Watches Are Too Literal

Time Capsule: The Heuer You Could Only Buy with an AmEx

Today’s main event: An urgent plea to stop engraving planes on watches. Also: The ‘80s Heuer you could only buy with an American Express, another pre-owned showroom opens in New York, and is this watch collector the “last author to make real money from his craft”? If you’re a free subscriber, upgrade now to get today’s entire newsletter:

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Time Capsule: The Heuer you could only buy with an AmEx

The Heuer you could only buy with an AmEx. Brochure: Courtesy of Jeff Stein/On the Dash.

Quartz. A declining dollar. It wasn’t easy being a watch brand in the 1970s. To survive, some brands embraced electronic technology.

“It is no exaggeration to say that my electronics team and I were probably one of the few watchmaking teams that fully understood the potential of solid-state electronics for the watch industry,” Jack Heuer writes in his excellent autobiography. By 1977, electronics accounted for 34% of Heuer’s total sales.¹

Thus explains the mail-order Heuer. In the 1980s, Heuer offered a thin, rectangular, gold-plated Heuer, powered by an ETA quartz movement (“the tasteful elegance of gold and ultra-thin design,” says the catalog). It was offered only to American Express cardholders for $295 in 1980 ($1,150 in 2025 dollars). You could order it by mail:

Mail-order Heuer. Inset: The Heuer Pulsemeter that never came to be. Brochure: Courtesy of Jeff Stein/On the Dash.

These AmEx Heuers are kind of hard to find nowadays. Perhaps then, as now, there wasn’t much love for a gold-plated Heuer.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble on a broken one on eBay (auction ends Thursday). A couple of months ago, another AmEx Heuer sold for $550 (Wind also sold one recently). I’m not telling you to buy a FOR REPAIR, gold-plated Heuer for a few hundred bucks. But it’s a fun footnote in watch history.

In Heuer’s biography, he says the brand was also testing a pulsemeter to be marketed and sold by American Express. But they encountered a problem: As we run, blood circulation intensifies in the legs and thighs, and less circulates through the arms and hands. The pulse in our upper body becomes weaker, undetectable by Heuer’s primitive pulsemeter.

In the ‘70s, Heuer was trying so hard to sell anything, and everywhere—just to survive. But the Heuer Pulsemeter died on the vine.

By 1985, TAG Group acquired Heuer.

Trying something new, so tap the heart or leave a comment if you like this little ‘Time Capsule.”² Onto today’s main event—

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Watches Are Too Literal

I can’t get this image out of my head:

The new Breguet Type XX 2075.

It just screams: We made a pilot’s watch. It’s such a pilot-y pilot’s watch that we engraved a plane on the back.

When did watches get so damn literal?

Breguet’s far from alone in taking such a literal approach to establishing its connection to the Holy Trinity of watch adventure: Air, Land, and Sea. Back at Watches and Wonders in April, I counted, at one point, five Formula 1 cars rolling around the convention center.

But It’s not just the ads—it’s infecting the watches now, like this new Breguet so-called Type XX.

There’s no subtlety. No room for interpretation.

Look, we know the stereotype: The (mostly) guys buying these things are pretty simple. We like fast cars, strong whiskey, and falling asleep to Jim Nantz’s sultry baritone with The Masters’ theme music in the background.

But can you imagine your grandfather, the one who flew planes in World War II, and an actual pilot, wanting a cute little airplane engraved on his watch?

Did Watches Get Lazy?

All mechanical watches are symbolic nowadays. Totems.

The 2010s made this clear, when every brand made watches with more heritage inspiration than the Oasis comeback tour. Everything became a reference to a reference. Brands kept outdoing themselves, referring to even the most obscure prototypes they could find buried in the backs of drawers, hidden away in the highest of attics.

And that’s fine. This isn’t another takedown of heritage watches—that’s a tired take. I’m talking about taking inspiration, but doing nothing to reinterpret it with your own creativity, through the unique lens of watchmaking, to create something novel and expressive.

Instead of taking the idea of a “pilot’s watch” and thinking about what that even means in 2025—when those planes basically fly themselves—it’s engraving a plane on a movement and calling it a day.

Other examples come to mind: