Camron shares his passion for watches (with many chronographs and Indie watches) under the pseudonym @cucalichronoguy on Instagram. He’s not the average collector and his collection is pretty… eclectic. Today we’re talking about a Speake-Marin, but not one that you’d think of immediately when hearing the Speake-Marin name. It’s a chronograph, and to be precise, itR...
The Tissot Seastar 2000 Professional, a watch we reviewed when it was updated last year, is Tissot’s answer to an instrument dive watch. And for the price, it’s packed with features… It has a powerful automatic movement, great diving capacities, solid materials all around, the required certifications, and it even looks pretty cool. In short, everything you'd expect and more. Afte...
The 1970s was a decade of revolutions. As far as watches are concerned, it is the period of the advent of the quartz watch, which had a major impact on the industry. If you are a fan of mechanical watches, you might think that it wasn't for the good Indeed, the popularity of the new, accurate quartz watches plunged the Swiss watch industry in a deep crisis. Still, quartz watches were a technologic...
The luxury sports watch category is hotter than ever. Just try and get your hands on an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak or a Patek Philippe Nautilus at a retailer and you'll understand what we mean. More and more brands are responding to this unabating trend for luxury sports watches, including more recently independent watchmakers and more accessible brands. This results in a quite large spectrum of re...
Released last year and based on a vintage watch produced by the brand during the 1970s, the Tissot PRX?has become a hit for the brand. Released first in quartz and later with an automatic movement, the success is easy to understand, with this combination of great looks, trendy integrated look and affordable price. Following the steel models, the brand released a (not so affordable anymore) steel-a...
Our oceans are suffocating with plastic pollution. According to research, if things don’t change, the ocean will contain more plastic than fish by 2050. Something needs to be done, and by all of us. And now you might wonder what watches have to do with this issue… All initiatives, even the smallest ones, can have an impact and can help achieve a cleaner planet.?Upcycling, the idea of?t...
Over the last two weeks, in this first installment and in this second one, we have dedicated our Sunday posts to indie watchmakers from outside of Switzerland. And even though the vast majority of watches are produced, or use components produced in Switzerland, why should it stop there? The allure of Swiss Made is understandable, but with the right mindset and the right people, a good watch can be...
An American-based watch collector, Sagar, a.k.a @watchfoodwithme on Instagram, works in Regulatory Affairs for Medical Devices. He might be only 31 years old, but if you look at his feed on social media, scrolling through his collection of watches, you'll see that he already is quite a seasoned horology enthusiast. And he clearly has a thing for unusual watches and colours. From his home base in M...
At first, TAG Heuer might not be your go-to brand for a dive watch. The brand is, after all, very much about racing chronographs and motorsport. Think Carrera, Autavia, Monaco, Silverstone, and many more names that bring back memories of great chronograph watches. Yet, since the 1980s and the 2000-series of watches, TAG Heuer is involved in serious dive watches. Following the revamp of the Aquarac...
The fourth entry in The Collector's Corner sees us returning to IWC, and though the company might best be known for its pilot’s watches, we are taking a plunge into the depths today. There are dive watches, and there are DIVE watches – the latter refers to watches that are so over-engineered that they are basically a piece of survival kit in their own right. The IWC Deep One is a DIVE ...
American watchmaker RGM introduced its Model 600 Chronograph last year with inspiration from military pilot watches from the 1960s and 1970s. It had a straightforward design with a black dial, bi-compax layout and no date and joined the rising trend of military-inspired chronographs like the Hamilton Khaki Field Automatic Chronograph and Longines Avigation BigEye. Blue dials are really trending as...
After two and a half years of solitary development, the brand Havid Nagan and its debut watch finally make their official debut. With no formal training as a watchmaker, Aren Bazerkanian founded his Havid Nagan microbrand in Los Angeles and relies on Swiss manufactures based in La Chaux-de-Fonds to bring his designs to life. Judging from the press images, the inaugural HN00 models deserve a second...
Born in 2007 and reviving the look of one of the brand’s most sought-after vintage dive watches, the Longines?Legend Diver has since its introduction become a sort of pillar in the winged hourglass’ collection. A typical modern icon that still looks as good and fresh as 15 years ago. Classically seen in black, the brand has created recently some cool colourful editions, mostly equipped...
Norqain, the independent Swiss brand that is going from strength to strength, is associated with sporty, robust outdoor watches fitted with chronometer-certified movements and a competitive pricing policy. Last year Norqain launched the Adventure Neverest line, a sub-collection?in the Adventure family that marks the brand's charitable partnership with the Butterfly Help Project to support schoolin...
Last week's article about indie watchmakers from all corners of the world showed that the industry doesn't solely revolve around Switzerland. And as a matter of fact, we've received some comments and did some more digging of our own and are turning it into a tryptic of articles, listing yet more watchmakers doing all sort of cool stuff. Some might be quite well-known, while others might be complet...
