to make the idea acceptable in England. At first, I ventured to inscribe it on one watch in every six.”

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Full show notes: https://www.unpolishedwatches.com/p/bonus-ep-collecting-the-1990s-with

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Today’s a bonus episode with Trevor Wynn, host of the Paré Paré Podcast. Trevor was in Chicago during Memorial Day weekend, so we sat down for a short chat at Huckberry after filming a YouTube video. We talk about Trevor’s brief foray into acting, leaving your passion behind, some of our favorite watches from the 1990s from Rolex, IWC, TAG Heuer, and more, and other updates to Trevor’s collection.

We’ll be back next week with a full episode featuring an interview with an independent watchmaker who recently announced his latest release. Thanks for listening!

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

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.

Show Notes:

• Paré Paré on Apple Podcasts

• How we all become sellouts, Decoder Ring

• The Feed is Fake, Vulture

• Benrus Type II, Analog Shift

• The Best Field Watches, Unpolished YouTube

• Cartier Santos SIHH 2002 LE, Tony’s Instagram

• Omega Seamaster Chronograph 007 ‘First Light’ (17mm thick!), Omega

• Modern two-tone Rolex GMT-Master II, Rolex

• A Guide to TAG Heuer Dive Watches, On the Dash

• Shop Unpolished Straps, Unpolished Store

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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.

The Roundup

A couple of quick hits before today’s throwback:

• Quick impressions of the new Tudor Black Bay Chrono 39. The 39 x 13mm case (47mm lug-to-lug) wears great, basically the same as my old Black Bay 58 (above). Yellow’s a big swing, and this one’s somewhere between traffic cone and school bus. But the matte yellow is well done: Bright, not flashy. I’ve said before that I much prefer a matte to a sunburst finish, and that’s certainly true here. It works with the black accents. That said, I would’ve liked to see Tudor introduce an all-new case with more standard and accessible colors. The Bumblebee will be part of its Daring collection, along with the blue and pink before it, and harder to get. Tudor’s an enthusiast brand and doesn’t need to lean into scarcity too much. $6,725 in 2026 is fair. Thanks to Burdeen’s for letting me check out the new Bumblebee.

• Apparently, Worn & Wound has acquired Lorier. The law firm that advised the acquisition broke the news on its press page. I reached out to W&W, and hopefully we’ll get the chance to hear more about it from their side. I’d heard the brand was getting killed by tariffs last year—surely they weren’t alone there—so I’m not sure if that has something to do with this news. I don’t cover microbrands much, but I like many of Lorier’s designs—Vintage-inspired but not too on the nose. And Lorenzo and Lauren were thoughtful brand owners, with an admirable reticence towards social media.

• Programming note: There likely won’t be a newsletter until next Sunday, but I’m going to drop a mid-week “bonus” podcast with Trevor Wynn of Pare Pare Podcast. Make sure you’re subscribed: Spotify / Apple / RSS.

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When Damage Became Tropical

The Ref is a weekly story about a sometimes-forgotten watch or moment in history. Sunday is the perfect time to step away from the feed for a few blissfully naive minutes to remember the watches that were. Ref. 04 is going back in time to discover the origins of tropical. Previous editions:

• Error Proof or California Dial

• The Cartier Watches Nobody Wanted in 1996

Tropical, like any good marketing term, is an invention of salespeople. Nowadays, it’s used to describe any dial—mostly black, though not always—that changes color when UV light reacts with its pigment or varnish.

I’ve owned a few tropical dials. By the time I came to watches, the appeal felt self-evident. But that wasn’t always the case.

When did “tropical” really become a thing that collectors would pay up for? I asked a couple of dealers:

• “I would say around 12-14 years ago,” Adam Golden of Menta Watches texted me. “If you go back and look at auctions at that time, you start to see it, and that’s when you first start seeing real premiums attached to them.”

• Matt Bain agreed: He said the term was used in the early 2000s, but the premiums didn’t start until ~2010.

