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Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

🚀 The Escapement

Ever since The Escapement was announced, I have been getting the same two questions, over and over, in DMs and comments and WhatsApp groups. The first is ‘what actually is this thing?’ and the second is ‘how is it different from Watches and Wonders or Dubai Watch Week?’

These are fair questions, and with tickets going live imminently, I figured I should answer them to the best of my ability - once - instead of typing slightly different versions of the same reply into a dozen DMs.

For the avoidance of doubt: I co-founded this event, and I’m also its head of content. So asking me whether The Escapement is worth attending is roughly like asking Aurel Bacs if his title lot is worth buying. I will do my best to be useful anyway, and you can calibrate accordingly.

Who is “we”, anyway?

I figured I should cover this because “a few collectors decided to throw an arena event” might set off alarm bells (as it would for me too).

The founding team is split by design - half are seasoned watch enthusiasts, and half people who build large events for a living. On the collector side you’ve got names some of you will know: Anish, Horology Ancienne, myself, and a couple of others. On the production side, we have legit heavyweight experience. The three event leads have something like 75+ years between them running large-format consumer events, which includes arena takeovers, 35,000-person music festivals, that scale of stuff.

The bit that makes our economics work, though, is that one of our co-founders, Petr, owns a fabrication house that has built stands for the watch industry for over a decade (IWC, Montblanc, Hermès, Piaget and others, at Watches and Wonders and Basel before that). The same team has built Greubel Forsey boutiques in SoHo and Ginza. Because the fabricator is part of the event rather than being a vendor hired by it, we get our production at ‘cost’, with no chain of markups (from fabricator to agency to organiser). That’s the reason a brand can participate in our event for a fraction of what the equivalent would cost at other shows, and it’s the reason we could afford to cap brands instead of cramming the floor to pay the bills.

My point is that you can rest assured, this isn’t a group of enthusiasts winging it.

Who are watch events for?

Let’s start with my favourite Munger quote: ‘Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.’ I think a useful exercise for understanding any event is to ask who pays for it, and who it needs to keep happy. Follow the money, and the experience will be self explanatory.

Watches and Wonders, for example, is a trade show. It exists so brands can present novelties to retailers and press, and the production budget (which is an eye-watering sum btw) is spent in service of that mission. Yes, they sell public tickets now, and the public days have grown, but when you attend as a collector, you are essentially a plus one in someone else’s show. The important meetings are happening behind frosted glass, the people you want to talk to are double-booked with Bucherer, and the whole machine would run exactly the same if you stayed at home. You can feel this when you’re there, in that It is mostly a B2B event that tolerates random collectors.

Dubai Watch Week is a different animal, and I genuinely love DWW; I’ve said publicly it’s the best ‘watch show’ in the world, and I stand by that description (for now, anyway!). You can touch the watches, talk to watchmakers, and it’s free! But it has two specific features worth noting... First, it’s run by a retailer, and a retailer’s incentives shape everything from which brands get prominence to how the floor is laid out. Mostly, this works out fine, but the curation logic is ultimately driven by commercial needs. Second, and this is the bigger one for you, it only happens every two years. This means that in the off-years, the collector community has... nothing. We are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

That particular gap is where The Escapement fits neatly. It is the same November weekend DWW occupied in 2025, fast-forwarded one year, and now in Abu Dhabi instead of Dubai.

So, what is it?

It’s a three-day event at Etihad Arena from 20-22 November 2026. Friday is for VIPs, media and industry. Saturday and Sunday are general admission with 10,000 tickets available across the weekend. We’ve also partnered with the city of Abu Dhabi and their various entities to really embed our event into their city’s events calendar (including their comedy festival, and their collectors’ week programming).

The brand list is capped at 50, even though the venue could physically hold more, so this was a deliberate choice and not a constraint; anyone who has trudged through a hall of 100+ exhibitors knows that past a certain point, more brands just means more noise and less of the stuff you do want to see. The brands we’ve curated run from accessible independents around 3-4K CHF all the way to pieces in the 300-400K range - Greubel Forsey, Biver, Rexhep Rexhepi, Daniel Roth, Gérald Genta, Czapek, Romain Gauthier, Ming, Simon Brette, Atelier Wen, Konstantin Chaykin, Louis Erard, Kollokium... you get the idea. These are brands we own, brands we have on order, brands we want to get to know better, or just brands which do cool things.

One more point people keep asking about... we have nothing to do with selling watches. We sell floor space and stage time to brands, and tickets to you, and that’s the entire business model. If we were taking a cut of watch sales, we’d be dealers running a dealer event, and the whole ‘for collectors, by collectors’ thing would be nonsense. How brands handle their own retail relationships in the region is none of our business.

The stage

This where I need to explain my own job… given I’ll be the one working with brands on this. The centrepiece of The Escapement is a stage - I mean an actual arena stage, anchoring the whole floor, with programming running across all three days. And the rule I’m enforcing as head of content is simple… there will be no brand representatives reading press releases you could read for yourself on Hodinkee.

A press release says the moonphase is accurate for 45 million years. It tells you the power reserve went from 60 to 72 hours. These are best described as ‘factoids’, and factoids are free; you can read them on your phone in bed. What you can’t get on your phone is the why. Why did anyone decide a 45-million-year moonphase was worth pursuing? What broke along the way? Who lost sleep over it? Those are stories, and stories are the entire reason any of us end up falling for particular watches. Nobody has ever justified a watch purchase solely with a spec sheet - people like us buy objects that mean something, and the meaning comes from the story attached to the object.

So yeah, that’s what the stage is for. Some brands will do grand keynotes, some will do something intimate and stripped back. Lang & Heyne, to give you a real example, wanted to launch a new watch for their 25th anniversary, and talk about what it took to create it, and the craftsmanship within it. We’re still working through the stage content so everything is still subject to change - but that’s the key difference with this event: we work with brands to create something we think will resonate with people like us.

We also have a separate stage which can keep folks entertained between brand segments. Here we will have things like fireside chats with collectors and panel discussions about hot topics like the hand finishing debate (btw, I’d welcome other suggestions). The panels will include and also be moderated by people from the community… and because we’re tied to no retailer and no publication, we can put whoever we want on that stage and discuss whatever we want. You’d be surprised how rare that is.

Nighttime

This is the part I’m perhaps most excited about, because it fixes my single biggest frustration with every watch event I’ve ever attended. The daytime experience at a good watch fair is fine, but the evenings are always fragmented. You’d typically have a hundred separate dinners and hotel-lobby gatherings scattered across a city, and you spend half your trip discovering the next morning that everyone you wanted to see was at the other thing. The community comes together for the day and then atomises every night, and nobody seems to question it.

So for our event, we kept everyone in the building. Each of the three nights, the arena will be transformed into an evening venue and the whole community experiences the same thing together. The VIP night is a gala with orchestral and cultural programming. The two general admission nights are, respectively, a comedy night with an A-list comedian (who is himself a watch collector), and closing ceremonies featuring a performance by an A-list musician. Names will be announced in due course, and no, I can’t say more yet (which is killing me, because these two shows alone would justify the ticket price!).

If you can’t make it

For those who can’t make it to Abu Dhabi… we’ve thought about you too. The daytime programme is being broadcast ‘professionally’ (includes a multi-camera production, a real director, on-screen graphics, hosts carrying the day, etc) by a team that has spent the past decade producing live broadcasts for some of the biggest streaming platforms on earth. Think of it like watching golf or F1; you have a lot of stuff going on in different places, and you need someone to share commentary as the director cuts to different cameras showing different scenes, and you need on-screen graphics to summarise what is going on in the shot you’re currently viewing - that’s what ‘professionally’ means (as opposed to a static camera just pointed as the stage or around the arena - that would be pointless!).

Plus, we’ve already started releasing a video series called The Road to The Escapement, where we’re visiting the participating brands and the people inside the ateliers. We’ve already shot several of these, including one where Romain Gauthier makes us fondue, which I mention purely because it’s the least press-release thing imaginable and that’s precisely the point. Rexhep’s video dropped last week, and hopefully by the time you’re reading this, we will have posted another (I think Luca Soprana, but can’t recall).

VIP versus GA

Actually, this is one other question I keep getting. A General Admission (GA) ticket gets you the weekend only; the full show, the stage programme, the activations, the comedy night and the closing performance. A VIP ticket gets you all of that too, plus the Friday, plus a dedicated VIP lounge inside the arena for all three days, and some exclusive content on the Friday. There’s also a VIP gala on Friday evening, and on all three nights the VIP tickets buy you front of stage seating as well.

The lounge is easy to explain; arenas are big, days are long, and having somewhere private to chill might be worth more to some than others. I guess more generally, it’s basically the same event with a different denominator. Only 1,000 VIP tickets will be sold, while the GA days are capped at 10,000. Same brands, same stands, same stage, same building... a tenth of the crowd.

If paying for fewer people sounds strange, consider that it’s arguably the purest luxury product there is. Most of what we call luxury is paying a premium for the absence of something… waiting, friction, queues, whatever. A first-class seat on a plane lands at the same time as economy; what you bought was space, comfort, and silence. So really, with a tenth of the crowd in the room, ‘absence’ ends up being ‘easier access’ to whatever is in the room.

There’s also one more thing, which I’ll share with the caveat that I really don’t know what shape it’ll take. Some brands have made it clear they want to look after the VIP group ‘properly’… call it a desire to serenade perhaps. What that means in practice will vary by brand and is still taking form, so I’m reporting the intent rather than promising any specifics. But if you think about it, the underlying logic is pretty sound; if you’re a brand and there are 1,000 of the most engaged collectors in the world under one roof, that’s a valuable captive audience.

None of this makes GA a ‘lesser’ product, to be clear. The weekend days are ‘the event as designed’, and they end each night with thousands of fellow collectors at a shared performance. Besides, the launch price for tickets are GA: 1600 AED ($435, £325) and VIP: 4400 AED ($1195, £895) so there’s too much value in the GA to say it’s a ‘lesser’ option. The VIP is just… more exclusive.

The way I’d frame this choice is that GA is for soaking in the show, and VIP is for longer private conversations; you’re optimising for depth, and paying for the smaller room in which depth can be achieved. Plus you get into the bigger room afterwards. You get both options, is the point.

Practical stuff

20-22 November 2026. Etihad Arena, Abu Dhabi. Saturday and Sunday are the ticketed general admission days; tickets go live on Monday 15 June at 5pm UAE time, and you can sign up for notifications on our website right now. Tickets will be sold via the Etihad Arena website (which you can also navigate to via the button on our website once it’s live). Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the arena handles all ticket sales, and they keep your money until after the event - so there’s no risk of a ‘Fyre festival’ situation; if the event doesn’t happen, they’re keeping your money safe.

Nobody has tried to put the watch community in an arena before, and first editions of anything involve a level of uncertainty that I’ve come to accept as the price of building something new. The team includes large-scale-event veterans, who have collectively launched massive events for the last 20 years… so I mean, we could not have chosen a better team! And what I can tell you is that every decision (brand cap, stage rules, shared evenings, broadcast, etc) was made by asking one question over and over... ‘what would we want?’

In November, we will find out whether we answered this correctly. I’d love for you to be in the room when we do.

Hope to see you in Abu Dhabi! ✌️

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The whole section in that old SDC edition was about how we, as enthusiasts, wear our watches ‘of the present’ on our wrists, and then use them to project ourselves into fantasy futures. “When I get the grail, then I’ll be satisfied” or other such ‘projections’ come to mind here; it’s as though the watch on your wrist isn’t telling you, sixty times per minute, that now is all there is.

Anyway, that post was mostly about not ignoring the present, and today’s post, sticking to the same theme, is more about forgetting the past. I say ‘same theme’ because both angles speak to the same idea, which is to lose your life without dying.

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Estimated reading time: ~15 minutes

Main question

At some point, which, for me, hit around mid-to-late-thirties, you will catch yourself asking a strange question: where did the time go?1

You might look at your kids and take in the fact that they’re suddenly not babies anymore. Or perhaps you will look at photos from 10 years ago and even though they feel like they were taken last year, apparently a whole decade has passed… while you were busy commuting, refreshing your email, going about your daily life and talking to strangers about watches on the internet.

By the way, this is not me ‘projecting’ my own experience on to everyone; this feeling is supposedly so ‘universal’ that psychologists have been studying it for well over a century. What they’ve found maps quite well onto how we experience (and waste) time as watch collectors… which was great to discover (in a cringe sort of way).

First we will go through some research, and then I want to try something with you; a little experiment we shall call a ‘Memory Audit’.

Why time disappears

There are three competing (but complementary) explanations for why time seems to speed up as you age. Each one builds on the other, and each one tells us something a bit different about the issue at hand.2

Proportional theory

The oldest explanation comes from French philosopher Paul Janet, who proposed in 1877 that we perceive time as a proportion of our total life lived3. When you’re only five years old, a single year is 20% of your entire existence, but when you’re 50, it’s just 2%. This causes the same 365 days to be experienced at what feels like a completely different speed for people at different ages.

This is sometimes called ‘log time’, and it’s probably the explanation most people have either heard before, or have intuitively worked out for themselves. The main issue I have with this theory is although it may well be intuitive to many, it is also more or less useless, because we can’t change basic maths. So just because we know this or realise it, doesn’t mean much since you can’t make yourself younger. So let’s move on to other stuff you can do something about.

Memory density hypothesis

In 1890, the American psychologist William James wrote in his book Principles of Psychology that time seems to speed up because adulthood brings fewer and fewer memorable events4. When you think about it, the passage of time for an average human tends to be measured by ‘firsts’ from the time they’re born… first smile, first step, first day at school, first date, first kiss, first car, first job, first wife (lol), first child, first watch... I mean, the list is endless. Anyway, as you age, the firsts tend to dry up, and the days and weeks, as James rather bleakly put it, “smooth themselves out… and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

Bizarrely, this general idea seems to have sat around for about a century before anyone tested it. In 2005, psychologists Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff at Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich ran the first major study on subjective time across the entire adult lifespan5. They surveyed 499 people aged 14 to 94 and measured how fast they felt time was moving.

What they found was that for short intervals (hours, weeks, months) there was barely any difference between the perceptions of young people versus old people. Everyone apparently thought time was moving quickly. The ‘effect’ only really showed up when people were asked to reflect on how fast the previous decade had passed. In this case, the older you were, the more the last ten years felt like they had vanished; the effect seemed to peak at approximately age 506.

The mechanism goes something like this: your brain encodes ‘novel’ experiences into memory, but it skips over all the ‘routine’ ones. It’s easier to think of your brain like an editor with limited storage; it only keeps the scenes that are interesting enough to justify the hard drive space.

A first date is something your brain will save, but your 37th commute to work will likely get binned. The result of this is that when you look back on a period packed with novel events, it feels long because there’s plenty of mental footage to wade through. When you look back on a period filled with routine, there’s almost nothing there, which is why the decade just seems like a blur that whizzed by.

Claudia Hammond, a psychologist and BBC broadcaster, has called this the ‘holiday paradox’. I found this obscure reference and decided to include it because it is so relatable. A packed weekend away might feel quick while you’re living it (because you’re having tons of fun), but it also feels long in hindsight (because your brain stored lots of ‘new footage’). Now compare this to a routine month at the office and it can feel slow in the moments you’re living through it (because you’re kinda bored), but it then disappears completely from your memory… you can barely tell one Tuesday from another.

Neural processing theory

In 2019, Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, offered a totally new angle grounded in physics instead of psychology7. As we get older, the neural pathways in our brains grow in size and complexity, but then they start to degrade - this means signals travel slower. The result is that the older brain literally processes fewer ‘mental images’ per unit of clock time.

A good analogy for this, is a video’s frame rate; when you’re young, your brain is running closer to ~120 frames per second, meaning every moment is rich and detailed. As you age, the frame rate drops off. Having fewer frames in the same amount of clock time will make the day feel shorter.

As Bejan put it, the young mind receives more images during one day than the same mind in old age, and this is supported by the observation that infants’ eyes move far more frequently than adults’ eyes i.e. they’re processing more visual information per second.

Plot twist

Very recently, Marc Wittmann (the same researcher from the 2005 study, now 20 years older himself) teamed up with researchers and tested 120 adults aged 20 to 91 across three countries8. The goal was to directly test whether time really does speed up because we store fewer memories as we age. This had always been the assumption, but nobody had actually checked.

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As part of the build up to The Escapement in Abu Dhabi this November, we’ve started a YouTube series called The Road to the Escapement. The latest episode features Rexhep Rexhepi talking about his new dong gong. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Escapement’s YouTube channel to catch all the upcoming videos… I think Romain Gauthier is next. These are not primarily ‘marketing’ videos for the event at all; they were paid for by us, with the primary purpose of entertaining and informing collectors like you and I - so I really hope you enjoy them (feedback always welcome, of course). Tickets for the main event will be launching soon, so keep an eye out for those via the website.

Anyway, let’s start this edition with some wise words from one of my favourite thinkers:

Real artists do all the painting themselves, not like Rembrandt

Real artists use brushes, not technology like Cartier-Bresson

Real writers write it out by hand, not like Jack Kerouac

Real musicians record it live, not like Steely Dan

Real singers sing without processing, not like Kanye West and Daft Punk

Real directors do the prep without AI, not like Martin Scorsese

It turns out that real artists have always used technology. What they have in common is intent, responsibility, and the ability to create a feeling in the audience.

