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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

Which makes this the perfect time to talk about how watch releases reach us, and specifically, why the current approach feels broken. I will use two independent brands as examples from the last month, because they make the point nicely. These two went in diametrically opposite directions and (to me) both got it slightly wrong. One over-did it, and the other under-did it; I think, somewhere between them, is probably how this should work in practice.

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Estimated reading time: ~15 minutes

Let’s start with Dominique Renaud (DR); the man (brand?) launched a new watch a couple of weeks ago, and for about 36 hours following the launch, every watch feed on the internet displayed the same images, and every WhatsApp group was talking about this piece. Most publications that cover watches published something about this watch but then, as these things do, it basically vanished. Granted, W&W has also just kicked off, so maybe DR’s disappearance isn’t a perfect data point - but the fact that a significant new independent launch was knocked out of the conversation by the next bigger noise is sort of the point I’m building towards. Stick with me.

This week we found out F.P. Journe is doing the exact opposite:

During Watches and Wonders this week, they are supposedly showing a handful of new pieces at their Manufacture in Geneva - they have a collectors’ set of bejewelled vertical tourbillons, a couple of LineSport limited editions, and some boutique editions. They’re showing them by private appointment only, with no photographs permitted and no press release of any kind. VIP clients who are in Geneva for W&W get to see them in person, and everyone else finds out through the grapevine and whatever ends up leaking (which will be everything, because it always is). I wasn’t even supposed to know what these watches are, and within 5 minutes of posting about it online, I was given the details I shared above.

So, quite conveniently, we have two independent brands with different approaches to launching products in recent weeks, and these examples give us a kind of ‘launch spectrum’ to think about.

Audience

Let’s start with DR, and just to reiterate, I’m not ‘picking on’ DR; this approach to a product launch is what happens with many launches, and DR just happens to be the most recent example I can think of, where the volume of coverage went overboard. Collective Horology, one US retailer for the piece, said on their podcast they’d been allocated five pieces and had already sold them; and that’s just one example. This raises an obvious question… who/what was all the marketing for1?

The watches are already sold, and while it may not be the case for DR, some are often sold months before anyone who is not already in the secret WhatsApp group has heard of them. This “saturation bombing” is not aimed at ‘converting’ buyers, because there are few buyers left to convert, if any. So the coverage must be doing something else - and I think it’s fair to say they are building brand equity, seeding future waitlists, and establishing that the brand is one you should know about so that in three years when they release their next piece, you feel clever for having known about the next one.

This feels like a legit goal to pursue, because brand equity compounds, and for a new or newly-independent brand it does matter. The alternative would be to release a watch in total silence and hope the right people find out via telepathy... which is dumb. DR benefits from people who will never buy a DR watch knowing the name, because those people might go on to read a Phillips catalogue five years from now and feel educated for recognising it.

But still, there is a difference between building brand equity and lighting yourself on fire in Times Square. The current approach to launches feels closer to the latter. Everyone gets the same images at the same moment, runs the same press release in slightly different words, and then everyone’s attention moves on together.

Now that I think about it, the same thing applies to Rexhep’s new chronograph. I mean, many might argue they will never tire of seeing this image, and that’s a fair quip; but when it launched on Sunday, I am pretty sure this was plastered across every corner of the digital world of watches, and yet, 99.9999% of people seeing it, will never be able to buy one - and that’s true even if they can afford one… ten times over 😂.

And really, if the whole watch-internet says the same thing at the same time it’s not really news, is it? To me, it’s more like announcing the weather. With low production indies, the people who the brands care about most (i.e. the ones who’d have bought the watch if they’d been offered it, and the ones who might buy the next one) mostly find out about it privately2, in the weeks/months before the embargo lifts. The public announcement is typically for everyone else, but for the most part, “everyone else”, is not buying.

Which, by the way, is why the deluge from Rolex and Patek doesn’t bother me as much. A brand that makes a million watches a year legitimately does need a broader announcement - some version of “everyone else” is in fact a potential buyer of at least some Rolex release, and so the press machine is doing real work there.

The argument I’m making here only really applies below a certain volume of production. If you’re making 30 pieces, or 100, or 300, and they’re already allocated or close to it, then the saturation approach is in fact, a category error3. It’s like using a Super Bowl ad to sell a watch that was already bought by 30 people you know by name.