William Massena gave me the most detailed answer:

“In the late 1990s, [tropical dials] were still considered damaged, then the rise of quality pictures on forums started to make us realize that it was a very similar and specific mark within Rolex and Omega. Gradually with digital camera pic quality improving, we saw that it really was a phenomenon across a wide range of brands. I think the term Tropical was invented by dealers because brown sounded bad.

Auctions

Old auction catalogs are the most publicly available source of information, so that’s where I turned. When something gains enough momentum with collectors and dealers, auctions ride the wave.

The first “tropical dial” I could find at auction came in 2007, when a Red Submariner 1680 sold for Chf 50k, 2x its high estimate:

Looking at the numbers, this feels like the tropical dial’s Ed Sullivan Show moment. By 2008, Rolex GMT-Masters, Subs, Explorers, and Speedmasters were all being described as tropical:

Tropical dials are most commonly associated with sports watches with black dials baked in equatorial heat to a brown that’d make Willy Wonka jealous. But as tropical became trendy, it expanded its reach.

The first Royal Oak I found with a “tropical dial” came in 2011. Unlike the black dials of those mid-century sports watches, a tropical 5402 looks more clearly like damage to the galvanic color and varnish on the Royal Oak’s petite tapesserie.

While it’s the same degradation process that occurs to an old Rolex dial, the raised portions of the Royal Oak dial turn brown more quickly, causing a less even patina.

William’s answer offered another hint: Look at the forums. There, the tropical dial’s big bang moment came in April 2005, a couple of years before the term appeared in auction catalogs. Within days of each other, we see the first mention on TimeZone and Vintage Rolex Forum, two of the largest collecting communities at the time. Both also reference watches from Italian dealers or collectors as the source of their curiosity.

On both sites, the discussion was the same: Collectors still weren’t sure if these were originally brown dials, or black dials that had turned brown. One thread even points out that a prominent dealer at the time listed a brown-dial Submariner 5512, stating Rolex originally made the dial in that color.

William said many collectors also assumed foul play:

“Many collectors, including me, thought that a lot of these dials were too even in coloring to be original (and we were proven wrong later). I came late to tropical collecting, only after serious dealers (Eric Ku, etc.) had sold a lot…I thought it was an Italian job (and sometimes I was right!).”

At first, the term tropical was simply about naming something that happened most commonly to watches that had lived under the sun and palm trees. It wasn’t about adding an adjective to entice another bid or two.

Eventually, dealers picked it up, auctions formalized it, and the market ran with it. Somewhere along the way, the word got stretched beyond its original meaning to capture all kinds of things. Take even the faintest brown out in the sun, crank up the saturation, and a watch is “going tropical.”

In those days, the watch world was also much smaller, and distinctions were readily drawn to give collecting a gotta catch ‘em all feel.

By the time tropical appeared in auction catalogs in 2007, it had a premium associated with it. As soon as that happens, less-savory types find ways to take advantage. People start baking or faking tropical dials.

This bubbled to the surface in 2021 when a tropical Omega Speedmaster became the most infamous tropical dial ever sold, for $3.1 million.

“The tropical dial is the coolest dial. However, I think its collectibility has cooled off since that Speedy at Phillips. That scandal had two victims, the Speedy and the tropical dial, and many people forget that.”

He’s right. I still think about this Rolex Milgauss ref. 6541 from a couple of years ago:

It was one of my favorite watches I saw that auction season, but it passed in the sale. The dial was slightly tropical, and there was obvious wear on the case and rust on the hands. But the entire package felt honest, the type of thing no one would bother to fake. It even came from a former CIA officer.

That’s the appeal of any of these tropical dials, whether today or 20 years ago:

If you’re enjoying these throwbacks:

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Before today’s Real Review: We just published the latest YouTube video on field watches, which you can watch here—and please subscribe to the channel! This post may be too long for email, so click the headline to view it in your browser.

For the second year running, A. Lange & Söhne has surprised with a well-proportioned release. The new Saxonia Annual Calendar measures 36 x 9.8mm, offered in 18kt white or pink gold. It’s not a limited edition and costs $63k.