“Here, I made this.”

— Seth Godin

What about real watchmakers?

If you’re new to SDC, welcome! When you have some time, check out prior editions of SDC Weekly here, or find enlightenment in the archive here.

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Estimated reading time: ~35 mins

🐐 A Crazy Motherfvcker

Most collecting stories follow a similar arc... you want a watch, you can’t have the watch, but then you eventually get the watch, and then you feel slightly empty and start wanting a different watch. This is the hedonic treadmill in a nutshell, and most of us know full well it’s a treadmill, and we hop on anyway because the hunt is the real drug.

Then, every once in a while, someone’s treadmill leads somewhere interesting, and the watch turns out to have been a kind of door the whole time.

This is a story about a man you probably know as @nycwatchguy. Most of the internet files him under ‘meme guy’, and the memes are decent for sure, but there’s a lot more to the man. He is by any reasonable account a successful entrepreneur who runs a sports and entertainment fund, plays pickup basketball like a pro, and a huge cat lover. He once mounted a citywide search for a lost cat that, I’m pleased to report, ended happily. For the rest of this post I’ll call him V.

Now before we go any further, I will add that V is a friend of mine, and of course, we met through watches, as us watch people tend to do. I say this so that you know to read everything that follows knowing that I (mostly) like the guy. That said, I’ve tried to stay neutral mostly because a fawning profile would bore us both, and also because quite frankly, the story holds up fine without any help from me.

The reason I decided to write this section is because it’s a great example of a watch working as a ‘key’ instead of just a wrist ornament - this will become clearer as we go along.

Where it starts

V grew up middle class in India, surrounded by wealthier friends. The thing he wanted more than anything in the fourth grade was a Casio with a built-in TV remote, so he could change the channel on people from across the room. It cost about $100 back then, which in his house was serious money, and he never got the watch. He finds it funny now that he’d drop more than that on dinner without even thinking (I can confirm he does this frequently).

At university his dad bought him a $40 quartz Timex, which became his most prized possession. In his final year he had a professor which any of us might describe as a cvnt. He was a hedge fund guy parked in academia during an SEC probe, who handed V a ‘D-’ and was mighty proud of a watch V thinks was a Glashütte Original. V never said a word to him. ‘Wanted nothing to do with him,’ he said, and the watch only emerged in his memory years later, when he started wondering why he’d become quite so obsessed.1

V’s spark came around 2011; he saw a Zenith Academy Christophe Colomb, assumed Zenith must therefore be the summit of all watchmaking, couldn’t afford the $350,000 version, and fell instead for one very specific Zenith El Primero Chronomaster.

He hunted it pre-owned across New York for months and found nothing, then mapped every watch shop in Rome on holiday and dragged a long-suffering companion to all of them. On the way back to the hotel, defeated, he wandered into a jewellery store on a whim. An older woman pulled out a roll of trade-ins, and inside it was the exact watch he had been hunting for all along. He talked her down from around $4,500 to $3,500, ‘saying I didn’t have much money, which was true’, and walked out with no box, no papers, and what he still describes as a feeling of fate.

He’s never been back to Italy since.

A mythical object

V’s god is Michael Jordan, and I don’t mean this as a figure of speech. He met MJ as a 17-year-old at summer camp, and has spent his whole life idolising the man. So, when a serious collector in Chicago messaged him in early 2021 to confirm a rumour V had been wondering about for some time, it took him by surprise. The rumour was that Urwerk had made a small number of watches for members of Grove XXIII, Jordan’s famously private golf club. There were only twenty-three pieces, never publicised, NDAs for all buyers, that sort of thing.

The Chicago collector seems to have verified it the only way such things can be verified, which is to say he accosted a stranger at his local mini market who happened to be wearing one! V immediately rang everyone he knew with a Jordan connection, starting with Urwerk’s management, who would not confirm the watch existed and, I suppose promisingly, would not deny it either.

Roughly a year passed and he kinda lost hope. Then, over lunch in Miami one day, one of V’s own fund investors clocked the Urwerk UR-220 on his wrist and asked him, ‘what the fuck is that on your wrist?’ V explained Urwerk, mentioned the Grove edition he’d been hunting for a year, and the investor said, with nonchalance, ‘oh, you want me to call him for you?’

Call who?

‘MJ.’

Well, no sh1t… but V just assumed nothing would come of it. Two days later he was in the shower when the phone rang. Dripping, he answered. ‘Is this thing called the Urwerk Grove XXIII edition?’ Yes. ‘I talked to MJ and am connecting you to his guy.’ The guy did his diligence, researched V, researched his fund, and decided he was ‘a real dude and not some joker off the street’, and V, being V, rapped out his whole life story into the phone, including the hilarious ending ‘they will bury me one day in this watch.’ A chilly December day soon after this call, a package was handed to V at the St. Regis in midtown.

One of twenty-three had arrived.

How collectors lie to themselves

At this point I’d usually cue the violins... but V is rather unsentimental about what happened next.

Urwerk made a second version for MJ. Several of the original recipients, finding the brand too avant-garde for their taste or seeing profit, sold theirs. ‘Now like 6 of my friends have them and it ain’t really THAT special to have one any more,’ he admitted. The scarcity that made the watch magic, the twenty-three, members-only, unconfirmable-by-the-brand quality of it, leaked away, as scarcity tends to. The watch he thought was his end game became, in the cold light of a maturing market, a very cool watch that a handful of his mates also owned.

I find this framing pretty useful, because the thrill was never really in the metal itself, but in the impossibility of owning it. Once you remove the impossibility you’re left with the object, and the object, however epic, obeys the same emotional depreciation curve as everything else you’ve ever lusted after. ‘Everything wears off eventually, right?’

Never ask for money

So the watch lost a little of its shine... but the relationship it opened was the polar opposite.

For three years V kept Jordan’s people in the loop on his fund, sending quarterly updates and the odd deal, and mostly heard nothing. When he started raising his next fund, he sent a note that more or less said ‘everything I’ve built traces back to loving basketball, which traces back to one man, the amount is insignificant to me, I just want to be in business with you’. And again, he heard nothing… three months of nothing. His feeling at the time was: ‘Goddamn it, never ask for money!!!’

And then, a week before he was due to fly to Geneva (to collect some watches obviously), a reply came in. This led to a meeting at his New York office, at the end of which he was told that Jordan would like to invest in the fund. V says he damn near fainted. If that wasn’t enough, the guy asked what he was doing that night, because MJ was in town.

‘Bro, I’d cancel my own wedding if it was tonight.’

He showed up at a random building downtown and finally met the man he’d idolised his whole life - but this time, as a business partner. He talked far too much, and then pulled out his Akrivia AK-06 in steel, number 23, and showed Jordan how Rexhep Rexhepi had changed the ‘25’ to a ‘23’ on the power reserve scale, as a nod to the greatest of all time.2

V says Jordan looked at him and said, ‘you’re a crazy motherfvcker man.’

It gets better, still. Jordan, apparently taken with the whole saga, flew to Geneva to meet Rexhep himself, and stopped at Urwerk HQ to sign the wall on the way. ‘If you spot MJ with an Akrivia one day,’ V says, ‘I’m taking full credit for that shit.’

What happened here?

V’s own moral is ‘if you love something enough and put it out in the universe, it will happen for you.’ It’s a lovely sentiment perhaps, and I don’t especially want to be the guy who ruins it - but I do think the more interesting perspective is a little less woo-woo.

The universe did not deliver Michael Jordan at all. V’s track record did all the hard work. The reason the phone call worked in the first place is that when Jordan’s guy went looking, he found a legit fund run by someone far more serious than the meme account would suggest. The watch got V into the room, but after that, it was the unglamorous stuff which did the work. ‘Put it out in the universe’ is a nice post for Instagram. ‘Build something a billionaire’s people can underwrite in an afternoon’ is the underlying roadmap to this sort of outcome.

This, I think, is the real lesson to take away from the story... a watch can be a key, but the key will only open the right door if there’s something worth letting in on the other side of the door - that bit is up to you.

Behind the memes

None of the above tells us what kind of collector V actually is, so I asked him some other questions to offer you a quick tour. He seems rather clear-eyed, almost to the point of bluntness, about his own record. He traded in and out of Richard Milles every few months in 2017, treating them as silly toys - turns out, each one would now be worth a New York apartment. He waited three years for a Vacheron Overseas Skeleton Perpetual, decided it was the best modern watch the brand had made, and disliked it the moment it touched his wrist. Wrong proportions, no strap could save it, ‘an expensive ass mistake.’ He sold a Logical 1 for roughly $100,000 less than it would fetch today. He is, in other words, about as fallible as you and I.

He’s also weirdly principled about taste. ‘I’m the guy who decides what gets meme’d,’ he says, only half joking, and claims he’s never once bought or sold a watch because of what the internet was doing. His logic is that if he likes something it’ll get hot eventually, so he’d rather buy ahead of the noise. The low-key watch he’s most devoted to is a Nomos World Timer NYC Edition, which says ‘5th Ave’ on the dial in place of NYC; nobody on Instagram cares about it, but he says he’ll never sell that one. He bought it after someone at Wempe messaged to say they’d found one in the safe, and he ran down Fifth Avenue to get it. There’s a version of V that is still the broke kid fresh out of college who met Ben Clymer at a Nomos event and thought a $3,000 watch was end-game stuff.

The persona costs him, mind you. The running joke in the trade is that he’s the Medici of the watch world, patron to every emerging independent. The reality, he says, is that he feels the pressure to back makers he can’t always afford to back, that brands assume NYCWatchGuy can buy anything, and that he says ‘no’ far more often than people think. Being the audience is a job, the job has a budget, and the budget is apparently not infinite.

Underneath all of this, he’ll tell you, watches come second, believe it or not. Basketball is the first love… he describes two hours on the court as his only real meditation, the one place his phone and his stress vanish - and he means it literally. He has leapt off his sofa screaming at a Steph Curry shot more times than he can count, and never once at a Hodinkee release. Watches, by contrast, mostly cause him stress, because he lacks the bottomless bank account a lot of this hobby assumes - he claims every purchase ‘legitimately hurts’ (which I call bullsh1t on, but anyway).

What watches gave him that basketball couldn’t, was the people. Here’s a specific question and answer from my interview with V:

For the most part I have had nothing but incredible experiences with the watch community, which is not what you’d expect from a bunch of rich people. As my mother always said, if you don’t have something good to say about someone, don’t say anything at all, and so I won’t be naming any names here.

I will say that very very few people have truly disappointed me in the watch community but there have certainly been a few who tried to chummy up to me and made up all sorts of fabrications, only for me to find out they were all lies and I honestly don’t even know what the end game was. There are also people who have bad mouthed me to ADs, I can only imagine to try and win themselves favor and try and cut off my allocations. I don’t know who these people are, but hopefully they’ve found something better to do with their time.

On the other hand, back in 2021 I was approached by a young guy at the Phillips auction in NYC asking if I was NYCWatchGuy and he struck up a conversation with me. This happens all the time so I never think anything of it, but sort of rolled my eyes at the time being like oh boy, here we go again. A few weeks later he messaged me and asked me to lunch. Once again, I was like eh, who is this kid but fine, I’ll oblige.

Well, fast forward 5 years later and he’s become one of my closest friends, has been an invaluable resource to me in the business world, and I’m truly glad he came up to me that day to say hello. As they say - always say hello to the person next to you on the plane because you never know, and so while I’m an introvert and will never be the first one to say hello, I’m always secretly hoping the other person will because I’m more than happy to chat!

This brings the whole story full circle and I didn’t think this was the end game when I started writing it. V once said that if you took his watches away he wouldn’t much miss the objects, but losing the people would leave a hole he couldn’t fill. The Grove XXIII Urwerk began as the most special object he’d ever owned, but later it was less so, and this ended up proving his own point for him… meaning the object itself kinda faded, but the man it introduced him to, did not.

I guess that’s all watch collecting ever really is... we tell ourselves we’re chasing the object, and sometimes, if we’re lucky and a little unhinged, the object turns out to have been a way of getting to the people.

Or, as the greatest of all time apparently put it, crazy motherfvckers, the lot of us.

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🚗 Ferrari says please don't buy it

At one of the anticipated launches the company has made in years, Ferrari’s head of marketing asked its biggest fans not to buy it:

“To my petrolheads that I meet, I always tell them, please don’t buy [the Luce]”

Enrico Galliera

According to him, the buyer they’re targeting is someone who already owns an electric car. What the fvck? This is a strange thing to say given that in 2025, Ferrari shipped 13,640 cars, and historically, ~80% are sold to existing owners.

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A few years ago, I wrote a summary of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, and I’ve referenced this book on SDC more times than I can count. If you needed evidence that Substack’s algorithms work pretty well, Carl Hendrick published an essay called Rethinking Fast and Slow e…

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I’ve been travelling for over a week now, and in between other commitments I have been working on a Ferrari Luce essay that I just cant seem to wrap up… anyway, something to look forward to, but for now, Jack Forster has done a fine job covering it here. I’m also bummed to be missing London Watch Week but if you’re in London this week, check it out here.

If you’re new to SDC, welcome! When you have some time, check out prior editions of SDC Weekly here, or find enlightenment in the archive here.

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Estimated reading time: ~37 mins

🎰 What You Lose When Your Watch Gets a Ticker

A few months ago I wrote about Watch Futures; this was the Kalshi-Bezel product that lets you trade contracts on whether Rolex discontinues the Pepsi, or whether the Bezel Rolex Index closes above some line at the end of the month. After that, I wrote about the Courtyard loot box; this was the $10,000 mystery pack with maths that work out badly for almost everyone who opens one.

I thought I was done with the financialisation beat for a while... but last week ArtNews reported that Kalshi has launched the same prediction-market BS for fine art. So if you’re into that sort of thing, you can now bet on whether Basquiat’s auction record breaks this year (the crowd says no), or what the priciest lot of the year sells for (the crowd is split between $250m and $300m), or whether a specific painting clears a specific price.

What I find intriguing is that the watch version came first, and the art version came second. That’s backwards, don’t you think? Regardless, I think the art version is the more revealing of the two, because it says something about the road our hobby is already a few miles down.

“Hedging” = pure fiction

Kalshi’s legal counsel says “a collector sitting on ten million dollars in impressionist paintings has no efficient way to manage that exposure—until now,” and they go on to add they are giving the art world “the same financial infrastructure the rest of the economy takes for granted.”

You know what that’s describing? Hedging. This is the respectable, grown-up reason a market like this is supposed to exist. The idea is that if you own millions of dollars of Monets and you’re nervous, you sell some contracts that pay out when Impressionist prices fall, and now you’re protected.

Except think about whether that actually works for you, the watch collector. To hedge your safe full of Pateks, you’d need a liquid market in contracts that move reliably opposite to Patek prices and settle against an index everyone trusts. We do not have that. We have things like WatchCharts, which (as I’ve noted before, and as the comments section reminds me almost every time) aggregates settled sales but is contested and not collectively exhaustive. We have Chrono24 asking prices, which are basically ‘aspirational fiction’ at best. Bezel’s Beztimate is another attempt and it still only covers what clears on one platform.

So the “hedging” pitch is mostly just decorative, right? What you get in practice is a venue to speculate, but it’s framed as risk management. Which is fine! But it’s worth calling a spade a spade, because the delta between the stated reason a product exists (managing risk) and the actual thing it does (letting you gamble on prices) is the whole story here. It is the same gap as Courtyard’s 95% buyback guarantee, which sounds like a ‘safety net’ and is really just the spread.

How does art matter?

Does the fact that the art market is doing this accelerate things in watches? I happen to think so - and I’ll offer three possible reasons for this.

The first we can call legitimacy laundering. Art is one of the oldest and most socially respectable asset classes on earth (Sotheby’s traces its first sale to 1744). As ‘proof’, just consider how nobody needs a 20-minute explanation for why a Picasso is a financial asset. It just is. So when Kalshi bolts prediction markets onto art, the watch version stops looking like a weird crypto-adjacent stunt and starts looking like one node in a purportedly normal, regulated financial system. That’s not to say the watch market became ‘more legitimate’ - this new development just allows watches to stand next to something that is already ‘more established’.

The second reason is that they get to share the infrastructure. This is all on the same platforms, it all uses the same CFTC “event contract” legalese, and we even have the same legal counsel making the same speech with the noun swapped from watches to art. So really, once you’ve built the rails for art, running watches on them costs almost nothing. Going back to the supply-side point from my loot box essay - these products proliferate because it is now cheap to build them!

For my third reason, let’s turn to NYCwatchguy’s bull case for watches. He made an argument that watches carry a massive psychological handicap which art doesn’t - that handicap was that watches have an MSRP. When a watch that retails for $70,000 sells for $900,000, your brain anchors to the retail number and screams “that’s 13x retail, this is insane.” A painting has no hang tag. “Meaning has no cost of goods sold,” he writes - which is a good line I thought. The market is just the market.

