The $100 Screw: Inside the 'Cottage Industry' of American Watchmaking
A deep dive with Keaton Myrick, plus the best modern Tiffany & Co. watch you might've forgotten, and the 2025 Rewind Magazine.
This week, I drove to a print shop here in Chicago to review the final proofs for the 2025 Rewind Magazine. It’s 80 pages of the best writing and photos from the newsletter this past year—completely ad-free. The Magazine isn’t for sale; it’s a physical artifact made specifically as a “thank you” for Founding Members.
To get the Magazine, plus a free strap of your choice from the store, upgrade to a Founding Membership here. Starts shipping next week!
If you’re already a subscriber and want to level up, you can still become a Founding Member. Send me a note if you’re having issues, tony[at]unpolishedwatches.com.
More on the Magazine here. Here’s a peek, including the cover and table of contents:
Sale! Unpolished is having a sale!
Unpolished is the newsletter for watch collectors and a top-25 Fashion & Beauty Substack. This week, I’m running a discount: subscribe for just $6 (usually $9). We rarely discount, and if you join now, your rate stays locked in—it never goes up as long as you’re subscribed. Join now:
The Roundup
🔎 A Movado M90 chronograph with ‘565’ case on eBay. I love any old Movado chronograph, but they’re really special with this Borgel case, similar to what Patek used for the ref. 565, its first waterproof Calatrava. But this one’s missing a caseback.
👨💼 Last week’s post about the Omega Seamaster cal. 321 is Derek Guy-approved (Menswear Twitter Guy—thanks, Derek). Coincidentally, today’s chat with American watchmaker Keaton Myrick hits on the theme from Derek’s recent Bloomberg column, “a proposal to bring back American manufacturing.”
🤿 Your watch is rated to 200m, but what’s that really mean? A fun interactive site.
⏱ Heuer god Jeff Stein’s arrivals from 2025—and some collecting tips for 2026. “Tell your friends you love their watches.”
👜 The best modern Tiffany & Co. watch (and LVMH Watch Week). LVMH Watch Week was this week, and besides drooling over that skeleton Daniel Roth Extra Plat for more than a few minutes, there’s not much to report. Tiffany & Co. released the Tiffany Timer Chronograph. “It’s good but not good enough,” SJX said. Tiffany’s watch department got a new director a few years ago (who previously turned Chanel into a respected watchmaker), so it still feels like a bit of a stopgap.
Thinking about what I’d actually like to see from the brand, I thought back to a watch I saw on a collector’s wrist a few weeks ago: 2018’s Tiffany & Co. Square Watch.1
Released for the brand’s 180th anniversary, this was a limited run of 180 in gold and 450 in steel. Unlike most “shaped” watches that just hide a standard round movement inside, Tiffany actually bothered to create its first in-house caliber, matching the square proportions of the case.
The Square Watch is also small—just 27mm across, true to its 1920s inspiration. They don’t pop up for sale often nowadays:
It’s exactly the kind of watch Tiffany needs to be making, and in 2018, might’ve been ahead of its time: elegant, historically grounded, and mechanically honest. While the new $55k platinum Timer is for the “Bird on a Rock” crowd, the 2018 Square Watch is for real nerds.
🎧 Listen to this week’s podcast with Nicholas Bowman-Scargill:
The full Unpolished archive is online for paid subscribers.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PUSHERS.IO
Buying Watches Doesn’t Have to Be Sketchy
Direct access to vetted dealers, fair prices, and watches you actually want.
Pushers.io is the marketplace built for collectors. Every dealer is vetted (3 vouches minimum), and you deal with them directly through the app. No middleman, no buyer’s fees, no bullshit, and watches you actually want. Listings move fast, and there are new watches every time you open the app. Join nearly 10k watch enthusiasts and check out Pushers.io or download the app today.
Keaton Myrick on ‘Leave no Trace’ Watchmaking
Forget American, these guys just wanna make good watches, I wrote last year about the small but growing cadre of watchmakers in the United States.
Keaton Myrick is one of those watchmakers. Based in Sisters, Oregon (population: 2,038), he makes only about 5-6 watches a year, largely by hand. He produces about 80% of his watches in his workshop. Keaton leverages the architecture of the common ETA 6497, but it’s completely transformed by the time he’s done.
Another publication commissioned me to write a piece about “American watchmaking,” so I recently reached out to chat with Keaton. He gave extremely thoughtful answers, so I wanted to publish them in full.
After what he calls his “post-grad” stint at Rolex, he realized he wanted to do more than service; he wanted to master old-school watchmaking techniques and restoration. He moved back to Oregon and started his own workshop, focused on high-end restoration and small-scale commissions.
Unpolished: When people talk about ‘American watchmaking’ today, what do they get wrong or oversimplify?
Keaton Myrick (KM): Infrastructure. While the US has a rich history of high-end watchmaking, it was so long ago that we have lost all signs of it. Industry changed and with that, so did the infrastructure of watchmaking. In general, micro-mechanics in the U.S. is reserved for aerospace, medical, or other government/defense goals.
A simple example is screwmaking. Horology demands extremely small, precise screws. For a long time, I was making my screws here in my Oregon workshop at a tremendous cost of time. The screws were good, and I was in control of the raw material, but they were costing me on average $90-110 per screw, as the time on manual equipment is so demanding. In the end, I reached out to my friend and talented watchmaker Zach Smith of Hour Precision in Ohio. Zach operates a very capable machine shop with a focus on high horology. I’m excited to say that I think this will be the last time I mention “infrastructure” as a problem in the U.S., as people like Zach start to rebuild it and more young watchmakers come up to demand what he makes.
Is there a distinctly American approach in contemporary independent watchmaking, or is that more of a narrative applied after the fact?
KM: I think this relates directly to the previous answer. We have this massive country both in area and in people. Yet, you can count the number of us making watches from raw materials on one hand. This is a testament to the sincere challenge of producing a watch outside of one of the big houses, the definition of a “cottage industry.”
The result is, often, a very handmade watch. CNC machines are getting cheaper, but those capable of working at the scale that watchmaking demands are still unapproachable for the average person. So often, you’re seeing a traditional, old-world approach to making watches. While the Swiss method sometimes involves fragmentation in manufacturing (design firms, prototyping firms, finishing houses, dial making, case making, etc.), in the U.S., you’ll often find closer to a true “manufacture,” not necessarily by choice but because there’s no other option. While I’m proudly producing ~80% of my watch in-house (including dials and cases), my colleague Josh Shapiro and his team are doing even more in their Los Angeles manufacture—some that big firms can’t even claim, manufacturing some of the most challenging internal components under one roof, while at the same time developing new and exciting finishing techniques.