The Saxonia Annual Calendar isn’t perfect and makes some compromises to achieve its wearable size, but it’s one of my favorite releases of 2026. After we take a look at the new pair, we’ll compare to a few competitors, new and vintage, but the Lange does more than enough to stand out.

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What Is the Saxonia Annual Calendar?

The gold Saxonia Annual Calendar (~43mm lug-to-lug) is paired with either an argenté or grey dial, both made from 925 silver.

An annual calendar needs one manual adjustment every year at the end of February. Invented by Patek Philippe in 1996 as a “useful complication” priced between its Calatravas and high-priced complications like a perpetual, it debuted in the ref. 5035.1

Lange introduced the first-gen Saxonia Annual Calendar in 2010, measuring 38.5mm and featuring its Sax-0-Mat micro-rotor movement. A bit of a slept-on watch nowadays, especially the slick grey U.S. boutique edition.

As for the updated Saxonia Annual Calendar, let’s start on the outside and work our way in:

Dial: The Saxonia Annual Calendar looks kinda flat in press images, but it’s not: The three subdials for month, running seconds, and day, are slightly recessed, and circular graining contrasts against the main surface. In keeping with the Saxonia collection, decoration is sparse: big date, applied gold hour markers, gold hands. The applied markers have an additional faceted pyramid on the tip, a thoughtful detail and nod to the previous annual calendar. The vibrant moonphase disc provides the only color needed.

Case: The case uses Lange’s familiar construction: Three parts, with a polished bezel, brushed midcase, and Lange’s distinctive notched lugs.

The bezel is noticeably slimmer than many other models, giving the compact calendar as much dial real estate as possible. The case adds a pusher at 10 o’clock, which advances the calendar with a click—an update that makes the annual calendar easier to use. The additional calendar correctors sit flush in the midcase.

The grey and rose gold is the winner, a combo we’ve seen before from Lange, but one that almost always hits. The white gold, with its matching silver dial, white gold hands and markers, is either boring or tastefully subdued, depending on who’s looking.

I prefer yellow gold watches, but the rose- and white-gold Annual Calendar pair and many, many other releases seem to indicate “the market” disagrees with me; proof, as if we needed more, that the market is not always right.

Movement: Inside is the new automatic caliber L207.1, with 60-hour power reserve. It uses the same foundation as the automatic movement seen in the Saxonia Automatic and Outsize Date (L086.1), which has been around since 2011.

There are the hallmarks of a Lange movement: German silver plates, anglage, black polish, hand-engraved balance cock, an in-house hairspring. Unlike the standard L086.1, there are even some gold chatons!2

It has a full winding rotor, in contrast to the previous Annual Calendar. Let’s look at a couple key differences between the old and new movement.

What the new annual calendar doesn’t have: The previous Annual Calendar used the Sax-0-Mat, Lange’s excellent micro-rotor, and had a couple of features the updated version doesn’t:

• Zero reset: Long a calling card of Lange, its patented zero reset snaps the seconds hand to zero when the crown is pulled out, allowing for accurate time setting.

• Gold rotor: The micro-rotor in the previous Saxonia Annual Cal is solid gold, while the full rotor in the new calendar is gold-plated.

I’ve seen these mentioned as shortcomings, but I think both are basically fine:

• There’s discussion about Lange’s decision to use a gold-plated rotor dating back to 2011, when it introduced its new automatic movement. Back then, Lange said the choice wasn’t about cost savings, but about technical considerations: Gold is soft, and especially when that thin (and winding rapidly), prone to stretching. So, it uses ARCAP for its full rotors, an alloy similar to German silver (e.g., it’s also used on the Odysseus’ Datomatic).

• The zero-reset takes up space, and the new caliber is 30 x 5.7mm. So what, you’re Lange, figure it out! you might say. I guess this is fair, but other technical improvements to the Annual Calendar make the zero-reset less necessary: The power reserve is up to 60 hours (compared to 46 on the previous Annual), and that new pusher at 10 o’clock makes it easier to advance the calendar without interrupting the business of timekeeping.