He treats the MSRP as watches’ ‘burden’, that is, retail price is the thing keeping them stuck at kindergarten while art sits in the faculty lounge. I suppose as a psychological matter, that’s fair enough.

But why not flip this and look at it the way a financial derivatives expert would. A prediction market needs one thing above all else, and that is an objective, agreed reference point to settle against. Did the contract resolve yes or no? That question has to have a straight answer, otherwise nobody will trade on it.

And here, I think watches are better collateral than art, not worse. A watch has a retail price, secondary comps, settled-sale indices, model references, serial numbers and all this other data. Art has an auctioneer’s estimate and a hammer - and this is precisely why the art contracts are forced into fuzzy wording like “will the record break” or “will the top lot clear $250m.” The very MSRP that NYCwatchguy calls the watch market’s anchor is the thing that makes a watch easier to write a bet on.

Is the bull case valid?

Give the man his due first; I agree that the pool of people who can afford ‘culturally important’ and scarce objects is growing faster than the supply of those objects, and the best objects are Schelling points (places people converge on without needing to coordinate). Everyone knows the Paul Newman Daytona, everyone seems to have now heard of Rexhep… and he’s right that most of the “this is insane” reaction is just MSRP anchoring plus unfamiliarity. He’s also right that you’re early to a market while it’s still uncomfortable, not after it’s comfortable.

I do have two pushbacks, though.

He leans hard on “art had a 250-year head start” - this is the idea that watches are simply walking art’s path but on a compressed timeline. Maybe. But that framing inherently assumes that watches must get to where art did, as if it were a law of physics. It’s really just one path among several. Art became a financial asset class, but it didn’t have to.

The other thing is how he frames watches “becoming art” as the bull case. But ‘bull case’ depends on your perspective, and in his framing, it really isn’t a good outcome for watch enthusiasts. Watches becoming art means watches becoming vaulted wall-assets you bet on instead of just being objects you wear and enjoy. The endpoint of ‘full financialisation’ might be something insane like a Journe in a vault in Delaware with a live ticker next to it - this is the sort of future I find a bit grim.

The ceiling in his story is, to me, more of a mass-cultural-damage scenario.

Thought experiment

Assume you love your watch, and today, you experience its market value somewhat ‘episodically’ through an auction result here, a forum thread there… things you can choose to look up or simply ignore. Now imagine a live prediction market trading 24/7 next to a Bezel index ticker, both flashing red and green. “Journe Résonance souscription breaks CHF 6m by December” at 41 cents, up two on the day.

More than the bet itself, the continuity is the big change here. Financial salience would go from something episodic or ‘ignorable’ to something ever-present and constant. The fact that art is now going down this path and accelerating things can maybe lead to betting on cultural objects becoming ordinary. And once it’s ordinary, it takes a lot of effort to look away from it.

And that’s not all… think about who has the edge in a watch prediction market; dealers with allocation, people who see the catalogues early, and arguably the brands themselves. Christie’s told ArtNews its conflict rules already bar employees from these markets. Watch brands have never needed rules like that, because until recently, nobody could make money trading on the colour of a Rolex release. A retail punter betting on watch prices is effectively sitting at a table where the other players can see his cards. The ‘democratisation’ here is real in the sense that anyone can play, but it is not real in the sense that everyone can win.

So, what to do with this?

Probably nothing, honestly. A prediction market is, at bottom, a kind of machine for turning collective social belief into a number. That’s not nothing, because price is, after all, a type of collective social belief represented in a number. It is what we tacitly agree something is worth right now given everything we know and feel. You can interpret that as efficient price discovery (bullish) or as something which turns watches’ meaning into a ticker (less so).

I haven’t budged from my previous conclusion; Kalshi can price your watch, but it still can’t tell you whether it was worth buying. All this financialisation infrastructure is going to keep knocking at the door whether we like it or not, and the only move that stays available to you is to keep your attention on the object and let the ticker blur into background noise. Whether that’s still possible, in a hobby that seems increasingly designed to financialise your attention, is the question we will need to answer for ourselves.

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Related link:

Unpolished Article. It’s Too Hot Out There. When the market runs hot, ‘collecting’ can make speculation feel like curation.

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💰Rolex Mirrored Latour’s 25-year Escape Plan (Part 2)

In case you missed it (read Part 1 here), last week’s argument was that the watch industry’s AD system, with its allocation games and forced bundling, is basically identical to the Bordeaux wine trade’s en primeur system. I say this because both have selective distribution networks where producers dictate terms, intermediaries that absorb risk, and consumers who pay a ‘bundling tax’ for access to the good stuff. The wine model has been in operation, mostly unchanged, for a couple of hundred years; the watch industry model replicated this in about fifty years or less.

This week, we dig deeper, and explore what happens when even the producers decide that system isn’t extracting enough. In both industries, the inevitable outcome appears to be that the most powerful producers stop relying on the merchants and instead, start eating their lunch.

On 12 April 2012, Frédéric Engerer, the man who ran Château Latour for its owner François Pinault, sent a letter to the Bordeaux négociants informing them that the 2011 vintage would be Latour’s last en primeur release. From 2012 onwards, Latour would not sell its wine in barrel at all. Instead, it would hold the wine itself, in its own cellars, and release it through the négociants only when Latour decided it was ready to drink - sometimes seven years for the second wine, and 10-12 for the grand vin1.

The Bordeaux trade did not, on the whole, take this lying down. Latour was one of the five first growths - the very top of the 1855 classification I mentioned last week - and one of the biggest single beneficiaries of the en primeur system. The estate’s release prices had been hitting €500 per bottle and rising. The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce, the négociants, and the international wine press all reacted as though Latour had announced half of Europe was leaving NATO or something along those lines.

There were 3 official reasons given at the time. First, provenance - Latour wanted to guarantee that every bottle leaving its cellars had been stored perfectly since the day it was bottled. Second, consumer preference - many drinkers had been complaining about being asked to buy ten-year-old wines two years before they were even finished. Third, control over release timing - Latour wanted to drip-feed older vintages into the market instead of emptying its cellar every spring at one price.

I said ‘official’ reasons because that was mostly BS cover. The real reason, which of course the trade understood within about 10 seconds of reading the letter, was to get more margin. A château that already commands €500 a bottle at release does not need en primeur to help with their cash flow (which was the original purpose, remember?). What it needs is to own the appreciation curve - to be the one selling the 2012 in 2024, at the 2024 price, instead of the négociant who bought it in 2013 and has been holding it in a warehouse for a decade. Pinault had spent the previous ten years renovating Latour’s cellars and reducing the proportion of each vintage sold via en primeur, in preparation for exactly this move. The plan was a decade-long capital intensive project with a mindset that was ready to take the risk onto their own books.

The next question was pretty obvious; if Latour could do this, why couldn’t others do the same? From what I’ve understood, the answer is that pulling off a Latour-style exit required enormous capital, an owner with patience for the long game, and the willingness to take on inventory risk that the négociants had previously absorbed; most châteaux can’t manage that, but clearly, Latour could.

Latour-shaped hole

What was more interesting in the years after Latour’s exit was what the négociants did with the Latour-shaped hole in their annual campaign.

A first growth dropping out of en primeur is a serious chunk of revenue removed from the Bordeaux trade, which meant the merchants needed a replacement. They didn’t find it within Bordeaux - in fact, they couldn’t, really, because the system was already maxed out on Bordeaux supply. So instead, they just expanded the franchise and built what’s now called ‘Beyond Bordeaux’, using La Place’s distribution infrastructure to sell wines that have nothing to do with Bordeaux at all.

The first non-Bordeaux wine to use La Place was Almaviva, from Chile, in 1998. Then Opus One from Napa in 2004. Then Masseto from Tuscany in 2009. By the time Latour left in 2012, the Beyond Bordeaux category had decent momentum. Today La Place distributes Penfolds (Australia), Solaia (Tuscany), Almaviva (Chile), Catena Zapata (Argentina), Vérité (California) and dozens of others, all using the same négociant–courtier–merchant model that has existed since the 17th century.

In short, Bordeaux merchants had built a massive distribution system, and when their main supplier started shrinking away, they made it available, for a fee, to anyone else who wanted that distribution. CVBG, one of the larger négociants, today reports that Beyond Bordeaux accounts for about 20% of its turnover, with Bordeaux en primeur only 35% and Bordeaux back-vintages 45%. So essentially, the system survived the exit of its largest producer by becoming a distribution layer for other producers’ luxury inventory.

The lesson in watches, if you’re drawing the same parallels I did, is that when a system stops working for the most powerful player in it, that player moves first, and the rest of the system will be forced to adapt to whatever’s left after they’re gone.

Rolex’s version

This brings us to Rolex, which did something similar between December 2022 and August 2023 - except they did it in a compressed timeframe that ought to be slightly alarming to anyone involved in watch retail.

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I must begin with a word of thanks to for his invaluable feedback on this essay. I also managed to convince a couple of friends to review it as well. I appreciate you all for taking the time - it certainly helped. The one piece of unanimous advice I did not take on board, was to split or shorten this essay…

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“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

―Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, 1657

If you took a snapshot of the watch industry in mid-May 2026 and you tried to make sense of where things are going by looking only at the headline numbers, what would you see?

The correct answer - if that is all you are looking at - is “not very much, actually.”

On the face of it, we see that Q1 2026 Swiss watch exports rose 1.4% and the WatchCharts Overall Market Index is up 2.4% in the last 3 months - its best period in a while. Phillips Geneva XXIII in May was a 99.6% sell-through with $96.3m in the room and 43 world records - making it the highest-grossing watch auction in history. Sounds epic, but when you look more broadly, the picture changes considerably.

Steel watches were down 9% in value but up 5.8% in volume - this is the textbook definition of trade-down. Precious metal watches were down 4% in value and 5% in volume. The only price bands growing are the cheaper ones. Saudi Arabia was down 16.8%, Qatar down 24.8%, the Middle East luxury sell-out down around 50% per Vontobel’s Manuel Lang. The largest single market, the US, was down 1.6% in March alone. The French re-export fvckery (up 72% in March) is masking what would otherwise be a worse set of numbers. Hong Kong and China are barely 14% of total Swiss exports now, down from a 24% peak in 2021. And meanwhile, a Chinese gold-jewellery company called Laopu Gold posted FY2025 revenue up 221% to RMB 27.3bn - about CHF 3.15bn, which is literally within rounding distance of Richemont’s entire Specialist Watchmakers global business.

That is what I want to explore today. Not so much “what’s happening,” because in some sense that’s the easy part; this is more “what does it mean to interpret all this stuff together.” What does it mean for brands, for collectors, and for the way capital moves through this market?

The short version, and you can stop reading after this summary if you want, is that I think the watch industry is being altered by four major macro forces. A tariff saga that has technically been settled by the US Supreme Court but practically just moved into a new bucket. A Chinese regulatory change (Decrees 834 and 835, plus the MOFCOM Blocking Order of 2 May 2026) that the watch industry has not even started to grapple with. A gold price boom which is producing a barbell effect within the watch industry that ties back to the K-shaped story everyone has been on about for a while now. And finally, a Chinese consumer adjustment, as demonstrated by Laopu, which is almost rewriting the script on what “Chinese luxury” means (and which European groups do not appear to have a plan to address).

Each of these forces has been written about individually somewhere, but what I have not seen anywhere is a look at the combined effect this will have on the watch industry. So in this post, I’ll try to do just that.

Before we start, just know that I am not trying to ‘pick winners’ or pretend I know how this will unfold - nobody can do that reliably. If there are options for the future, I will spell them out. The point of this post is to map the terrain, and while I doubt this needs repeating, this is not investment advice nor watch buying advice.

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Estimated reading time: 34 minutes

Q1 numbers

The most important thing about the Q1 2026 FHS data is that the headline number of +1.4% is a mathematical outcome, but it’s useless for any serious analytics. I say this because of three separate data points that, taken together, tell a different story altogether.

First is the price segments. Watches above CHF 3,000 (export price, so wholesale roughly 2-2.5x cheaper than retail) declined 1.9% across 2025 and the trend has carried into 2026. The CHF 200–500 export-price segment grew 15.4%. So Switzerland is shipping more units, but cheaper ones. The “value” line is being held up by a small number of very expensive watches at the top of the curve, and not by a healthy distribution across the various price points.

Second, the materials mix is wonky. Precious metal watches were down 4% in value, steel watches were down 9% in value but up 5.8% in volume. “Other metals” - titanium, ceramic, bronze - were up 23.8% in volume. So what we see here volume rotation but on the cheap end of the scale. People are still buying watches, but not the watches which FHS numbers would regard as flattering.

Third, look closely at the country breakdown. The US, the single largest market at 18.9% of exports in March, was down 1.6%. France was up 72.4% in March and 55% across Q1 - which might sounds great until the FHS itself points out this is the re-export distortion from the post-tariff routing changes that began in December 2025. Saudi Arabia was down 16.8% (third consecutive negative month), Qatar down 24.8% (also third), Germany down 8.5%, Japan down 12.6%. China was up 4.2% in March, which is the first positive month in over a year - possibly a cycle bottom, possibly noise. Hong Kong stabilised at +0.5%. India was up 36% and is now a top-15 destination. The UK was up 3.2% and still ranks second by end-demand.

If you sum all of this up, what you have is a market shipping more of its cheaper stuff to make up volume, leaning on European re-export traffic to make the value line work, holding on by its fingernails in the US, hollowing out across the Gulf, and waiting on a Chinese recovery that nobody is willing to call time on just yet. So I maintain, the +1.4% is not what most industry people would like to think it is.

Manuel Lang at Vontobel was speaking to Bloomberg about the March data... he said that in the Middle East, the March export numbers are not a clean proxy for end-demand because luxury house sell-out is ‘roughly 50%’ down on the year. Switzerland shipped roughly flat into the Gulf, but the retailers in the Gulf sold about half what they sold a year ago. That gap, between sell-in and sell-through, is a really important number in the big picture but I’ve not seen anyone talking about it.

Sell-in putting up a front for sell-through is how recessions work in luxury. The shipments arrive, the inventory builds up, and the data looks fine for two or three quarters, and then suddenly the retailers stop reordering and the chart falls off a cliff. We have lived through this exact pattern in 2015–16 (China anti-corruption), 2019 (Hong Kong protests), and 2023 (post-COVID hangover). I am not predicting a cliff as such, I am just saying that if you only look at FHS data, you will never see ‘the cliff’ coming.

US tariff drama

For most of 2025 the US watch market was effectively held hostage by a tariff dispute that, by the end of the year, almost nobody understood. We covered this reluctantly but extensively already, but I’ll summarise it briefly.

April 2025, the Trump administration imposed a 10% baseline tariff on Swiss imports under IEEPA (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act). August 2025, that rose to 39%, which is the number that triggered a panic. Swiss exports collapsed 56% in September and 46.8% in October - at the time, consumer demand wasn’t even tanking, it was just Swiss manufacturers refusing to clear inventory with a 39% knock. The watches were not going out the door because the math did not work at the new rate. In November 2025, Jean-Frédéric Dufour of Rolex, Johann Rupert of Richemont, and a few other all visited the White House the week of Supreme Court oral arguments - a great piece of choreography that triggered a separate, ongoing Swiss parliamentary inquiry into whether the gold clock Rolex gifted Trump at the US Open constituted a bribe.

Then on 20 February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorise tariffs at all. The ruling invalidated the 10% April baseline, the 15-41% reciprocal country tariffs, and also the fentanyl-trafficking tariffs. Around $100bn in collected revenue could legally need to be refunded, with interest accruing at roughly $650m a month, and over 2,000 Court of International Trade lawsuits in the queue. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reportedly told the administration it is ‘not able to comply’ with the refund directive logistically.1

The Trump response, within four days, was to move the tariffs into Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Section 122 lets the President impose tariffs of up to 15% for up to 150 days without Congressional authorisation. That is, I believe, the current operative situation with Swiss watches - 15%, effective 24 February 2026, expiring 24 July 2026 unless Congress extends it.

So we are now in a window until the end of July where the legal status of US tariffs is only provisional. If Congress does not extend (and given the political incentives, extension is not a given), Swiss watch tariffs revert toward something close to the 2-3% baseline that prevailed before all of this started. The entire US price structure that Rolex, AP, Patek, Cartier and the rest erected over the last year (pricing in 15% duty plus roughly 12% Swiss franc strengthening on top) would have to be unwound.

What is interesting is that the brands have approached it differently. Rolex hiked steel ~5.6% on average in the US in January 2026, gold +8.7%, white gold Day-Dates roughly +8.6%, the white gold 40mm Daytona crossing $56,400 (up from $51,800). AP hiked +7.5% in the US, +2.5% in the UK, with Royal Oak increases larger than CODE 11.59 increases - which kind of indicated which models they think the market will absorb the pressure on. Tudor hiked prices, but Patek did not, Cartier did not, and Omega, Breitling, IWC, TAG, and VC all held firm. That said, Patek had been the first to raise prices in September 2025 to absorb tariff costs (roughly +15% in the US, cumulatively closer to +22% before the rollback), then partially reversed those US increases when the 15% Section 122 settled - so Patek’s posture, as best I can see, is hold-and-adjust, and not lead-and-defend.

The Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing earlier this month (14–15 May 2026) was framed by some legal analysts as primarily about the next phase of US-China economic friction and the Blocking Statute regime, rather than tariffs per se. If you want to drill deeper, you can start here; but let’s press on.

Dual-compliance trap

I am prepared to bet money that you will not see a single watch-related publication talk about what I am about to describe.

On 7 April 2026, the Chinese State Council announced Decree 834 - Regulations on Industrial and Supply-Chain Security. On 13 April 2026, six days later, it issued Decree 835 - Regulations on Countering Improper Foreign Extraterritorial Jurisdiction. On 2 May 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) issued Announcement No. 21, the first invocation of the Blocking Rules since they were introduced in 2021. Several independent legal experts agree on the fact that this is the first time the Chinese state has actually used the ‘Blocking Statute’ regime since putting it on the books.

The MOFCOM Order followed a series of US’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designations (sanctions) of Chinese refineries for trading Iranian crude (this is where everyone in the world was ordered to stop trading with Chinese refineries). So the Chinese ‘retaliation’ was to issue the MOFCOM order that no person or entity in China may ‘recognise, enforce, or comply with’ the relevant US sanctions.

There are four mechanisms in Decree 835 that European luxury groups, including the watch divisions of Richemont, LVMH, Swatch and Kering, will need to learn the implications of very quickly.

First, the Malicious Entity List. This is a new tool that targets entities which ‘promote or participate in implementing’ foreign measures judged to harm Chinese interests. The Chinese verb tuīdòng (推动) - ‘promote’ - is pretty broad. In theory, public advocacy, lobbying, or even encouraging supply-chain decoupling could plausibly fall within its reach.

Second, the piercing rules. Countermeasures extend to entities ‘actually controlled by or participated in establishing or operating’ by a listed entity. In plain English, if a Swiss watch group has a designated subsidiary, the rest of the group is exposed. There is no ‘clean’ firewall even if it’s a separate entity.

Next, Article 14, the private right of action. This is the big one; Chinese persons or entities harmed by foreign-sanctions compliance can now sue in Chinese courts for damages and injunctive cessation. So if a Cartier boutique in Shanghai refuses to serve a wealthy Chinese client who has been added to the US SDN list (because doing so would expose Richemont to US sanctions), the client can sue Cartier in a Chinese court for the harm caused.

Finally, Article 12, potential criminal liability. Prior regimes were mostly administrative, but this one can escalate.

Now, layer onto this the data that UEL designations (China’s Unreliable Entity List) jumped from 3 in 2024 to 67 in 2025. More than 100 individual organisations and individuals have been hit with countermeasures under one regime or another in 2025 alone. The volume of designations has moved from “occasional and symbolic” to “regular and operational.”

You may be wondering why you should care, and what this has to do with selling or buying watches… well, it does matter.

Richemont, LVMH, Swatch and Kering each operate mono-brand boutique networks in mainland China. Cartier alone has ~695,000 watch units a year flowing through the system at a CHF 3.5bn turnover (wholesale). A meaningful percentage of high-end mono-brand boutique transactions in China are with the kind of HNW individuals who, increasingly, also have US business interests, family members at US schools, or some form of US exposure. If any one of those clients ends up on a US sanctions list, the boutique will have a huge problem.

If they refuse to serve them, the boutique has US sanctions cover but is potentially exposed to Article 14 damages in a Chinese court plus possible inclusion on the Malicious Entity List for the parent group. If they do serve them, the boutique has Decree 835 cover but its parent is exposed to OFAC penalties form the US.

This is called a dual-compliance bind, and it is the same sort of problem that paralysed major banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered in the late 2010s when they got caught between US and Chinese sanctions. The banks figured it out eventually, but at significant cost.

I have looked, and I cannot find a single Q1 or Q2 2026 luxury earnings call where Decree 835 has been raised by an analyst or addressed by an executive in our industry. This is either some sort of news vacuum (the regime is too new, the implications too technical, and the question has not been asked yet) or it is a calculated-collective-silence across the industry on the assumption that flagging it would invite the very enforcement it warns against. Either way you read it, I’d say it’s pretty significant.

For now, pay close attention to the H2 2026 luxury earnings calls. The first time a senior CFO at Richemont, LVMH, Swatch or Kering acknowledges Article 14 on the record, this story will become mainstream ‘proper’.

Of course, this all links back to the recent essay on “Wrist Laundromats” which covered the broader theme of watches as a vehicle for moving capital across borders when conventional banking either cannot or will not suffice. If you assume some percentage of the high-end Chinese luxury watch market has historically been about value transfer and not pure consumption, then Decree 835 changes the cost-benefit calculation for everyone involved (boutique, client, auction house, dealer, freight forwarder etc). None of them are unaffected.

Gold above $5,000

Spot gold broke $5,000/oz for the first time in late January this year, briefly hitting $5,110-5,115 before dropping again. By early February it was bouncing between $4k and $5k and the market was struggling to find a stable clearing level. The year-on-year move from end-2024 to end-2025 was about 64%, which is the largest annual gain since 1979.

Bank forecasts for end-2026 are, in the spirit of late-cycle gold targets, all over the map. Goldman is at $5,400, JPMorgan $6,300, Deutsche Bank $6,000, UBP $5,200, Morgan Stanley between a $4,500 base case and a $5,700 bull case, SocGen $6,000 as a ‘conservative’ read. That is a roughly 40% dispersion seven months out. Clearly, what everyone is agreeing on is the upward trajectory.

Why is it happening? The short answer is some combination of central-bank gold buying2, Chinese gold accumulation3, ETF inflows, private HNW physical purchases, the “debasement trade,” concerns about Fed independence, and safe-haven flow into the (kinetic) Iran war. The bull case for gold is pretty much fully priced. The bear case requires a pretty serious de-escalation on multiple geopolitical issues all at once.

Maybe you’re just wondering what this does to watches? Ha! The popular story is that “gold is up, so gold watches are a hedge, so all watches must be appreciating in real terms” - but I reckon this is not the right angle to view things from.

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If you’re new to SDC, welcome! When you have some time, check out prior editions of SDC Weekly here, or find enlightenment in the archive here.

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Estimated reading time: ~40 mins

👠 Quality won, luxury lost

Last week, BoF covered the FT Business of Luxury Summit in Puglia, and their headline was pretty bombastic; given how many people forwarded me their Instagram post, I figured I’d add this extra section here. What underpins a lot of the article is a claim that between 2022 and 2024, the global luxury industry lost about 50 million customers (i.e. the total addressable base dropped from 400 million to 350 million). Note: all pulled quotes in this section are from the BoF article linked above.

“According to Bain’s Claudia D’Arpizio, the global luxury industry peaked at around $1.5 trillion in size in 2023, reflecting overall growth of 40–45 percent since 2015, before contracting by almost four percent by 2025.

When asked what is the greatest risk facing the luxury industry, D’Arpizio didn’t cite tariffs, the war in the Middle East or slow growth in China, but rising inequality: the risk that luxury goods are becoming markers of exclusion rather than totems of aspiration.”

If you follow the watch market, and more so if you read SDC regularly, nothing in this article should be surprising at all. The watch industry has been arguing about this for about three years now but of course, the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry would never put out a press release saying “the aspirational class has left the building.” Other industry reports seem to dance around the situation with phrases like “K-shaped” and “uneven recovery.”

The BoF article was somewhat clarifying, in that it offers a decent summary of what has gone wrong across all luxury, and a number of people who shared it with me seem to agree that nearly everything in there has some sort of ‘watch parallel’. In fact, we’ve explored many of those parallels in the SDC already.

Aspirational class disappearing

To start, Bain’s data shows the top 2% of luxury spenders now account for 45% of all luxury purchases, up from 35% in 2021. So about half of an entire global industry is now powered by 1 buyer in 50.

I wrote about how the K-shaped economy was about to do this exact thing to watches, and here’s a follow-up explaining why the aspirational watch buyer was being squeezed from every angle. The story across luxury in general sounds eerily similar to what we see with watches. Someone buying their first £7,000 watch is checking their credit card balance, but the person buying their 5th Patek is not. When wages stagnate, when discretionary income narrows, when GLP-1 drugs and longevity clinics start competing for the same wallets… the watch market will lose the bottom of its pyramid first.

The numbers we have seen in the watch industry confirm this too; Morgan Stanley’s Ninth Swiss Watcher report shows Swiss watch volumes have more than halved since 2011, from 29.8 million units down to 14.6 million. Total industry value is up modestly over the same period, but only because the mix has drifted upmarket. I suppose you can read that in two ways. The optimistic view is that the industry is “premiumising” and that’s what industry people will tell you. The more realistic view is that fewer people are buying more expensive things, and a lot of the people who used to buy entry-level Swiss watches are simply not buying any (and one could argue, they’re buying Japanese instead, but that’s a story for another day).

Bain’s Claudia D’Arpizio (via BoF) suggests that the big price increases of recent years have been ‘hardly accepted’ by buyers unless they came with corresponding creativity and quality. Watch collectors have a more pungent term for what happens when neither of those things shows up, which I explored at length when looking at the broader luxury asset correction. Ultimately, the verdict is roughly the same.

When a brand becomes the product

“India Mahdavi, the French-Iranian architect and designer, drew a distinction between what she called “industrial luxury” and “authentic luxury.” In the industrial model, “the brand becomes the product,” she said. The experience is standardised, disconnected from place and replicated across cities and continents.”

This, for me, was the best paragraph in the BoF article. In other words, with “industrial luxury” the customer is paying for the image of the brand, and not the thing the brand is making and selling. To be honest, this describes the watch industry over the past decade quite accurately.

Morgan Stanley estimates that marketing accounts for about 8% of luxury sector revenue. For an LVMH-owned watch business chasing F1 sponsorships, celebrity ambassadors and red-carpet placements, I’d guess the figure is comparable. I called this luxoplasmosis a few months back; the argument was that brands have become so obsessed with measurable marketing metrics (like engagement rates and reach) that they have stopped asking whether their campaigns build any brand equity at all. They confuse “moves metrics on the dashboard” with “being important” and then wonder why the watches don’t sell well.

In the watch industry, “the brand becomes the product” is essentially a watch that is made as a thing to carry the logo. You may know the name, the case is nothing special, the movement may be developed by an external supplier (but the brand will never say it outright), the dial design is super forgettable… but there is a Hollywood actor who’s invested in the brand and present in every campaign, and everyone is saying this is a serious horological player. The brand budget is doing all the work which the products themselves, cannot - and eventually, the maths catches up.

Handmade fairy tale

Speaking of “the brand becomes the product” - this phrase reminded me of a discussion which went on across many Substack pages at the time it was trending. The general principle was the issue of quality, or the pretence of it. The BoF article notes that Chanel and Dior pushed handbag prices up 59% and 51% respectively from 2020 to 2023; customers wanted to know what they got for that. In many cases, the answer was nothing. It was just the same bag, but at a much higher price. Delphine Arnault herself, on stage in Puglia, conceded: “we can’t really increase the price of a product without increasing the perception of the quality.”

No sh1t!

Watches did the same thing, with the added twist that “hand finishing” was a perfect example of a substitute story for legit quality improvement. The hand finishing fairy tale essay showed that for many “artisanal” brands, the math simply does not add up. When you divide annual production by total staff and allow for the fact that humans need to eat and sleep and answer emails, the claim of “fully hand finished” becomes mathematically impossible. All these sharp inner angles people fetishise can now be cut by CNC anyway, and the bevels can be polished by machine. The “hand” in hand finishing has, for many brands, become a marketing word instead of a factual description of what actually happened in a workshop.

Saint Laurent’s CEO said “quality has won over luxury” and the general consensus is that customers are more educated about quality than they were a decade ago. They know the gap between what it costs to make a bag and what it costs to buy one. So when it comes to watches, if the watch lacks quality, the price tag will not save it. As we’ve covered repeatedly in SDC, the watch market has confirmed this in the secondary numbers. Excluding Rolex, Patek and AP, the average watch now trades at -31% or worse relative to retail. Some Patek perpetual calendars sell at auction for as much as 70% below retail. Roger Dubuis released a reissue last year, and nobody could quite explain who that watch was for. The market spoke, and what it said was that the price did not match the offer.

Dead middle

If we zoom out on what the BoF article is getting at, the luxury industry has lost the aspirational buyers, retained the wealthy buyers, and now has this giant ‘middle layer’ of brands trying to be two things at once. They are too expensive to be considered ‘value’ buys, but also too generic to be ‘prestige’ buys; so they end up losing share on both ends.

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In my original response, I said I would wear such an object ‘if I loved how it looked’, and I would treat it as a piece of wrist jewellery rather than as a watch. I also said I would never wear it as a daily watch, because I do use wristwatches to tell the time. So I guess we never actually debated whether the thing ‘is a watch’ at all… but regardless, his essay stumbles into a much bigger problem in philosophy than dummy watches deserve. Which means we must go into the rabbit hole...

Estimated reading time: ~9 minutes

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Clowns and palaces

There is an old (I believe Turkish1) proverb that if a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king; the palace becomes a circus. Which is to say, intent is what defines the category of the object. A person living out of their car has not magicked their car into a house. A person living on a boat at a marina has, and we even have a word for it, a ‘houseboat’. The difference is that in the second case, the boat has been deliberately fitted with plumbing and electricity, and it is now used in a way that earns the new label. In the first case, the dude is just sleeping in the back seat because life isn’t working out too well.

If I take a pair of trousers and wrap them around my head, I can call this a turban. Maybe it will sort of look like a turban, too. But they are still trousers. The question of whether they stay trousers or have transmuted into trendy headwear depends mostly on what I am doing with them, why, and whether anyone in the wider world will accept my re-labelling. Most of the time, the answer is no, you weirdo, those are trousers and you have them on your head. But if it’s Taylor Swift doing the same conversion, maybe it sticks?

I’m reminded of The Lorax, a children’s book written by Dr. Seuss and published in 1971. This Once-ler guy invents something absurd called a ‘thneed’ and it seems objectively stupid… but then it catches on and his thneed business is so successful that it leads to the extinction of all the truffula trees which were used to create the thneeds. Absolutely epic book - the movie is less good, but here’s the scene when he first proposes this is something for everyone:

I fully appreciate that this is not at all analogous given the Once-ler isn’t re-labelling something that already exists. This is about inventing a new category that nobody asked for. But the point I was thinking of making was that what something ‘is’ depends in part on whether the world agrees to call it that.

Anyway… when I say I would happily wear a movement-less object I love, I am not trying to redefine what a watch is. I am simply qualifying its use. The same lump of metal might be a ‘watch’ in one context, a ‘piece of wrist jewellery’ in another, and a ‘paperweight’ in a third. What it is can depend on what it is doing, or even what it is meant to do.

Qualifiers are not a small thing

Here, I think TLSB and I agree, even though we may at first appear to be on opposite sides of the table. He works through several thought experiments and reaches some loose conclusions. A working watch is a watch. A watch that has run out of power reserve and sits in a drawer is also a watch. A watch that needs a service and tells the wrong time is a watch. A watch that has rusted into oblivion at the bottom of a lake is, in his words, ‘less of a watch’, in the way a corpse might retain the shape of a person without being alive. A dummy watch with no movement at all, he says, is not a watch.

I think this is broadly correct, but the labels themselves are doing all the work here. None of these objects are just ‘a watch’. They are, to be precise, a working watch, a wound-down watch, a broken watch, a rusted, irreparable watch and a dummy watch. This is a big deal, don’t you think?

Let’s expand the scope and take a non-watch example. Imagine you are organising a 100m race at a club meet, and someone drops out at the last minute. So you put out some ads online, and someone calls you. ‘I am actually a professional 100m athlete,’ a stranger tells you on the phone. Great! So you slot them in to the roster. Then on the day, they turn up for the race, and it turns out they are a Paralympic 100m athlete but your race is not a Paralympic event. Without the ‘Paralympic’ qualifier this is a wild category error. Given a ‘100m athlete’ and a ‘100m Paralympic athlete’, both people are indeed athletes, and they both cover 100m as fast as they can. The ‘Paralympic’ qualifier is the entire difference.

My point is, ‘broken watch’ and ‘watch’ have exactly the same relationship. Both are watches in some loose sense, but the qualifier tells you more about the object. You cannot trust a broken watch to tell you the time, but you can still trust it to be a watch in your drawer. A dummy watch is also a watch in some loose sense. The ‘dummy’ qualifier tells you that timekeeping as a function has been disabled or removed, and that what is left is the shape, the design, the aesthetic and maybe even the social signal which one might otherwise find in a working watch.

Which - to my earlier point - makes it ‘a piece of wrist jewellery shaped like a watch, worn on occasion in the place of what you would otherwise wear as a watch’.

On the ‘ability-to-tell-time’ as a valid test

TLSB proposes that what makes something ‘a watch’ is its potential to tell the time. The rusted watch at the bottom of the lake is still a watch (albeit, a ‘lesser’ watch) because, once upon a time, it could. But a dummy watch is not a watch because it never could and never will.

I am not sure this test holds.