Welcome back to our Collector's Corner series about watches from the 1980s and 1990s, and outline why we think they're cool and why they deserve your attention! A few weeks ago, we examined the first Valjoux-7750 powered split-seconds chronograph - the legendary IWC Pilot's Watch Doppelchronograph 3711. This time around, we will take a look at another chronograph gem from the opposite end of the s...
Today will be a truly special installment of The Collector's Series. The kind of person and watch collection you'll see once in a lifetime Many people are collecting watches, but few of them have turned watch collecting into as much of an art as Patrick Getreide. The French businessman who started collecting four decades ago is not driven just for the sake of owning timepieces but by passion. We w...
The “TAG” in TAG Heuer is an acronym for Techniques d’Avant-Garde. And with this in mind, the brand has always been at the forefront of innovation, whether as one of the first watch brands to have an automatic chronograph or as one of the first to create a luxury connected watch. For several years now, TAG Heuer has embraced technology and has even developed its own in-house expe...
Adapting the Biblical phrase to the watchmaking sphere, it is true to say that watch lovers do not live by novelties alone. There are plenty of models out there that deserve to be admired, time after time. One of these belongs to Vacheron Constantin‘s understated yet elegant Patrimony family inspired by slim men’s wristwatches of the 1950s. The Patrimony Moon Phase and Retrograde Date ...
As always, to a given problem, there are multiple possible solutions. When it comes to winding a watch, following the old-school and rather simple solution of the hand-wound movements, then came the automatic winding. With the advent of the wristwatch in the first half of the 20th century, watchmakers worked on finding solutions to give a movement some perpetuity, and designed wristwatch-sized cal...
What happens when you take Louis Cottier's world time complication, add a dose of refined Singaporean taste and passion for craftsmanship and entrust the project to a venerable master independent watchmaker like Svend Andersen? The answer is this delightful Celestial Voyager with a cloisonne dial inspired by the flight of hot air balloons over Cappadocia. Marking the second chapter of BCHH and And...
By now we've established well enough that the world of watchmaking is far from limited to Switzerland, or even Europe. Well beyond the Swiss borders, there's plenty of amazing stuff to be discovered. And even though we have a seasoned team of editors, we sometimes get hit by big surprises. Like Kikuchi Nakagawa, a watchmaking duo from Japan, who we've never covered before but recently stumbled upo...
It's easy to immediately think of Switzerland when it comes to fine watches, but kind of unfair. In some ways, watchmaking and Switzerland?are synonymous, like chocolate, or cheese fondue. Yet, despite being the industry's epicentre, it's far from the only place on earth where watches are made. There are countless brands and individuals doing some really inventive stuff, especially in the independ...
Watch collectors are kinda crazy, of course, but it's a nice kind of crazy' says Mr. Alias, a 45 years old entrepreneur from the Netherlands. His collection is eclectic and whenever he no longer wears a watch it is mercilessly discarded. His love for the technique, craftsmanship, and the painstaking devotion high-end watchmakers display, however, keeps him eternally intrigued by the world of watch...
Last week, and you hardly can have missed it, Audemars Piguet presented a whole new collection of Royal Oak watches celebrating the 50th anniversary of the icon born in 1972. Among a dozen updated models, there was, of course, the brand new Jumbo, the reference 16202, which we’ve extensively reviewed in this article, in its all-time classic stainless steel version. But there’s more to ...
Seiko expands its Prospex Speedtimer chronograph series with a new blue panda-style dial with contrasting black sub-dials. Introduced in 2021, the Prospex Speedtimer celebrates Seiko's contribution to sports timing with a fusion of design details and mechanical features of stopwatches and wristwatch chronographs produced in the 1960s. The case and dial, for example, pick up on specific design feat...
It is well known that the Swatch Group, either through Omega (with the Olympics) or Longines, has a long tradition of being the official timekeeper of sports events. Recently, Longines has announced the renewal of its presence as?the Official Partner and Timekeeper of the 2022 Commonwealth Games. And in the frame of this collaboration, the brand goes bold and far more striking than usual, with a h...
In the music industry, when a band releases a compilation of its most successful songs, it’s named “best-of” or “greatest hits.” At Omega, such a compilation is named the Speedmaster Calibre 321 Canopus Gold. A watch that summarizes 65 years of Speedmaster, a watch that combines the best from the past and the future. Everything that has been praised over 65 years in t...
For some years already, the market of luxury sports watches – understand watches with integrated bracelets combining robustness and mechanical refinement – has been stronger than ever before. We’ve seen new entries to the category, in pretty much all segments of the market, from accessible to ultra-high-end. Even?indie watchmakers are embarking on the concept. And with the two ma...
February the 1st marks the advent of the lunar New Year, an event celebrated in China and other countries in Asia and Southeast Asia. Ulysse Nardin also wants to mark the occasion by releasing a new version of its Moonstruck Worldtimer in a more contemporary and lightweight case from the Blast collection. Representing the Moon’s rotation and the apparent movement of the Sun around the globe ...