Follow the incentives

I seem to quote Charlie Munger once a week now… but I don’t think I will never stop, because this quote is pure gold:

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In case you missed it, I joined over at Unpolished Watches for a fun conversation which he published over the weekend (free for all):

Unpolished Watches

The Psychology of Collecting (w/ King Flum)

One of the reasons I find watch collecting so fascinating is that it puts on full display the entire breadth of human psychology: Why we want the things we want, and how to be happy with what we already have…

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19 days ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Tony Traina and kingflum

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.

Estimated reading time: ~45 mins

🤓 Building a village around a genius

Chris Hall went to visit Dominique Renaud at his new atelier in Tolochenaz, and the resulting dispatch was an interesting read. I came away with a few things I hadn’t really clocked before, and since one of SDC’s ongoing fixations is how indie brands actually stay solvent once the initial hype fades, this post was of particular interest.

The headline news, if you missed it, is that there is now an HHDR Group (Haute Horlogerie Dominique Renaud) sitting above both Dominique Renaud the brand and Renaud Tixier, and this company also holds a minority stake in Niton, and owns DS Assemblage which is a supplier that fell into trouble and was eventually acquired. If that sounds suspiciously like the Kari Voutilainen playbook of buying up the struggling suppliers you depend on, that’s because it is. Hall brings this up explicitly, and CEO Michel Nieto more or less cops to the strategy. Hall writes:

“…the entire point of HHDR Group is to lean on the prodigious creative output of Dominique Renaud while putting in place structures to ensure that the master watchmaker or inspirational engineer isn’t also having to balance the P&L, sort out the social media strategy and juggle retail relationships on four continents. What looked and sounded like an overabundance of corporate structures is really a framework for getting the best out of the team’s star talent, while also attempting to protect the various brands against shocks.”

What I found most interesting was the framing of all this. Nieto’s pitch, roughly, is that Renaud is a brilliant chap who should be left alone in the attic to invent things out of Lego Technic (yes, really - Hall even shared photos), while the grown-ups downstairs deal with P&Ls, retail relationships, and social media. The goal is to build “a village around him”, and the implicit point here, is that most indies collapse because the founder-genius ends up having to be the numbers-and-admin person too.

I also didn’t know - or had forgotten - that some of the patents Renaud developed over his career are still held by previous employers, meaning he literally cannot use his own inventions in his own watches until those patents lapse. The torque indicator on the Pulse60 is one that recently came back to him - which is its own little parable about what it actually means to be an “independent” watchmaker in 2026.

The question he ends on is whether this corporate-scaffolding-around-a-creative model is the future of sustainable indie watchmaking… I thought this was an interesting question to ask in the segment right now. Good job, .

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🎤 Georges Kern on Universal Genève

Georges Kern recently appeared on Watch Advisor for an interview… Most of the Universal Genève segment will sound familiar by now, if you’ve followed all the press releases (here are a few: Fratello, Revolution, EuropaStar). The brand is positioned ‘in the middle’ of the traditional offerings and what you might call the bling merchants. Sizes are supposedly capped under 40mm (apart from the Dioramic I think) on the advice of an advisory board of vintage collectors whose brief from Kern was “tell me what not to do.” I thought it was impressive to see how multiple collections were launched at once (Polerouter, Compax, Cabriolet, Disco, Dioramic etc) and this helps ensure the brand doesn’t get labelled as a “Polerouter revival” effort. The whole UG operation is walled off in Geneva with its own team - distinctly separate from Breitling.

All of this is sensible, and most of it has already been dutifully written up by the watch press. The one bit nobody seems to have spoken about in much detail is where the movements come from. I mean, Revolution even went as far as calling it “in-house”:

LTM outsourcing

Well… Mr. Kern isn’t hiding anything… “LTM is producing our automatic … with the three former colleagues,” he says, almost in passing, “and we [Breitling] produce the chrono.”

LTM is Le Temps Manufactures, based in Fleurier. It’s a white-label specialist that serves roughly thirty brands from niche independents to major group-owned names and its speciality is small, high-end movements made in small batches for companies that want something better than Sellita without the capital expenditure of building a manufacture from scratch.