If you sink a watch to the bottom of the ocean and leave it for fifty years until the movement has fully oxidised away and the ceramic case has been crushed, you have an object that can never be restored. Its potential to tell the time is the same as a granite rock’s potential to tell the time. Under TLSB’s own test, this should disqualify it from being a watch. But he thinks it still is, because of what it was. Which suggests the test is not really about future potential at all. It feels like it’s more about origin and intent at the moment of manufacture.

To be fair to TLSB, he never explicitly endorsed this - I am inferring it from how he treats the rusted watch in his essay. He could just as easily say the rusted watch was a watch until it became unrecoverable, and is now a former watch. That’s a defensible position too. But it’s a different test from the one he applies to the dummy watch, and that inconsistency is what I want to poke at.

Where does that leave us? Well, an object is a watch if it was designed and built with the intention of telling the time, regardless of whether it ever did, ever can, or ever will. A dummy watch, manufactured by Rolex specifically as a dummy for window display, also fits this definition. It was designed and built with the intention of being a watch, just one that never had to work. The case, the proportions, the crown, the dial, all engineered as if to tell the time, so the omission (or disabling) of the movement was a budget and supply decision - and definitely not a philosophical one.

So if the test is about origin and intent, the dummy watch must pass. If the test is about whether it ever told the time, the rusted watch fails. TLSB can have one test or the other, but not both.

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Derek Thompson calls this the ‘anti-social century’.

Thompson reckons Americans now spend an additional 99 minutes at home each day compared to 2003. Kids and teens are looking at screens for between 270-380 minutes a day1, and young people who once met friends almost daily, now do this 50% less often.

He goes on to explain how Character.AI has millions of users who spend an average of 93 minutes a day engaging with their AI companions. These are alarming stats and don’t forget, these only cover the US. Japan is likely worse than the US, and India seems to have similar issues. In fact, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has also declared loneliness and isolation to be a pressing, albeit underappreciated global health threat. They even issued a report which finds that strong social connection is linked to improved health and reduced risk of early death.

At this point you might think I’m about to argue that watch collecting has fallen victim to these same forces, or that Instagram has turned appreciation into a performative activity, or that online forums have replaced intimate gatherings, or that we’re all broadcasting our wrist shots to thousands but really, we are connecting with no one... but if that’s what you thought, you’re wrong.

In fact, I think the opposite is mostly true. I’m going to argue that watch collecting might be one of the few remaining antidotes we have to this “anti-social century” we find ourselves in. I think there’s something about physical objects, shared spaces, and the ritual of gathering which actually makes our hobby uniquely positioned to fight back against this isolation-epidemic.

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Estimated reading time: ~17 minutes

What’s the problem?

Thompson’s thesis is based on a purported shift in how humans interact, and in particular, that broadcasting has replaced conversation. Research shows that online communication is actually materially different from face-to-face interaction and they highlight three critical differences: it skews negative (negative posts get more engagement), it amplifies in-group versus out-group dynamics (tribalism etc), and it rewards high-arousal emotions like outrage over more ‘civil’ reflections.

When you’re at a party, you can’t be consistently negative without people eventually viewing you as an insufferable pr1ck. You are forced to read body language or notice when someone’s bored, and then social norms will dictate that you adjust your behaviour accordingly. Online, you’re basically just “performing” to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. The focus then shifts from “the other person” to… yourself. As a result, most of this “broadcast” style communication ends up becoming pretty narcissistic2.

Thompson observes that we’ve created a virtual world where negativity and outrage clearly thrive, even though face-to-face interactions demand understanding, reciprocity, and compromise. The typical American man now spends seven hours watching TV for every hour spent hanging out with someone outside his home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than in face-to-face contact with friends.

The consequences of this BS extend beyond individual unhappiness; and in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor” Marc Dunkelman points to the erosion of “the village” i.e. familiar (but not intimate) relationships with neighbours and community members. Remember that old saying “it takes a village to raise a child?” Well, his point is that families teach us love, tribes teach us loyalty, and the village teaches us tolerance.

When arguing online, you might write off someone who disagrees with you; but in a village setting filled with your neighbours, you will bite your tongue, try to find common ground, and learn how to accommodate opposing views with respect and more importantly, without framing everything as an attack or a defense.

Thompson also talks about AI as potentially creating an “engine for the mass production of narcissism at scale” which is an interesting way to frame things. It’s true, AI does excel at validation; it has no problem telling you that your problems matter, your thoughts have value, and that your feelings aren’t stupid (even when they are). AI can deliver cognitive behavioural therapy scripts quite effectively, and these capabilities are actually therapeutic for many people - as proven by the public outrage when OpenAI decided to make GPT-5 the default model with no option to select GPT-4o.

The difference is that a great therapist isn’t (just) a professional “validator” as such; they also need to tell you when your thinking is disordered, when you’re asking the wrong questions, or quite frankly, when you’re fvcking wrong! AI has been engineered to be more sycophantic in that it is very likely to agree with you, validate you, and make you feel like you’re always right.

The good news, he explains, is that humanity has actually faced similar crises before. Though the concept of neurasthenia3 was first used in the early 1800s, in 1900-1914 there was supposedly an “anxiety epidemic.” Critics thought people were moving too fast, and the advent of bicycles, cars, and trains were overwhelming human brains at the time.

Even further back in time, in the 16th century, scholars were reported to have panicked about information overload when there were suddenly too many books to read. They invented solutions, of course; public libraries, detailed outlines, alphabetical indexes, encyclopedias and so on. Thompson concludes by saying that humans are good at finding solutions, though we often wait too long before acting.

Physical objects matter

I’m sure you’ll agree that watch collecting operates on different underlying principles than most modern hobbies. You cannot fully appreciate a watch through a screen. Yes, you can of course photograph it, take videos of it, and broadcast this ‘data’ to thousands of followers. These activities happen all around us; Instagram is full of wrist shots, YouTube overflows with reviews and commentary, and WhatsApp groups host endless debates about every aspect you can think of arguing about.

The difference is that all these digital activities really just supplement the physical experience, but they sure as fvck do not replace it. A photograph of a Chronomètre Bleu dial will never - and I mean, never - convey the way light alters its appearance in infinite ways. A YouTube video cannot replicate the sensation of winding a Romain Gauthier Logical One using a pusher. To fully appreciate any fine watch, it must exist in three dimensions, occupy physical space, and be experienced through multiple senses simultaneously.

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If you’re new to SDC, welcome! When you have some time, check out prior editions of SDC Weekly here, or find enlightenment in the archive here.

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Estimated reading time: ~35 mins

🤡 Stern, again

As I started this section, I realised it’s been a busy few months for Patek content. In April, Stern scolded anyone who’d drawn a Rolex/Bucherer parallel to his Beyer acquisition. And then quite recently, he claimed 100% of the Cubitus design and confirmed that the perpetual calendar would go to existing VIPs and not to the much-advertised ‘next generation’ of collectors. Now Robin Swithinbank has had his turn for the FT...

“I don’t want anybody going down, either, but a lot of people will be out of business.”

Kinda cool to see Stern is stating the hard truth publicly like this; the top four privately-owned Swiss watchmakers (Rolex, Patek, AP, RM) controlled about half of the luxury Swiss watch market in 2025, up from 37% in 2019. The other half is being divided among everyone else, and Stern is more or less confirming he believes that a fair chunk of that ‘everyone else’ is not going to make it.

The old multi-brand AD model that propped up so much of the mid-tier worked, in part, because of bundling. If you wanted a hot Patek (or any ‘blue chip’ watches), the dealer could make you ‘force buy’ your way to earn the privilege; a Zenith here, a Carl F. Bucherer there... which is how many brands hit their numbers without really earning true customers on product merit.

To me, this is carriage collapsing in real time; you may recall we spoke about carriage not too long ago. Patek is opening its fourth directly-owned salon at Beyer; the global point-of-sale count is down from 500 at Stern’s accession to 259 today; US retailers have been cut by two-thirds to 38 (and yet still produce 16% of revenue, which tells you the bundling game was worth a fair chunk).

On certified pre-owned, Patek’s position seems to have drifted from ‘never’ to ‘maybe one day’:

“I’m thinking about something, but it’s too early to talk about it. It will take years.”

Sure, he’s not saying it’s definitely happening, but it’s not a straight denial either, and given how much they’ve rejected the idea in the past, even this tepid framing is a step in a particular direction. EveryWatch (per the FT article) reckons Rolex CPO did roughly $600m last year, or about 10% of the global secondary Rolex market - a side business larger than the primary sales of most Swiss brands. Stern saying “they realised it’s not that easy” is fair, but the maths is the maths. If you’re Patek, you eventually must capture some of that yourself or just watch the grey market hoover it up.

Him saying “it will take years” tells us that the spreadsheet has already been built, he’s just figuring out the mechanics of making it work. So, for me, it’s now a ‘when’ not an ‘if’ for Patek CPO.

When asked about following the rest of the industry into the world’s fastest-growing luxury market, Stern said:

“Why should I go there? It’s too early. Most of the Indian clients that want Patek are living in London or travelling to Geneva and the Middle East. So it’s not my priority.”

And then, almost in the same breath, he says:

“The tourist doesn’t really have the chance to buy a Patek. The retailer has to sell to the local client.”

So how does that work? You don’t need to go to India because Indian customers are buying when they travel… but tourists can’t really buy because allocation has to go to locals. As far as I’m concerned, Stern is openly saying he doesn’t care about Indian customers - despite the fact that India makes up roughly 18% of the world’s population and is arguably the single biggest long-term opportunity in luxury watches. Indians aren’t, in his words, “my priority.”

Now to be fair, Patek definitely doesn’t need India today; they sell everything they make. But in my mind, this is the sort of thinking that lets a brand sleepwalk through a generational shift in where wealth is being created. Hermès, Cartier, and others are making moves into India because a fair chunk of future watch collectors (young, globally mobile, legacy-minded, urbanising fast) live there. If you’re Patek, sure, you can ignore that today and the customers will still find their way to you. But will they feel the same way in 20 years’ time… about a brand that couldn’t be bothered to show up?

Stern closes the interview with “there is still a lot of pleasure and possibility for the watchmaking industry.” Sure, for Patek there is. As for the brands Stern has just casually consigned to closure… perhaps a little less so.

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Both stories start in Le Brassus on May 16th, 2026, overseeing a globally coordinated in-store launch of eight bioceramic pocket watches. They involve a hand-wound modified SISTEM51 with a Nivachron balance spring and a 90-hour power reserve. Both involve long queues, hype, Soulja Boy, and lanyards. These stories do however, diverge, approximately 18 months later.

The first one is where AP’s strategy team gets to walk into the boardroom in 2028 and smugly tell the family they were right all along. The second one is the version where Olivier Audemars looks across the table at Ilaria Resta and asks her, with the sort of restraint that old money has perfected over generations, what the fvck she was smoking when she approved this collab.

Let’s start with the good story.

Estimated reading time: 28 minutes

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Riding High in November 2027

You’re excited because it’s time to start packing for Dubai. You fly into DXB on Wednesday afternoon, and you’ve been scouting Dubai Watch Week’s website for ages now, to see what the brands have planned. AP, predictably, has the largest ‘stand’ again. I say stand, but it’s actually a fully standalone building, and the photos coming out of the construction phase are pretty remarkable. The Royal Oak logo is visible on the entrance side, but on the roof, in much smaller letters but visible from every approaching car on Al Khaleej Road, is the Royal Pop logo. Royal Pop is obviously not an ‘equal’ to the Royal Oak, but it has some relevance now because it paid for the school next door.

The school is the headline of AP’s week; in fact, six months earlier, AP officially opened the Audemars Piguet Académie de Savoir-Faire in Le Sentier, which is a free-to-attend horological apprenticeship programme funded entirely from the Royal Pop royalty pool. The opening cohort is 40 students, who will train for four years, with zero tuition fees. At the end, they will be qualified watchmakers, and any small independent in the Vallée de Joux can hire them. Some of the first cohort will probably end up at Greubel Forsey, or Voutilainen, or even AP itself; some will start working at their own benches. The point is that they exist, and the reason they exist is that AP managed to harvest something like CHF 25 to 50 million in licensing royalties from a bioceramic collab, declined to put any of it on their own balance sheet, and bought the most expensive piece of moral high ground in the watch industry.2

It worked!

The format was the first smart move; deciding to make Royal Pop a pocket watch on a lanyard and not a wristwatch turned out to be the best strategic call of the entire project, and AP basically got it right by being slightly paranoid. Pocket watches don’t compete with wristwatches the way wristwatches compete with each other. The kid wearing a Royal Pop on a Bottega lanyard at Soho House is not the same kid eyeing a steel Royal Oak Jumbo on his AD’s waitlist, even if he wants to be that kid in five years. Substitution failed because the products were not, in practice, substitutes. The 30% of consumers globally who now wear smartwatches already gave up their wrists; Royal Pop weaseled its way back into their lives in a way that didn’t need to ask for the wrist back.

Another masterstroke was the supply discipline. Swatch and AP agreed early on to cap total production at ~600,000 units across an 18-month window, ending in late 2027.3 By March 2027, secondary market prices had stabilised at a modest 15-20% premium to retail, which was high enough to keep the object desirable and low enough that nobody on Instagram was openly mocking AP for releasing a ‘flipper’s watch’. The painful MoonSwatch lesson, which Omega learned was taken into account this time.

One massive consideration was the whole trademark debacle. AP lost its bid to register the Royal Oak’s shape as a trademark in Japan in March 2024, and the US Patent and Trademark Office issued its final refusal in March 2025. Both jurisdictions held that an octagonal bezel, eight hexagonal screws, and a tapisserie dial were ‘highly common in the watch industry’ and not inherently distinctive enough to be owned by one party. This was, in a legal sense, terrible news for AP. In a market sense, one could assume it meant that Asian factories were about to flood the world with octagonal homages, and there wouldn’t be much AP could do about it through the courts.4

So, AP did the next best thing; they flooded the world themselves, with a sanctioned, branded, Swatch-distributed version. By the time the Royal Pop production run closed in late 2027, there were more officially branded Royal Oak silhouettes on the planet than at any point in the previous 54 years. Knock-offs still existed, of course, but the ‘cultural reference’ was owned by AP themselves. When someone showed up wearing an octagonal-bezelled bioceramic homage from Alibaba, the question changed from ‘is that a Royal Oak?’ to ‘is that a Royal Pop?’ That question, in the hands of an enthusiast, is devastating to any homage maker, because it implies the original they’re copying is the $400 Swatch version and most importantly, not the $30,000 original from Le Brassus.5

One more thing that worked out well was how audience received this product; specifically the female audience. You can easily conceive how a 16-year-old girl who bought a Rainbow Royal Pop in May 2026 just because her favourite TikToker had one, didn’t actually grow up to want a $30,000 Royal Oak by 2030. But regardless, she did grow up to know the brand exists, which is, when you actually look at it, what every luxury house wants.

By the time this kid turns 21, she’s already fluent in AP design codes; this fluency was the thing AP couldn’t ever buy at any price through traditional advertising, and Royal Pop bought it for them at scale. By Q3 2027, Resta’s target of moving women from <20% to 45% of AP’s buyer base by 2030 had in fact jumped forward by roughly 18 months.

AP has had an audience-cultivation problem for years - the brand has under a hundred mono-brand stores globally, with an average transaction price of around CHF 51k, and produces fewer than 53,000 watches a year. So it’s fair to say they are not in the business of making customers - and especially not female customers. They are in the business of receiving customers - ones who have already been made (into watch-buying customers) by somebody else. Royal Pop, in this scenario, became the ‘somebody else’. It taught the untapped female market, a generation of Gen Z, and Gen Alpha kids, what an octagonal bezel was, why eight hexagonal screws were a design thing, what Petite Tapisserie meant, that the Vallée de Joux was a thing, and that the people who made the ‘real’ versions of this watch thought it was important enough to fund a school or whatever.

Anyway, by November 2027, AP’s secondary market is doing fine. The Royal Oak Jumbo is still trading at ~30% above retail, and the waitlists are, by most accounts, slightly longer than they were in 2025 - that’s partly because the Royal Pop hype seeded a new generation of would-be buyers without giving them a substitute.

AP’s revenue has now comfortably crossed CHF 3 billion. The 150th Heritage Universal Calendar pocket watch, released in 2026 with 30 complications and a price in seven figures, is being read by the press as the elite bookend to the Royal Pop’s mass-market entry point. The brand is, somehow, both more accessible and more aristocratic than it was 18 months earlier.

In this version of the future, Ilaria Resta instantly gets a five-year contract extension, Olivier Audemars gets invited on the The Joe Rogan Experience where he goes on about generational courage or some sh1t, and the brand goes on to report a record year. Everyone gets drunk at Black Coffee’s set at the AP party in Dubai… Mark Ronson plays Suzanne and nobody gives a fvck.

AP can dream, right?

Cry Me a River in November 2027

Now we’re in an alternative universe - but in the exact same week as the previous story.

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Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

📊 Three quarters of “nice”

There is a great Warren Buffett line about how you only find out who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out… and in this case, the Swiss watch market spent four years with the tide on its way out, and this produced a great deal of analysis about who was naked. If all the prior Morgan Stanley/WatchCharts essays I have written are anything to go by, the answer was “most of them”, and in the case of one or two, distressingly so.