My biggest critique of the movement is aesthetic:

[Also below: A collector’s tip on the Langematik, the calendar competition, and on wrist impressions of the Saxonia Annual Calendar.]

The wide outer track for the rotor makes the movement appear smaller, leaving less room for Lange’s best-in-class finishing to shine. That said, Lange’s automatic caliber still stacks up favorably to competitors like the Patek caliber 240.

A Brief History of the Langematik (and Why You Should Care)

Lange introduced the Langematik, featuring the base Sax-0-Mat movement, in 1997, retiring it in 2011 for the full-rotor automatic. Today, it persists only in the Langematik Perpetual. Langepedia has said of the Sax-0-Mat:

“To this day, it remains the finest self-winding movement Lange has ever created. Given its craftsmanship, aesthetics, technical ingenuity, and historical mark on the brand, it will be quite hard to surpass.”

Some will mourn the Sax-0-Mat’s final departure from the Annual Calendar, but the smaller version’s size and other improvements ultimately make it difficult to compare the two.

Collector’s tip: Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an early Lange that isn’t being hyped up by Instagram dealers, look at the original Langematiks. This was Lange’s original sporty effort, the Sax-0-Mat is excellent, and the 37mm size is just right.

On the Wrist

The updated Annual Calendar comes on a padded alligator strap. It feels too dressed up for a watch in 2026, but I work from home, so what do I know, except that it’d probably (definitely!) look better on a Matte Calfskin Strap from the Unpolished Store (stone grey for white gold, chestnut for rose, I’d say).

The Saxonia Annual Calendar is wearable but substantial on the wrist. The lugs are also slimmed down, giving it less visual weight. Slightly thicker than an ultra-thin 90s perpetual calendar or Lange’s old time-only 36mm watches, but I want a little oomph from my Lange.

There’s just enough heft to give it that I want the owner to feel like they’re closing the door of a Mercedes, as Günther Blümlein famously put it—but it’s more SL than G-Wagon.

The Calendar Competition

I struggle to think of any true, direct competition for the Saxonia Annual Calendar—a good sign for any new release. The previous Annual Calendar measures 38.5mm, more like a traditional Lange. That said, you can also find them for like $30k.

For a 36mm calendar, natural comps are the ultra-thin perpetual calendars from the 1990s: the Patek Philippe 3940 and its round competitors from AP and Vacheron (I don’t really consider the 5035 and other Patek annual cals as competitors). You could get a later 3940J for around the same price, but (1) the Lange’s case construction is much better and (2) Lange’s movement offers superior performance and finishing.

There are also the modern annual calendars from Patek Philippe: the ref. 5396R is the best comp, but it measures 38.5 x 11.2mm and costs about $4k more. Meanwhile, Patek Philippe itself doesn’t seem to take seriously the rest of its annual calendar offerings, so I won’t either:

Concluding on a Good Annual Calendar

The Saxonia Annual Calendar, along with last year’s 1815 34mm, shows that Lange takes watchmaking for smaller sizes seriously in a way that many other watchmakers don’t.

Here I am comparing a new watch (and a less complicated one at that) to a 3940, one of the most in-demand vintage watches around.

But six weeks removed from the beige halls and fluorescent lights of its Watches and Wonders release, and after spending some more time with it, the Saxonia Annual Calendar holds up:

• Compared to vintage watches: Modern quality, movement finishing, and performance in a compact size the watches of a generation ago can’t match;

• Compared to new competitors: A form factor that most modern complicated watches don’t even try to execute.

A. Lange & Söhne is at its best as a new-old watchmaker, taking the ideas of historic Glashütte watchmaking and bringing them to modern watches. The Saxonia Annual Calendar is proof.

More about the Saxonia Annual Calendar on Lange’s website. I’ve heard that it’s starting to be delivered, so also check out your local boutique. Lange’s new boutique just opened in Chicago, which is where I was able to see it.

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