The UG-110 is, on all available evidence, a UG-designed calibre manufactured under exclusive contract at LTM. The integrated chronograph, Kern says, is produced by Breitling’s own manufacture. , who is typically critical of most new movements, actually likes the new UG Polerouter movement - you can read his take here. I asked him who had hacked his account when I saw his essay - he laughed, and assured me it was still him 😂.

Anyway, none of this is particularly scandalous at all. This is how most of the industry works below the top tiers, and Vaucher, Kenissi, La Joux-Perret, and many others all run similar models. Some of the watches we all admire most come out of these sorts of arrangements. That being said, the gap between “Geneva-based independent haute horlogerie house with its own manufacture movements” (which is what the UG marketing leans towards) and “designed in Geneva, manufactured on an exclusive contract at a shared specialist in Fleurier” - this feels awfully convenient to just gloss over, don’t you think? To me, this is the difference between owning the means of production and renting them on a long term lease. For years, this was frowned upon; and while I don’t think it ought to matter, simply NOT mentioning it feels a tad deceptive. Again, not a big deal, but it felt like something worth pointing out.

Reality

Stripping away all the marketing and romance of UG; Kern and Partners Group bought a dormant IP for ~ CHF 60m in December 2023 - basically a trademark and a few decades of accumulated collector reverence that other people’s enthusiasm paid for. They commissioned bespoke movements from a specialist who was already doing this kind of work for the rest of the industry. They then walled the operation off in Geneva to protect it from association with the Breitling ‘mass market’. Then they set entry price at CHF 14k-ish, which is high enough to avoid the bloodbath segment between CHF 5–10k and low enough to leave room for the complications to carry decent margin on top. Kern even assembled an advisory board to stop them embarrassing themselves on the initial execution. And now, they have launched several collections at once so the market couldn’t file the brand under any single heading before they’d finished showing their hand.

This is, by any reasonable measure, a good trade on the financial side. Partners Group took Breitling from a CHF 800m-ish valuation in 2017 to around $4.5bn by late 2022, and the UG acquisition is a natural extension of that strategy. That is, they acquire dormant equity cheap, inject competence in operations, and let the multiple expand over time. The watches don’t have to become the new Vacheron for this to work; they just have to become something that justifies a valuation materially above CHF 60m in the next private equity exit cycle, and that’s a much lower bar than the marketing implies. But then again, Breitling’s own valuation got slashed earlier this year… so it’s not all rosy.

Three scenarios for the next few years

Knowing they use LTM movements gives us another way to think about where this goes - as opposed to relying solely on their marketing.

The first scenario, however optimistic it may sound, is that UG executes on what Kern thinks it could become. Volumes may grow slowly into the low thousands, and the relationship with LTM blossoms because LTM has every reason to protect this rather prestigious contract. The complications may even ramp up, the brand’s average selling price may drift upward into the CHF 25–35k zone, the Couture tier does what the Couture tier is supposed to do, and in ten years UG is a credible mid-sized high-end house sitting somewhere in the Lange-to-JLC band. This is the version where Partners Group get a respectable multiple on their money, and everybody wins, more or less, even if the people who bought CHF 14k steel Polerouters in 2026 don’t necessarily feel rich in 2036.

The second scenario is that the market doesn’t reward the launch pricing. The entry point pricing turns out to be too high for what most people actually want from a Universal Genève, given the brand has been invisible for decades and the fanbase was built around cheaper vintage stuff on the secondary market. Sell-through will then soften at full retail, and prices on the secondary market will go the way of most revival launches - i.e. down! Kern will adjust, trim the range, lean harder on the complications and the Couture tier where the margins are more defensible, and Gallet might pick up more of the volume hole than he will ever admit. This is not a disaster scenario per se… it would be more of a normalisation scenario.

The third scenario is some sort of convergence. Over time, it might be that the operational difficulty of running two separate movement programmes (UG via LTM, Breitling via its own manufacture) starts to cause headaches. Maybe LTM gets acquired by someone, maybe it raises prices, or worse, they become capacity-constrained. Or, maybe Breitling’s manufacturing evolves enough to suit or accommodate UG - even with minor modifications. And who knows, perhaps Partners Group (or Kern himself) decide in a few years that the overhead of keeping UG separate, just isn’t worth the cost.