If you’ve seen the 1Q26 report which WatchCharts published with Morgan Stanley last week,1 you will see the tide has now slightly turned. The WatchCharts Overall Market tracker rose +1.9% QoQ, which marks the third consecutive quarter where secondary prices have risen by more than 1%.2

25 out of 35 brands posted positive performance, and all three listed groups (LVMH, Richemont, Swatch) were in the green together for only the second time in several years. Every brand that Morgan Stanley tracks for value retention saw an improvement, which is the first time that has happened since 2022.

So I guess it’s fair to say things like ‘the market is up’ or ‘things are fine’ or ‘the recovery is pretty broad and now even applies to listed conglomerates’. The only question, really, is what the words up, fine, and broad now mean in the current market given the last four years were spent pretty much redefining all these words.

Headlines have conditions

There’s no disputing the +1.9% headline number and it is also true that three consecutive quarters of growth is the longest sustained recovery this market has had since the May 2022 peak. I’d also say that the breadth stats are even more impressive than the actual level. A year ago only 3% of tracked brands and 14% of tracked collections were posting positive QoQ performance. This quarter those figures are 71% and 76% respectively. So it seems the market has gone from a single-elevator economy - Patek up, Rolex stabilising, everyone else on the way down - to something that almost qualifies as a market-wide bounceback. But is it really?

Well, the listed groups have finally caught a break as well; Richemont +1.2% QoQ, Swatch Group +1.5%, LVMH +0.7% and of course Rolex (which is technically not listed but found in the same chart) leads at +1.7%.

So far, so green; but remember, none of these are large numbers and the year-on-year performance is still a mixed bag… Richemont -0.9%, LVMH -1.8%, Swatch +2.7%, Rolex SA +5.9%.

A reasonable person reading this report (and the prior few) could easily make the case that the watch market has stabilised, and an even stronger case that 1Q26 is the first quarter in which that stabilisation has indeed been broad. They could also cobble together a very weak case that any of this represents a return to the conditions of 2021–2022 (but that would be dumb).

The report, to its credit, is explicit about the last point; they use the phrase “four years removed from the peak of the watch market bubble in 2022”, which is the most polite way I have ever seen anyone describe three years of decline.

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In late April, Sotheby’s Hong Kong hammered through HK$414m (~US$53m) worth of watches in 13 hours, marking the biggest watch sale ever held in Asia. 97% of lots sold, with more than half of those above the high estimate - this all resulted in six world records set by over 800 active bidders from 50-plus countries.

The headline sale was a 1987 yellow gold Cartier London Crash (pictured below) at HK$15.6m (~£1.5m) to a private Japanese collector after only nine minutes of bidding. The first 82 lots from a single-owner Cartier collection were estimated at HK$15–23m and closed out at HK$108m... and no, that’s not a typo.

And yeah, this is the same Sotheby’s whose junk-rated parent is, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, offering its own consignors 7% per annum to wait six months for their cash, while it refinances three-quarters-of-a-billion dollars worth of bonds at 7.375% plus underwriting fees. But yeah, the market does not seem to care.1

Phillips, for its part, set the pre-game tone last November when its Decade One sale hammered a steel Patek 1518 at CHF 14.2m, making it the most valuable watch sold at auction in 2025.

The houses now turn up to Geneva carrying that backdrop of momentum, plus, in Sotheby’s case, a record-breaking quarter and the confidence that comes with having recently sold a watch for seven times its high estimate.

So today’s post is about this weekend’s auction sales… maybe you don’t give a damn, in which case you should stop reading now and have a great weekend!

Estimated reading time: ~15 mins

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🔨 Antiquorum, 9–10 May

These chaps have the largest catalogue of the week with 672 lots; Antiquorum’s Geneva sale is broad by design (they’re even selling Rolex standalone dials etc), but the ‘top’ of the catalogue seems pretty narrow. Let’s go through the top 5…

Patek Philippe Nautilus Ref. 3700/13, ‘Jumbo’, Lot 285

The big daddy of this auction has to be this piece…

This piece was ordered through Somazzi in Lugano in 1984 and delivered with a certificate of origin explicitly listing the dial as ‘special or rose, index brillants’, and consigned by the original owner’s grandson.

To me, this is the sort of thing which the market has been lapping up in recent times; not the Nautilus per se, but these sorts of unlikely-to-be-repeated factory anomalies inside an otherwise commodified reference. Not to say the 3700 is a commodity relative to what else is out there, but I just checked and there’s 99 of them on Chrono24 right now, so this one is ultra-special for the people who tend to collect in this stratosphere.

Patek Philippe Ref. 5004P, first-generation platinum, Lot 668

The 5004 is Patek’s perpetual calendar split-seconds chronograph, produced from 1995 to 2011, with the platinum first-gen examples being the rarest of all. There aren’t many of these, and most live in safes anyway.

Rolex Cosmograph ‘Jean-Claude Killy’ Ref. 6036, Lot 655

Of the three Rolex triple calendar chronograph references (4767, 6036, 6236), the 6036 is the one Killy is associated with (named after the French Olympic skier who wore one). Steel examples are vanishingly rare and most surviving 6036s are in gold. Rolex effectively abandoned this kind of complicated wristwatch after the 1950s and never went back. Vintage Rolex is heavily mature as a market, but the 6036 in steel sits in a small museum-grade pocket of it that doesn’t really track the broader Daytona-PN cycle.

Urban Jürgensen Ref. 11C, unique steel prototype No. 10, Lot 263

This is a Baumberger–Pratt era prototype in stainless steel and it takes us back to UJ’s revival under Peter Baumberger, with none other than the late Derek Pratt as his co-pilot. This has to be one of the more interesting independent stories of the late 20th century, and I’d say prototypes from this period are breadcrumbs of how that story continues to be told. If you happen to care about the academic side of independents and their origin stories, this is a pretty compelling piece to hoover up.

Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Ref. 6239 ‘Paul Newman’, Lot 211

I mean, sure… you might roll your eyes at this one, but hear me out. The Paul Newman market is the deepest, most studied secondary market in the entire watch world… this is arguably the watch which started the modern auction-gaming saga. So the point of including this here is to say that this lot is a great market “barometer” (or themometer if you prefer that). The estimate is CHF110,000 - CHF150,000, so if this clean 6239 PN clears the high estimate easily, I think it’s fair to conclude that the vintage Rolex base is doing just fine... and if not, that tells you something too.

Honourable mentions

There’s a green-dial steel Patek 5711/1300A-001 which you may recall as the diamond-bezel hype-era 5711 - to me, how it performs is its own data point to watch, as it speaks to whether the 2021 mania has fully dissipated. There’s also a platinum Journe Résonance, which I’d call obvious if Phillips and Christie’s weren’t also offering Resonances the same week. There is, this season, a slight Journe oversupply at the institutional end of the market, so watching how three of these clear in five days will be more interesting than seeing how one clears in isolation.

🔨 Phillips Geneva XXIII, 9–10 May

The Phillips catalogue is, as usual, carefully assembled. They’ve got just over 200 lots, heavy on cloisonné, mid-century classical, and the early canon of independents.

Patek Philippe Ref. 2523 ‘South America’ polychrome cloisonné, 1953, Lot 27

Many have said this is the lot of the year so far, and maybe of the next several to come - here’s one of many quotes I’ve read about this watch: “one of the most visually captivating and historically significant wristwatches ever made.”

The 2523 is the second-generation Cottier world-time (the heures universelles mechanism, 36mm, with a second crown at nine to spin the city ring), and only roughly 29–36 examples were made across all metals and dial variations - of which this version is said to be the rarest. I guess trophy hunting at the absolute apex of vintage Patek is still a thing; how big a thing, is what we will find out on Saturday.

Rolex Ref. 6085 ‘The Dragon’, cloisonné enamel by Nelly Richard, 1952, Lot 119

This is a 33mm yellow gold Oyster with a cloisonné dragon dial by Nelly Richard, the mid-century enamellist who worked closely with Stern Frères. The interesting thing here is the implicit signal collectors would be sending by buying this for between CHF 500k and 1m. At this price, you are not really buying a Rolex as much as you are buying a Nelly Richard, in a Rolex case, branded as a Rolex. In this case I’d say the artisan supersedes the maison. The fact that this sort of premium can be paid on a 33mm time-only watch from the brand most associated with rugged tool watches is, on its own, worth a second thought.

For what it’s worth, Perezcope disputes Phillips’ claim:

Scholarship indicates that only six Dragon dial models are known to date, each housed in a different reference, making this example — reference 6085 — most likely unique.

He said on his Instagram stories that there are at least two known examples of this watch. I have no idea either way, just letting you know what I heard.

Audemars Piguet Ref. 5503, two-tone steel and pink gold, 1942, Lot 26

To me, this watch is fkn epic… one of five made, 36mm (which btw was large for the period), and it’s got circular calendar and chronograph displays instead of the twin apertures used by Patek and Vacheron at the time. The two-tone case just takes it to the next level, and even the legendary 1518 was never made in two-tone, so this is its own little pedestal if you can call it that.

F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance, ‘Souscription’ no. 18, Lot 6

Given the previous lot, this will come as no surprise - another two-tone. This one is no. 18 of 20 from Journe’s original 1999 Souscription series, with the brass movement and platinum case - but this time with gold midcase, lugs, and crown.

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Now, I don’t think anyone is disputing that this is clearly derived from the Royal Oak:

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Today we’ll start with a guessing game… if you haven’t seen it, the Swatch homepage is teasing something (and clearly not missing an opportunity to take the p1ss out of Watches and Wonders either!):

What could this be? Well, there are some other ads floating around, and I have these two courtesy of our friend Johnny Davis at Esquire:

What’s interesting is that if you check out the SISTEM51 website, you will see the image in pink (above) matches a component on the Swatch website (circled in red):

So part 1 is solved… this will be a mechanical S51 watch. Now onto the theme - and for this, check this out:

If you look at the straps from the homepage teaser, the colours seem to line up with these characters (light blue & white = Alice, light & dark pink = Cheshire Cat, light & dark green = Mad Hatter, dark blue = Caterpillar, black could be anything really!).

Coupled with the “Wonders” text on the homepage, my prediction is that they’re launching a SISTEM51-powered Disney collaboration with an Alice in Wonderland theme. Bear in mind, Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland was released in 1951 - which makes 2026 the movie’s 75th anniversary. Perhaps Swatch has found a way to celebrate?

Or maybe I’m just delusional… I mean, it’s fair to wonder (lol!) whether Swatch would spend so much to advertise a Disney collab… I guess we will find out on May 16th!

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Estimated reading time: ~20 mins

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If you wanted to move a million dollars in $100 bills across a border, you’d be carrying roughly 10 kilograms of paper (or ~22lbs) in a briefcase; this would of course be hard to explain if you were stopped and questioned about it. Instead, if you converted that cash into an RM 27-05, you’d be able to carry the same value on your wrist, through airport security as a personal accessory, and in most countries nobody would bat an eyelid.

Quick disclaimer before we continue… this is not some kind of ‘moral panic’ essay. Buying and selling expensive watches legitimately is fine, and none of this changes the appeal of horology to people like you and me. But if you care about this hobby, the ‘shadow economy’ that has grown around it is worth understanding, mainly because it’s starting to drive regulation that will eventually affect all of us.

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Estimated reading time: ~20 minutes

Why watches, specifically?

Money laundering needs three things… a way to place dirty money into the system, a way to move it around without leaving obvious traces, and a way to bring it out of the system as ‘clean cash’. Watches are almost perfectly suited for all three steps; obviously not by design, but by some weird confluence of their physical and commercial traits, they do happen to be super useful for this purpose.

Starting with the physics, as one does, it is obvious that the value-to-weight ratio of a high-end watch is very attractive. A Daytona carries anywhere between $30k and $17,752,500 in value despite looking like ordinary ‘male jewellery’ to the average person. A Tiffany Nautilus sold at auction for $5.35 million (auction premium raised this to $6,503,000) and weighs about 120 grams. There is probably little else on earth which combines this level of ‘value density’ with the ‘social normality’ of casually wearing it on your person through any border crossing on earth.2

Next, is the relative anonymity of watches; unlike cars, real estate, or even diamonds (which require certification), no jurisdiction on earth ‘mandates’ ownership registration for watches. There is no title deed, no VIN number, and no centralised database of who owns what. A watch can change hands with nothing more than a handshake.

Finally, there is the general structure of the watch market - the secondary market for pre-owned watches is estimated at somewhere between $17 billion and $27 billion annually3, and it is, for the most part, quite chaotic and fragmented. What constitutes this ‘market’ ranges from independent dealers, online platforms, pawn shops, private sellers, Instagram traders, middlemen, and so on… plus there is minimal regulation, pervasive cash transactions, and essentially no background checks required for most of it.

If you put all of that together, you get what one Australian police source described4 as a situation where “you can’t put $1 million in your bank account, but you can fly out of the country wearing it on your wrist and then sell it overseas.” Funny that.

Criminal cases

Here we will cover a few documented cases to anchor the theory a bit better.

We’ll start with Project Cassandra (this is a huge and fascinating expose, do read it later); long story short, it is a deep-dive into a DEA investigation that ran from 2008, involving 30 US and foreign agencies. In terms of watches, investigators had documented that Hezbollah’s financial management arm had purchased €14 million in luxury watches from a single store in Germany.

The coordinator of one specific operation was a Lebanese-Colombian national who went by the name ‘El Taliban’ (shocker); he managed cocaine shipments from South American cartels, used the proceeds to buy watches, and had couriers transport them to Lebanon where they were sold for cash through ‘hawala’ networks which would totally bypass any international financial monitoring. The network ran across Spain, the Netherlands, Romania, and Belgium, and drug money became watches, which eventually became clean cash in Lebanon. Neat!

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Estimated reading time: ~40 mins

📉 Swiss Watch Industry - March Update

Our favourite federation has dropped the March numbers, and per most reports, everything seems stable. Q1 exports came in at CHF 6.2 billion, up 1.4% (YoY) on Q1 2025 (though March itself was down 1%.) After what we saw in 2025, ‘stable’ is the closest thing to a win you could get, I suppose.

That being said, the rankings do need some sort of health warning. France appears in second place this month with a 72.4% jump, and that isn’t real demand - the FHS itself flagged it as ‘re-exports to other destinations’ as opposed to legit growth in a new market. This seems to have started in December 2025 (when France went up by 50.9%) and has continued every month since.

The simplest explanation is probably some sort of post-tariff logistics rebalancing; brands pushed inventory into the US ahead of the 39% tariff in 2025, then watched US shipments collapse, and then started shipping again once the rate fell to 15%1 in December. As the GS Guy mentions in the comments - the routing through France does nothing to change the US tariff rate - tariffs follow country of origin, not country of dispatch… which means the French routing is about something else (logistics consolidation, VAT or corporate tax optimisation?).

Nobody is willing to name names, but the suspicion is that this is partly a Richemont consolidation play. Cartier is HQ’d in Paris and controls roughly 8.7% of the Swiss watch market by retail value, so French logistics for non-US destinations would make obvious sense. Tariff arbitrage on third-country shipments is also possible - the EU has more favourable bilateral trade deals than Switzerland (with markets like India and Mexico), which means routing via France can amount to lower import duties at the final destination (compared to going direct from Switzerland). If we strip out the French anomaly, March looks more like a 3-4% decline than the headline 1% drop.

There’s another interesting story in the price segments; watches above CHF 3,000 at export (which covers most luxury watches you’d recognise) were down 0.5% in March and basically flat across Q1. This is the segment that has driven essentially all the industry’s value growth for a few years now. The Morgan Stanley/LuxeConsult report in February said that watches retailing above CHF 50,000 accounted for 89% of total industry growth in 2025. If the upper end is flat, this would mean the engine has conked out.

What kept the headline numbers respectable here is volume at the cheaper end. Steel watches were up 5.8% in units but down 9% in value, which means average steel watch values fell sharply. Either brands are shipping fewer Subs and more Hamiltons, or there’s destocking going on – but it’s probably a bit of both.

India crossed into the top 15 (+56.6%), and Mexico also continued its climb (+16.4%). UK exports were up +3.2% to make it the second biggest legit market (France being hub-exports and not real demand) behind the US for the month. The report says:

Over the entire first quarter (+1.4%), several major markets appear to have reached the bottom of the wave, including Japan (-0.4%), Hong Kong (-0.8%), and China (-0.7%).

This is being measured against the same period in 2025 (which was rough!). Greater China was down 9% in 2025 and down 23% in 2024. So Q1 2026 is better described as “still declining, but more slowly than before, and from a very low base.” I’m not sure I would call this stabilisation - what is fair to say is that the slope is flattening, but the level is still falling. The reason it looks “near flat” is that there’s not that much further down to go after two years of mega drops.

Anyway, Saudi Arabia (-16.1%) and Qatar (-24.8%) seem to show the effects of war in the Middle East… but UAE somehow held flat at +0.7%, which defies logic.

I think this is because UAE is the regional distribution and logistics hub for a large chunk of the Gulf, so the FHS export figures for UAE probably include inventory that is eventually sold to buyers in Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and even to other regional and Indian visitors who shop in Dubai.

