Real Review | Ming Polymesh and 'Add to Cart' Innovation
The numbers behind Unpolished in 2026—plus, the 3D-printed bracelet I can't stop touching.
Happy July. Before we get to today’s Real Review: I enjoyed author Gary Shteyngart’s discussion of watches in the latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show, beginning right around here. Gary’s larger “project” is about appreciating beauty and living well, and the theme of his next essay book—The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure—where watches fit nicely among essays about capybaras, tailored suits, and martinis. You can also find Gary on Substack.
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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.
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:
🙏 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:
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:
🇺🇸 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
My favorite, tap the heart or leave a comment:
The polymesh looks amazing on the new Ming x JN Shapiro Lightning. I received the first piece allocated to Sydel & Sydel and ask Jonathon about polymesh vs bracket. He said both work really well on the Lightning but we both felt the polymesh really drove more of a Ming vibe. You may have seen my piece during the event you did with them a few weeks ago. Thus far I haven’t had any fit issues, but I agree the pin/clasp is tricky until you get the hang of it. Very innovative and super comfortable.
I've had one for a bit over a month now and think it's great but also a bit hard to justify price wise unless you have a number of watches that it works well on. I primarily bought it for an Apollo 11 45th anniversary Speedmaster (Titanium case with Sedna accents) and think it works great on that. It's also good on my Sinn EZM2 and surprisingly on my Habring Top Seconds.
One thing to note is that because of the thickness of the "endlinks" it won't fit on watches if the lugholes are too close to the case.