In any of these worlds, UG will start looking more like a sister brand to Breitling than a peer to Lange, and the brand will then settle into something closer to what IWC became under Richemont. Essentially, it’s a mostly-competent, somewhat successful brand (ish!), but it’s no longer competing for the affection of the collectors who revered the original UGs in the first place.

Wait and see

The open question at this point is which way things drift from here. If the entry-level Polerouter holds its price on the secondary market over the next year or two, Kern will have pulled off a difficult feat, and scenario one is firmly in play. If it softens, scenario two will unfold; and you won’t need a spreadsheet to work out which one it is.

After that, it’s largely a question of what happens with Gallet (launching at the end of August or beginning of September, per Kern). If it stays in the entry tier where it was announced to be aimed at (i.e. “accessible” Sellita-powered stuff integrated into Breitling’s distribution) then UG gets to keep the high-end lane all to itself. But if Gallet starts creeping upmarket, or if UG starts “integrating” more and uses Breitling’s movements for anything other than the chronograph, that’s the third scenario - the convergence. Worth watching, but nothing dramatic - these are somewhat slow movies which will play out over a couple of years.

The rest we can mostly ignore; a lot of the noise around revival launches is just that… noise! To be clear, none of this is a prediction that UG will fail. Kern has earned the benefit of the doubt roughly three times over. The products, at least as far as early signs go, seem to be good. The advisory board did its defensive job, the design discipline is clear to see, the movements (regardless of where they’re made) also seem to be a solid effort - including the absence of a microrotor, which per Velociphile, is an upgrade. The brand probably has a future, so the only outstanding question is how successfully it permeates the market.

To me, all three scenarios are fine for Partners Group, which is perhaps the whole point of this approach. Given the acquisition price of CHF 60m, there’s probably no “disaster” outcome on the cards; if anything it’s only a range of good-to-excellent outcomes. This means the interesting question has nothing to do with financials; it’s more about whether the collectors who spent all these decades keeping Universal Genève’s name alive are going to recognise the brand in a decade - otherwise, they’ll look at what Kern has placed in the display cases and decide to go back to hunting vintage instead.

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🥽 Nautilus - the 50-year-old porthole

Given we’re in 2026, many in the watch industry are eagerly awaiting Patek’s news regarding the Nautilus 50th anniversary this year; so far, I’ve seen no indication that anyone knows what our boy Thierry Stern is going to do to celebrate.

I suppose the last sentence contains a lie; everybody thinks they know what Stern will do. I’ve seen a bunch of opinions all over the internet... Some Chinese-language leak accounts have supposedly listed some new Nautilus reference numbers1. The speculation market aside, consensus view for now is that Patek will release something in precious metal, and there will be no steel successor to the 5711. I’d be inclined to agree, because “Cubitus”… duh!

Anyway, before we move on to what’s coming, I think it’s worth looking back on how we got here. The Nautilus story is in fact one of the wildest ones in all of watchmaking, and a surprising amount of it is not well-known. If you’ve been collecting for a while, you probably know the broad strokes, and if you’re newer to all this, you might only know the watch as “that steel Patek that costs more than a house” without really understanding the ‘why’.

So first, I will attempt a brief history, and I want to stress ‘brief’, because people far smarter and more dedicated than I am, have already produced some epic scholarship on the Nautilus (more on them later). What I’m trying to do here is give you the story arc, flag a few bits that are surprising or underappreciated, and point you toward the deep-dive resources if you care to dive deeper.

This reminds me of something… you can think of this as the map, not the territory.

Napkin drawing

The origin story of the Nautilus has been told so many times that it’s basically mythology at this point. It’s 1974 at the Basel Trade Fair, and Gérald Genta had already designed the AP Royal Oak two years earlier - plus the Universal Genève Polerouter and Omega Constellation “C” before that. He’s sitting alone in a hotel restaurant, and across the dining room, a table of Patek executives are having dinner. Genta, apparently seized by a burst of inspiration, grabs a napkin and asks the waiter for a pencil. J.C. Biver tells a fun story about Genta’s inspiration for the design of the Nautilus:

In roughly five minutes, while watching the Patek guys eat, he sketched the foundational lines of the Nautilus. Five minutes for a design that, fifty years later, would sell for $7.56 million at auction. Not too shabby eh.