In essence, the war is impacting the home market economies in Saudi and Qatar, but the UAE’s hub status and diversified consumer base seem to be insulating it. I do think that if tensions get worse, UAE could probably absorb even more redirected business from its neighbours, the same way it absorbed Russian capital after 2022.

Most of this stuff ends up being “insights from hindsight” because who knows what any of this means in the moment. In Q2 we will see most W&W 2026 novelties start hitting boutiques and the post-W&W ordering cycle will kick in. For now, I guess the situation is best described as fragile but stable.

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Fhs March2026

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🤔 Thierry denies what Thierry is doing

A few weeks ago, I argued that the Beyer acquisition was not really a one-off sentimental move, and more like Patek doing the same thing Rolex did with Bucherer, but subtly - just a steady slide from wholesale toward DTC.

Thierry Stern would like you to know that he disagrees.

He spoke with Andrea Martel at NZZ for what reads like a polite scolding of anyone (hi) who has drawn the Bucherer comparison. “We don’t go the way of Rolex with Bucherer and become a dealer ourselves”, he said. “Our focus remains watchmaking.”

Straight face

I have read the interview at least 3 times and I still can’t work out how Stern squares his words with his actions. He has just bought a 266-year-old multi-brand retailer, is converting the entire 600-square-metre store into a Patek-only Salon, will lay off about 35 staff in the process, and is opening his fourth directly-owned door in a city he describes in the same interview as “perhaps even more important” than Geneva.

If that is not ‘going the way of Rolex’, it is a pretty good impression of it.

What Stern probably means is that they are not buying an entire 100-store retail group in one go. That’s fair enough. The pace is obviously slower and the perceptions matter to him. But for anyone standing on the sidelines, the direction of travel is identical and the destination is the same - more brand-controlled retail, fewer multi-brand doors, and more direct relationships with collectors plus the data that comes with them.

The difference is in how it is being portrayed; Rolex announced a deal, and Patek is telling us, with a straight face, that nothing is really changing. 🤷‍♂️

Gübelin exit

The most consequential part of the interview for me, is when he is asked about Gübelin (which sells Patek in Zurich and is, per Stern’s own description, ‘directly opposite our future salon’), he said “in such a small space, this hardly makes sense.” He then walked it back with a polite line “the future of our cooperation with Gübelin in Zurich is currently the subject of discussions.”

To me, that is their death warrant; Patek’s owner has said, on the record, that two Patek doors across the street from each other do not make sense, and one of those doors is his own - so which one do you think is going to close?

I noted before that the Beyer conversion would have second-order effects on Zurich’s retail mix, and now we know what the first one looks like. Gübelin will likely lose its Patek allocation in Zurich, which is a decent chunk of revenue for a retailer that has been a Patek partner for decades. Whether the global Gübelin-Patek relationship will survive is a separate question, but the Zurich part is likely over.

Who paid for the tariffs

Stern also admitted something else; the US slapped tariffs on Swiss watches, and then those tariffs fell from 39% to 15%. Patek raised global prices by 4% on 1 February for materials cost, and US recommended retail prices ended up 8.6% lower than where they started.

So how did Patek absorb the original tariff hit without raising end-customer retail prices? Stern told NZZ, plainly, “we have reduced the dealer margin to compensate for the tariff-related price increases.”

So when the tariffs were at 39%, Patek’s US dealers ate the cost and end customers paid the same. Patek protected its brand image and its retail prices, and the dealers got squeezed. Now that the tariffs have come down, Stern doesn’t say whether the dealer margin has been restored, or whether Patek has just pocketed the spread.

I don’t know the answer, but ask yourself; if you were running Patek and you had just taken a chunk of margin off your dealers, supposedly only until the tariffs eased, and the retail prices the customer pays were now lower than they had been before… would you give that margin back? Or would you keep it, point to the lower retail prices as evidence of consumer-friendly pricing, and let the dealers absorb that loss?

If you combine this with the Beyer conversion, the picture starts to look quite consistent. Make the multi-brand model less profitable, and wait for succession or commercial pressure to take its toll. Then step in when the family runs out of options and convert.

Slow-motion

A few other lines in the interview fit the narrative; “We don’t want to open up new markets. We don’t have enough watches for that”, is the Patek line that has been recited since at least 2010 and that is somehow always true regardless of capacity. “Our goal has never been to make as many watches as possible”, which is fine, but is also the only acceptable thing to say given that they have been stuck around 75,000 watches a year for ages and seem to be hitting a wall on production.

The capacity-constrained, growth-isn’t-the-point framing is also the perfect cover for the retail consolidation. If you cannot make more watches, you do not need more dealers. You probably need fewer, but better placed, and ideally ones you control yourself. Every sentence Stern utters about constrained production is also really just a sentence about why fewer doors and more brand-owned Salons make more sense.

From where I’m sitting, Patek’s strategy looks pretty smart. Doing it slowly and politely, and continuing to tell everyone the third-party retailer model is sacred, is actually quite shrewd. It lets you keep the relationships with the dealers who still matter, while also relying on them less over time.

We should probably stop letting the brand tell us what is happening and just observe what they actually do. Stern says they are not going the Rolex way. Maybe… but every action of the last few years (shrinking from 400+ points of sale to under 300, opening fourth and fifth and likely sixth directly-owned Salons, acquiring a long-time partner the moment a succession crisis offered an opening, squeezing dealer margins to absorb policy costs) is a step on the same road Rolex took. They are just walking it more slowly, and I suppose with better manners… but methinks Patek ADs should start counting down to a world without Pateks to bundle.

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🔥 Grand Feu, a week later

When Rolex launched the new off-catalogue steel Daytona I made the case that they had borrowed the term ‘Grand Feu’ from the rest of watchmaking to label a dial-making process that does not meet the 150-year-old watch industry definition. I still stand by that... looks like Fratello agreed with me as well. Hot off the press… also covered it yesterday and concluded, very appropriately I might add, with this XKCD comic:

With that, we shall continue with, to borrow Jack’s words, “the endless pleasures to be derived from the human tendency to elevate minor points of distinction to the level of doctrine.”

More than a few people pushed back in the comments on my Grand Feu post; the point, roughly, was that the new Rolex ‘Grand Feu’ dial is simply nicer to look at than the metal-substrate enamel dials you have seen in person. I have not held a new 126502 myself, only looked at photos, and enamel tends to photograph badly at the best of times… so I can’t really referee this. But let’s assume you are right, and that the new Rolex dial is the prettier object under neutral lighting.

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Robert Trivers died on March 12th, 2026, at the age of 83. Trivers was an evolutionary biologist, not a watch collector. He spent his career thinking about altruism, parental investment, and sex ratios in the animal kingdom - none of which has, on the face of it, much to do with watch collecting.

And yet, in 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Trivers wrote a single paragraph that pretty much explains watch collecting better than most watch collectors ever have. The idea, in one sentence, is that we deceive ourselves on purpose because evolution built us this way, and we do this mainly so we can do a better job of deceiving other people.

Which means your million-dollar FFC is not, in a strict Triversian sense, a million-dollar FFC. It’s an elaborate piece of psychological equipment that helps you feel completely normal about spending a million bucks on a watch, while at the same time helping you convince everyone around you that this was a perfectly rational thing to do.

For context on Trivers - he was a Crafoord Prize winner, ranked among Time Magazine’s greatest thinkers of the 20th century, and probably the single most influential figure in modern evolutionary psychology. Between 1971 and 1974, he published four papers that changed how we understand human social behaviour. So with four papers in four years, each one was a kind of grenade tossed into a different corner of the social sciences. Then, in 1976, he added a fifth idea called self-deception, and this is the one we’re applying to watch collecting today.

Steven Pinker described one of Trivers’ passages as follows:

“If … deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced.”

This sentence, from Robert Trivers’ foreword to ‘The Selfish Gene’, might have the highest ratio of profundity to words in the history of the social sciences.

Frankly, “the highest ratio of profundity to words in the history of the social sciences” is the most high brow academic praise I have ever read in my life. This idea1 is also probably one of the most disturbing in all of psychology, which is why I want to spend the next 4,000 words on it.

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Estimated reading time: ~17-23 minutes

Think back to the last hype watch you bought; maybe it was a piece you justified because of its “superior craftsmanship”, “in-house movement” or perhaps even the,“investment potential.” You’re probably wondering why I am using quotation marks here; after all, it is quite likely that you actually, truly, believed these were the reasons you bought the watch… right?

Well, sure, you’re convinced you bought the watch for the reasons stated. Your brain has constructed a perfectly logical narrative that feels completely true. You believe it, 100%.

What Trivers proposed (and what decades of research has since supported) is that your brain is running a much more sophisticated programme than you realise. This programme has evolved specifically to hide your own true motivations from you - and get this… it’s a feature, not a bug.

Of course, you’ll probably read all of this, nod along, recognise all the patterns described… and then go and buy another watch anyway. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what the research predicts.

Evolution made you a really good liar

Trivers’ original argument from 1976 starts from a premise that Richard Dawkins articulated neatly in The Selfish Gene: “all animal communication contains an element of deception right from the start, because all animal interactions involve at least some conflict of interest.”

If that’s true (and the evidence suggests it is) then there should be strong evolutionary pressure to spot deception. And that pressure should, in turn, select for self-deception; because if you truly believe your own bullsh1t, you won’t give off the subtle cues that betray a person who knowingly tells lies.

Trivers’ 2011 paper with William von Hippel came out with a counterintuitive finding - that self-deception evolved to help you win social battles, rather than to protect a fragile ego. In the sporting sense, this is offense and not defense.2

von Hippel and Trivers identified three specific advantages of this system. Self-deception removes the mental stress of maintaining a consistent web of lies, it removes the nervousness and stress cues that come from knowing you’re being dishonest, and it eliminates the secondary ‘tells’ you might produce when trying to mask your nervousness. So you’re not acting calm, you are calm - because you believe your own story.

Applying this to watch collecting, when you truly believe your new Patek is a reflection of your ‘appreciation for horological heritage’ instead of something you bought in pursuit of social status, you eliminate many “tells” from your personal behaviour. If you think about this purely from the perspective of evolution, it’s genius, really.

Everyone has little quirks; nervous glances, vocal tone shifts, and other tiny behavioural cues exist in all human behaviour, and these tend to betray your conscious lies a lot of the time. “True” information is preferentially kept out of your consciousness, and false beliefs take its place.3

Even your brain is in on it; when researchers study ‘directed forgetting’, they can see the prefrontal cortex actively suppressing the hippocampus.4 In short, one part of your brain is literally telling another part what it’s allowed to remember about your own motivations. Effectively, evolution has burdened you with an internal filing clerk whose job is to lose the receipts 😂.

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To quote a dear friend… “perhaps the most bizarre news released around Watches and Wonders…” is that Patek has apparently instituted a policy where only one archive can be issued - ever - for any particular watch. Another friend who is close to the brand has confirmed this to be true. What this means is that if you happen to buy a watch that has had an extract issued from the archive before, you can’t ever get one again, even if it’s lost, damaged, or stolen.

And just like that, Thierry has created a new hierarchy in the pre-owned Patek market. You think he’s a wizard, or just a moron?

If you’re new to SDC, welcome! If you have time to kill, find older editions of SDC Weekly here, and longer posts in the archive here.

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Estimated reading time: ~30 mins, unless you want to read about W&W 2026, in which case it will be 44 mins. I put the W&W section at the very end, in case you’re tired of reading about W&W (I know I am!).

🆕 Wei Koh launches Legare

This apparently happened at Watches and Wonders but it’s likely you didn’t hear about it, because as far as I can tell… almost nobody reported on it. Wei Koh appears to have launched his watch brand; it’s called Legare. He confirmed this on camera to Tim Green of Subdial, who bumped into him at the show and conducted what is, as far as I can tell, one of only two interviews about this launch.

That is pretty weird, don’t you think?

Wei runs Revolution, and The Rake; he hosts Man of the Hour on Discovery Channel, which is a multi-part documentary series about independent watchmakers that is airing right now. He is, by his own publication’s estimation, “one of the most well-respected voices in contemporary watchmaking.” If anyone could arrange for their own brand’s launch to receive better coverage across global watch media, it ought to be this guy.

And instead, the confirmation that the thing exists comes via a chance encounter with Tim Green on a trade show floor, recorded in low-res and uploaded to social media. I’d guess this low-key approach is no accident. Wei is now the President of the GPHG Jury, and there are obvious reasons to handle the “I have just launched my own watch” moment super carefully when your new high-profile gig involves judging other people’s watches. Chris Hall wrote “Wei reportedly says that there’s no chance it’ll be put up for a GPHG while he’s jury president.” Well that’s a relief… if true.

From the Subdial interview, we know the brand is called Legare, which Wei says derives from the Latin carrying the sense of legacy or ‘to bequeath’. It is the verb root that gets you, eventually, to the English word legacy. The brand motto is “à la recherche du temps perdu”, which is French for “in search of lost time” and also, as most of you will of course know, the title of Proust’s seven-volume novel about memory, cake, and jealousy.

The watch itself is called Chapter One and it measures 37.5mm in diameter and 9.9mm thick, cased in grade 5 titanium.

Wei’s co-founder is Guillaume Tetu, who co-founded Hautlence back in 2004, left to run product and later become COO at Ralph Lauren Watch & Jewelry, and then returned to Hautlence in March 2025 as Chairman and Advisor. Quite how all of that sits alongside a separate start-up venture, I do not know; it seems like the kind of thing a lawyer would have views on, but that is apparently the arrangement. Some images from the Subdial video:

So that is the what; which is to say, it seems like a Dufour Duality, but inverted. Turns out, that is no accident.

Piguet’s pocket watch

In 2019, Sotheby’s sold a pocket watch for CHF 250,000, when the estimate going in was only CHF 7,000–10,000 - which kinda tells you everyone in the room knew what they were bidding on but the cataloguer did not have a clue.

The movement was made in 1933 by a 19-year-old student named Albert Gustav Piguet, who was graduating from the École d’Horlogerie in Le Sentier, at the time the pre-eminent watchmaking school in the Vallée de Joux. Under the supervision of the headmaster Marcel Bulleumier, six student-made double-balance pocket watches were produced between 1932 and 1934; two at 38mm, two at 43mm, and two at 48mm. Piguet’s was one of the smallest, at 38mm.

The movement architecture is the main thing to note here; it’s a single gear train driving two balance wheels linked by a differential, built to run on the principles of resonance1. Pulling that off as a graduation project, in 1933, aged 19, feels rather prodigious if you ask me.

Piguet - I suppose unsurprisingly - went on to have a highly consequential career. He joined Lemania after graduation and rose to technical director, a role he held from 1948 to 1980. During that tenure he developed the CH27 chronograph calibre, later rebadged as the Omega cal. 321 - the same one that ended up on Buzz Aldrin’s wrist on the Moon. He also developed the legendary Lemania cal. 2310, which became a base for some of the most revered vintage chronograph movements used by the big names in watchmaking. If you collect vintage chronographs, there is a good chance you have looked through a caseback at one of Albert Piguet’s designs without even knowing it. Heck, I myself have enjoyed one of these in my Breguet 3237.

Duality links

Dufour told Josué Hernandez (and I covered this back in SDC Weekly 133) that he decided to make the Duality in 1996 after seeing a 1930s double-balance pocket watch in a book from the Rockford Time Museum. His recollection was that the pocket watch had been made at a watchmaking school in Le Locle. SJX’s essay on the 2019 Sotheby’s lot suggests the school was actually Le Sentier, and that a sister example of the Piguet (from the same 1932–34 batch) was the Time Museum piece, later sold when the collection was dispersed in 2004.

Le Locle and Le Sentier are not the same place, so either Dufour is remembering a different watch, or he is mis-remembering this one, or the book mis-captioned it. Who knows... what is not in dispute is that the Piguet-style 1930s double-balance pocket watches are the conceptual ancestor of Dufour’s Duality, of which he has made about ten.

Dufour’s technical premise was that by running one balance very slightly fast and the other very slightly slow, and averaging their rates via a differential, you can tighten positional variance across the six positions. Normally you try to minimise the spread, but with two balances, the errors should in theory cancel out. It is undoubtedly an elegant piece of horological gadgetry with essentially zero commercial justification, which is perhaps why people love it.

Which brings us back to Wei’s watch.

Legare Chapter One

Legare Chapter One is 37.5mm in diameter, and Piguet’s 1933 pocket watch movement was one of the 38mm calibres from the school batch; that delta is presumably the case flange, give or take?

My point is, the whole schtick of this new watch looks like it is to take the Piguet movement lineage, the same lineage that gave us the Duality, and simply copy it. That would make the motto “à la recherche du temps perdu” rather literal; you go into the archives, find a seminal creation in watchmaking, and then just remake it with modern materials and an inverted design.

For full disclosure, I would have tried to reach out to Wei for better images and a few more specs directly, but he blocked me on Instagram a while back. I have no idea why; likely a meme that landed badly, but no hard feelings on my end. If you are reading this Wei, DMs are hypothetically open; I think the watch looks interesting and I would love to know more.