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His name is Mathieu Cleguer, and his new watch is called the Inspiration One.

If you’ve been following SDC’s coverage of escapements over recent months, you will recall that we covered Breguet’s natural escapement and Daniels’ double-wheel concept in SDC Weekly 119, then Frodsham’s and Lederer’s wristwatch solutions in SDC Weekly 121.

In some ways, this is the next chapter in that accidental series and it’s a bit of a weird one, because this time we’re talking about a brand-new independent watchmaker who seems to have arrived at the exact same ‘mechanical theory’ as the world’s largest watch company.

The 12-piece titanium souscription series (CHF 56,000) is already sold out, and future production in precious metals will be around double the price of the titanium pieces. Also, total lifetime production of this watch will be capped at 80 pieces, so you could say his production output is comparable with someone like Rexhep, or close enough.

Anyway, today we will talk about what this watch is about, and why anyone should care.

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Estimated reading time: ~20 minutes

Quick refresher on escapements

If you’re new to all this, a mechanical watch basically stores energy in a spring that wants to release itself all at once. The mainspring, which is a coiled metal ribbon, stores all this energy when you wind it, and if nothing stopped it, the whole thing would unwind in a couple of seconds with the hands spinning out rapidly.

The escapement is the mechanism that prevents this from happening. It acts like a turnstile, which lets energy through, one tiny bit at a time, in a steady rhythm. Each ‘tick’ is the escapement releasing one tooth of the escape wheel, which nudges the balance wheel to keep it swinging, which keeps the watch running at a consistent rate.

For about 250 years, the Swiss lever escapement dominated the industry, and most agree that it works well, it’s reliable, and it can ’start’ itself. The problem is that the escape wheel’s teeth physically slide across the ruby pallets under pressure. This wastes energy as friction and, more importantly, requires oil for lubrication. This same oil eventually dries out, thickens, or migrates, and it causes a watch to lose accuracy and eventually stop.

The general dream among watchmakers has always been to build an escapement where the contact is tangential (a rolling push, like nudging a merry-go-round as it passes) instead of a sliding action. This idea of ‘tangential contact’ is of course much more efficient and barely needs oil, if any.

Breguet tried to solve this in the early 1800s with his natural escapement, and then Daniels tried to solve it in the 1970s with the co-axial and the independent double-wheel. Omega mass-produced Daniels’ co-axial from 1999, and Frodsham and Lederer proved the double-wheel could work in a wristwatch. Rolex then launched the Dynapulse in 2025, and now Cleguer has added his own design to the mix.

All of these ideas are simply a different approach to the same underlying issue.

Who is Mathieu Cleguer?

Cleguer is 35, from Brittany in France, and studied micromechanics at HE-ARC in Neuchâtel between 2011 and 2014. After graduating, he spent the next decade as a movement construction guy, which I guess means he would usually design calibres from scratch for other brands. His CV includes Akrivia, Breva, and Emile Chouriet, which I suppose gives you some idea of the level he was operating at. According to Revolution Watch, Cleguer has the ability to design movements that balance both aesthetics and technically clever bits - which I would imagine is much harder than it sounds, because most movements you see tend to lean heavily one way or the other (and the few exceptions we know of, come from truly exceptional people!).

The Inspiration One is his first watch under his own name, and it’s the first of a planned ‘Inspiration’ series which he will dedicate entirely to alternative escapement systems. The Inspiration Two is currently scheduled for 2030 and Matheiu tells me “it will be nice.” 🤣

I don’t know about you, but I like this guy already! As an aside - his next watch will not be part of the Inspiration collection - we know it will a complication, but he was tight-lipped about any further details.

Problem solving

SDC readers may recall the two big historical flaws we discussed back in SDC Weekly 119.

First was in Breguet’s natural escapement, which used two escape wheels spinning in opposite directions, with each one delivering a direct push to the balance. It was an elegant concept, but had two problems. The first was that the wheels were geared together, so they moved simultaneously (creating excessive inertia - like trying to push two heavy doors at once instead of one at a time), and the tiny gaps between meshed gear teeth caused ‘backlash’ that made the impulse uneven. The second problem was that the whole thing was unreliable at self-starting. Breguet built about 20 of these, got frustrated, and then gave up.