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🕵️ Rolex gives us a clue

At the bottom of Rolex’s Oyster 100 celebration page, you will find this little teaser:

And on Friday last week, Niccoloy shared a recently published Rolex patent on Instagram, suggesting it may be linked to whatever Rolex is about to announce.

Esquire picked it up within hours and wrote a quick story about it, speculating that this might be the 1908 getting a calendar upgrade in May. Which… fine. Rolex speculation is a sport for all of us, and I’ve played it more than once in these pages as you know. Today, instead of the usual guessing game, I want to talk about the patent itself because the ingenuity here makes me wonder why it took so long for us to see such a thing in a wristwatch.

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Their steel is not called “steel,” it’s called Oystersteel. Their rose gold is not called “rose gold,” it’s called Everose, and it contains a little bit of platinum to keep the pink from washing out - which is the sort of problem you only discover you have once you have sold a lot of rose gold watches to a lot of people who live in sunny places. Their steel-and-gold bimetal watches are called Rolesor. Their steel-and-platinum mix is Rolesium, a word Rolex has owned since 1932, when they originally used it to describe a proprietary steel that looked like platinum, and then retired the name and reused it 70 years later when they had platinum that looked like platinum.

Their ceramic bezel is of course, Cerachrom. Their lume is Chromalight. Their hairspring is Parachrom; their shock absorber is Paraflex; their crowns are Twinlock and Triplock and, for the Deepsea, Ringlock. The people they pay to wear their watches are not called “ambassadors,” because “ambassador” is a word other brands can use - so Rolex ambassadors are called Testimonees, which is a word so specific to Rolex that fvcking autocorrect doesn’t even recognise it.

So tell me, does it not make you wonder why, when unwrapping their most-discussed release of Watches & Wonders 2026, Rolex decided, for once, not to invent a word for this?

As we now know, they have called it Grand Feu enamel:

This is interesting because everything else was standard-issue Rolex - they named the metal, they named the ceramic, they named the lume, and then they got to the dial and they reached across the fence into general watchmaking vocabulary, and they stole “Grand Feu.”

This term has meant one specific thing in watchmaking (see update below) for hundreds of years1, and Rolex used it to name a process that does not meet the centuries-old definition. That’s not nothing, but before I can explain why it’s not nothing, I have to walk through what “enamel” and “Grand Feu” mean in the first place.

So let’s cover some definitions, then we can look at Rolex’s method, and finally we will get into the weeds with naming, which is where this gets good.

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Estimated reading time: ~13 minutes

What is “enamel” anyway?

At a chemistry-level, enamel is just glass, I guess.2 You take silica, aka sand, and you mix it with fluxing agents (like sodium carbonate and boron oxide, whose job is to lower the melting point of the sand so that you can work with it in a kiln instead of needing a blast furnace) and metal oxides (for colour), and you fuse the whole mixture into a lump.

That lump is called frit. You then grind the frit into a powder, apply the powder to a surface, and fire it in a kiln hot enough to melt the powder back into glass. When it cools, the glass bonds to whatever surface you put it on. That bonded layer is the coating we call enamel.

The catch here is that the name of the coating apparently depends on what you bonded it to; so this is where things get lawyerly.

ASM International is the professional society for materials scientists, and they maintain the reference handbooks which engineers use when they need to know what something is called - according to their definitions, this whole thing is unambiguous on this point:

”When the substrate is a ceramic, the coating is called a glaze. When the substrate is a metal, the coating is called a porcelain enamel. When the substrate is a glass, the coating is called a glass enamel.”3

If that weren’t enough, you will be pleased to hear that the same distinction is also codified by ASTM International in standard C286. Note how the title, “Standard Terminology Relating to Porcelain Enamel and Ceramic-Metal Systems”, already tells you everything you need to know about what “porcelain enamel” refers to. Let’s say you are a structural engineer specifying a coating for a storage tank, or a lawyer writing a product liability contract, and you write “porcelain enamel” - you have clearly specified glass on metal. If you write “glaze,” you have specified glass on ceramic.

Now, to be fair to Rolex and to ‘the other side of the argument’, outside of strict materials-science standards, “enamel” seems to be a rather forgiving word. Wikipedia’s definition of vitreous enamel allows any substrate (i.e. not only metal). Museum glossaries also seem to allow any substrate. If a ceramic expert says they are “enamelling” a piece of pottery, nobody calls the grammar police. So yes, there is a loose, colloquial, material-level sense of “enamel” that just means “fused-glass coating,” and Rolex has a fair claim in that sense.

The issue with Rolex is not what “enamel” means in a museum, though. For me, the problem is what Grand Feu means in the watch world.

Fine, so what is “Grand Feu”?

“Grand Feu” literally translates to “great fire,” and it refers, in the French-language watchmaking tradition from which it comes, to one specific process. That process is, specifically, fusing powdered glass to a metal base at a temperature high enough (800°C and up) to vitrify the glass.

The metal part is not optional - and I want to make sure this is clear, because this is the crux of the whole discussion. Some definitions from a few references I could find:

Monochrome Watches has one of the better glossaries on the watch internet, and it defines Grand Feu as powder “heated on a metal base at very high temperatures:”

anOrdain are primarily known for their enamel dials, and they concur:

Heritage Crafts is a UK body that maintains a register of traditional crafts, and they have watch dial enamelling on its “at risk” list - they also think a metal base is part of the definition:

All of this is to say, there is no real disagreement in the watch industry on the definition of “Grand Feu” - it means glass on metal. The reason it should mean glass on metal is that the entire mystique of the process is down to the fact that that metal is a really, really difficult thing to fuse glass onto.4 This is the reason collectors value it, why dials take so long to make, why the rejection rate is somewhere in the 40-50% range, and the reason the Heritage Crafts register classifies it as being “critically endangered.”

Glass and metal expand and contract at different rates when heated, and this is just a physics-based-fact. This means that every time you fire an enamel dial, the metal underneath wants to do one thing and the glass on top wants to do another, and if you don’t manage the fight between them, the dial explodes or warps or cracks.

You manage the fight by applying a second layer of enamel to the back of the metal blank - this is called the contre-émail, literally the “counter-enamel” - so that the front and back contract at the same rate and hold the metal flat between them. Every single one of the multiple firings has to be managed this way. And by the way, every single firing is a coin flip… if you get to firing number seven and blow it, you need to start over; hence the high rejection rate.

So hopefully it makes more sense now, and that’s basically what you are paying for when you pay for a Grand Feu dial. You are paying for the need to have way too many coin flips. Actually, to be more specific, you are paying for the ones that didn’t survive, because somebody had to grind the frit for those too.

So what did Rolex do?

Rolex, to their considerable credit I might add, have engineered the romance out of the problem. The 126502 dial is not made on a metal base. In their new process, you take a ceramic plate and you fire vitreous enamel onto it. Now, because ceramic is very hard and does not expand or contract much when heated, you do not need any counter-enamel.

Roughly speaking, the ceramic just sits there, doesn’t warp the way metal would, and the glass does whatever glass does. This solves the coin-flip problem I mentioned earlier. You can do this four times; once for the main dial and once for each of the three sub-dials, and Bob’s your uncle. Then, because the ceramic plates cannot be soldered the way enamelled metal sub-dials were in the past, you mount all four finished pieces onto a brass backing plate using modern adhesives or physical fasteners.

The result is rather beautiful as far as I can tell from photos. The surface is indeed vitreous enamel, fired at the right temperature, with the milky luminous quality that everyone loves to gush over.

The four-piece construction mimics the stepped, layered architecture of the great English pocket-watch dials of the late 19th century… like the Willis dial, shown on this J. Player & Son Supercomplication:

Andrew Cavanaugh (via SJX) writes about this J. Player & Son Supercomplication:

London dial manufacturer T.J. Willis made the enormous vitreous enamel dial for this and most other English complications of the day. Each of the five sunken sub-dials are separate parts, soldered into the main dial. While proportionally small, in absolute terms each sub-dial is quite large and easy to read.

So really, for Rolex to make this as tribute to Hans Wilsdorf’s London origins (they didn’t), it might even feel inspired. But let’s be serious… it is also, by the strictest technical definitions, not a Grand Feu dial.

It is actually just fused glass on a ceramic substrate - and this, per industry definitions, is a glaze.

Three ways to look at this

Purists may even agree that Rolex has done something innovative but they will also say Rolex should not be allowed to call it Grand Feu enamel. This is correct on the definition (glass-on-ceramic is not the canonical Grand Feu process), and it is also correct on the reduced difficulty (no counter-enamel, no thermal soldering, no Rose’s-metal-low-melting-alloy-drama5). Some, such as Brandon Thomas in this IG post, have suggested what Rolex has done is “pottery” - but this is false. Pottery is specifically clay-based (kaolinite, earthenware, porcelain) and Rolex’s zirconium oxide is an industrial ceramic, not pottery.

The correct materials-science-based word is perhaps glaze or more accurately, glazed ceramic. “Pottery” is of course a much funnier word, but it’s not technically the right one. If you wanted to get pedantic, a closer fit would be “glazed zirconia,” which perhaps sounds like a dessert.

Pragmatists will likely say it’s enamel because it’s made of enamel, and it’s Grand Feu because the firing process is the actual Grand Feu firing process (”Grand Feu” translates, remember, to “great fire” which actually refers to the kiln, not the substrate upon which the glass is melted). Plus, the construction style is plausibly Willis-esque anyway, right? I think pragmatists would be right to argue Rolex did not just slap lacquer on a ceramic disc, which is what they could have done and what nobody would have called enamel. They did bother to fire vitreous glass at ~800°C or whatever, and this is a legit process which requires some legit skill, I’d imagine. I guess these folks would conclude that Rolex just took a difficult process and industrialised it, and perhaps they are just being loose about what that thing is called, but it’s fine.

Material scientists do not care about feelings, so I suppose they will throw the book at this and declare that when you fuse glass to ceramic, the word is “glaze.” Not much more to say, is there?

Anyway, these positions are only in conflict if you insist on one answer. They are not in any sort of conflict if you admit that “enamel” here, is doing two jobs; one is about materials, and the other is about traditions. Rolex is using the material definition and any purist would be using the traditional definition.

This is actually a classic arbitrage if you think about it… the same word means two different things to two different audiences, and you can do quite well for yourself by using the word to the audience that hears the “flattering” definition while also relying, legally and technically, on the “unflattering” one.

Which brings us back to the naming issue we started with.

Why didn’t Rolex invent a new word this time?

Rolex, as we’ve already established, names everything. Rolex’s approach to language in general, seems to be “if you can trademark it, trademark it; if you can’t trademark it, invent a word you CAN trademark.”

So if you are Rolex, and you have, factually and objectively speaking, invented a new dial construction, one would think that the Rolex move practically writes itself here. You can call it Cerafeu, or Emaillium, or Grandoyster, or whatever the hell you want - people will roll their eyes and still lap it up. Rolex names are often slightly worse than the real thing, and that’s fine, because the point of the name is not that it’s good but that it’s yours. Rolex would own the word. The press would have to explain the word every time they wrote about it. The word would, over the next few decades, accrue the same kind of premium that “Cerachrom” and “Everose” have accrued, where eventually the word itself is some kind of luxury “signifier”, even if it sounds divorced from what it originally described.

I am sure you could imagine this happening, because at every other point in Rolex’s history, this is indeed what has happened. And yet, for the most consequential dial-material announcement of, I don’t know, their entire existence (?) … they chose a term that they do not own, which predates them by centuries, and whose accepted meaning their own process does not quite satisfy.

Why is that?

I think their made-up names work because the underlying things are in fact theirs. Oystersteel is just 904L, sure, but Rolex did pioneer using 904L in watchmaking at scale. Cerachrom is zirconium oxide ceramic, sure, but Rolex did develop the proprietary process that makes those bezels colourfast and (almost) uniform. Everose is a gold alloy with a platinum additive, and Rolex did formulate it. Rolex’s made-up names cover technologies where Rolex can credibly claim authorship. The name is a flag planted in territory they created, and subsequently owned.

“Grand Feu,” on the other hand, is territory they do not own. The term holds the prestige of hundreds of years of enamelling tradition - a tradition Rolex is not part of and has never tried to be part of. Many other brands are part of that tradition, and they all still use metal blanks, and apply counter-enamel, and accept the failure rate that comes with Grand Feu.

If Rolex had invented “Cerafeu,” they’d have a cool proprietary process with zero “inherited” prestige. Nobody would know what it was, and Ben Clymer would have to spend even more words explaining it. Collectors would have to decide from scratch whether this new-fangled Cerafeu thing was as good as actual Grand Feu, and some would say yes, and some would say no, and the discourse would play out the way discourse plays out, and eventually, in ten years, “Cerafeu” might stand on its own.

But calling it “Grand Feu enamel” skips all of that noise. It instantly imports the prestige of an old tradition without Rolex having to do the traditional process at all. It is, to be direct about it, a free ride on vocabulary and hard work, built by others.

And frankly, that’s the move they made here. They invented a new process, purposely did not invent a new word for it, and instead borrowed the oldest prestige-word in the dial-making business, knowing perfectly well that the word carries a set of expectations the process does not meet.

This is a genius bit of brand work, I have to say. It is also - and to be clear I have enormous respect for what Rolex accomplished here - not entirely fair to the independents who are still doing it the “hard way”, and who do not have a marketing and legal department the size of a small country to defend the nomenclature on their behalf.

The specific problem for me is that if Rolex calls glass-on-ceramic “Grand Feu,” and Rolex is the largest and most visible watch brand on earth, then within a generation “Grand Feu” will mean whatever Rolex’s version of it means. Which means the people who still do counter-enamel and soldering on copper will have to find a new word, or add an adjective (”traditional Grand Feu,” “old-school Grand Feu,” “metal-substrate Grand Feu” etc), which is exactly what “organic” food producers had to do when the regulators watered down what “organic” meant, and exactly the issue we have with the term “handmade” in watchmaking itself.

Linguistic drift is a real thing, and in this case it is a “cost” which will be borne by specialists because the largest player in their category has stretched the language to cover something new (and easier).

Again, this is not a Rolex-specific problem either; this is how words work, and especially how luxury words work - Swiss Made, Manufacture, In-House, Haute Horlogerie, Hand-Finished… all of these have been stretched to near-meaninglessness by one brand or another, and each time it happens, the brand that stretched the word pocketed some kind of “value” from the brands which followed the older definition more accurately. Rolex is just particularly good at it, and their whole naming strategy exists so they can control their own vocabulary and nobody can rip off their efforts.

The fact that they chose, this one time, to use somebody else’s vocabulary tells you exactly how much they wanted the prestige of Grand Feu, and exactly how aware they were that their process would not earn that prestige on its own, no matter what name they made up.

Final thoughts

Is the Daytona 126502 dial beautiful? Yes, and I suspect it’s even nicer in person.

Is it a new engineering achievement? Probably yes. As far as I can tell, firing vitreous enamel onto zirconium oxide at Rolex’s production quality is a new thing, and it is hard, and I’m sure that independent dial-makers would agree.

Is it enamel? In the loose material sense, yes. Vitreous enamel is the coating material, and Rolex is using real vitreous enamel. In the technical sense, the coating on the dial is a glaze, because the substrate is ceramic. But really, both things are true, and the word “enamel” will continue to do both jobs depending on who is talking.

Is it a Grand Feu dial? Nope - not by the watch industry’s own settled definition. “Grand Feu” has meant glass-on-metal with counter-enamel and multiple firings for the longest time; objectively speaking, Rolex has not done that. What Rolex has done is looks the same but is technically different, and those are two different things. As a pragmatist, if you make the argument that “great fire” just refers to the kiln temperature… this might be etymologically right, but historical precedent disagrees… it has never meant “just” that, in any context where the term is used seriously in watchmaking.

Is it a Willis dial? Of course not. The Willis lineage is about soldered, multi-piece, metal-based enamelling; the 126502 is effectively four glazed ceramic plates glued to brass.

Was Rolex entitled to call it Grand Feu anyway? Well, this is not a technical question at all. It’s more about whether you think a dominant brand should be allowed to “import” the prestige of a niche and specialised tradition without doing the special thing that said tradition requires.

Where I land is that if you name your own steel, and you name your own gold, and you name your own ceramic, and you name your own lume, and you name your own paid ambassadors… and you essentially make a new word for every single proprietary material your R&D department produces; and then on the one occasion where you invent something that truly breaks new ground, you choose not to name it and instead annex somebody else’s word, I don’t think that’s an accident. And I also think the decision tells you that Rolex believes the marginal dollar of prestige contributed by Grand Feu (versus a word of their own making) made it worthwhile to use. It is a disservice to watchmaking tradition, and they should never have used the term.

Either way, appreciate the watch, appreciate the dial… I know I do. You can also appreciate that Rolex has made something new, and something that, entirely on its own technical merits, is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to be doing - after all, industrialising slow and tedious processes is how humanity progresses.

But appreciate, also, that “Grand Feu” is doing far too much work in describing their new dial - work that Rolex did not pay for, and work which will inevitably devalue the (more difficult) work done by smaller artisans in the watch world.

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P.S. In other news… my friend Manuel pointed this out to me:

Now look at this:

I guess Rolex really has run out of fvcks to give… 😂

Footnotes