Then there was Charles Fasoldt, a German-American watchmaker working in Albany, New York in the 1860s. Fasoldt came up with another clever idea, where, instead of having the escape wheels push the balance directly (Breguet’s approach), he used a lever as an intermediary step. The escape wheel would push the lever tangentially (so rolling contact with barely any friction) and the lever would then transfer that energy to the balance - also called an ‘indirect tangential impulse’. The problem was that Fasoldt’s system only delivered impulse in one direction, so during the return swing of the balance, it got nothing. Watchmakers call this a ‘lost beat’, and it made the whole mechanism too weak for a wristwatch1.

So you had two escapements from the past, each one was innovative in one respect and but badly flawed in another; Breguet’s gave impulse in both directions (good) but used direct contact and couldn’t self-start (bad). Fasoldt’s used tangential contact through a lever (good) but only pushed one way (bad).

And this brings us to Cleguer… who spent many years trying to combine the best bits from both.

Innate Escapement

The Innate Escapement is Cleguer’s name for the proprietary system he created; technically we could classify it as a “double-wheel, indirect-tangential impulse escapement” - and I know that sounds like a word salad, but each part of that description has a purpose which we can deconstruct quite easily.

Double-wheel means it uses two escape wheels, arranged in a mirrored layout and turning in opposite directions, with each one taking turns to deliver energy. This is the part he took from Breguet.

Indirect means the escape wheels don’t touch the balance wheel directly. Instead, they push a lever, and the lever transfers the impulse to the balance through a conventional fork-and-roller connection. This is the part he took from Fasoldt.

Tangential impulse means the contact between the escape wheel teeth and the lever’s ruby pallets is a rolling push and not a sliding drag. This means it has minimal friction, and therefore, barely any oil is needed on the impulse surfaces2.

What took Cleguer five years and more than twenty failed prototypes to figure out was that he needed to abandon Breguet’s defining feature (direct impulse from wheel to balance) and route everything through Fasoldt’s lever instead. He told Revolution:

“The problem is that a traditional natural escapement is not self-starting. Most modern solutions rely on silicon, but I wanted a mechanical solution.”

He first tried to make Breguet’s direct-impulse system work with traditional materials, but that failed - just as it had for everyone else who tried without silicon. “It wasn’t the right solution. I had to rethink everything,” he said.

His breakthrough came when he moved the impulse mechanism to the lever; instead of the balance wheel having impulse pallets on its roller (as in Breguet’s design), Cleguer put dedicated impulse and locking pallets on the central lever itself - one pair for each escape wheel. The lever then handles all the complex, high-speed work of locking the wheels and receiving tangential impulse, and then simply passes a clean push to the balance through the fork.

This solves both of the original problems; you get impulse in both directions (because the two wheels alternate, like Breguet intended), the contact is tangential not sliding (because the wheel teeth roll against the convex face of the lever’s ruby pallets, like Fasoldt intended), and the geometry is arranged so that a tooth always comes to rest in front of a pallet when the movement stops - this means it self-starts the moment you wind the crown.

The whole thing is built from hardened steel escape wheels with traditional chronometer-style tooth profiles and synthetic ruby impulse and locking stones. If you showed the components to a 19th-century watchmaker, they’d recognise every single material - only the geometry is new.

Dynapulse comparison

When Rolex unveiled the Dynapulse escapement in the Land-Dweller’s Calibre 7135, it was rightly hailed as one of the most significant technical developments in Swiss watchmaking in decades.

The more interesting thing for us nerds is to recognise the Dynapulse is also a double-wheel, indirect-tangential impulse escapement. It seems to be the same underlying mechanical design, and it hails from the same family tree - Breguet and Fasoldt, through Daniels, with everyone arriving at this indirect tangential system with twin wheels taking turns.

The difference is how they get there.

Rolex builds the Dynapulse from silicon using Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE), which is basically the same photolithographic process used to make semiconductor chips. The silicon components are impossibly light, inherently non-magnetic, self-lubricating, and can be shaped into complex organic geometries that would be physically impossible to machine from metal, at least for now. Rolex’s escape wheels have just six teeth each (compared to dozens in a Swiss lever), the whole thing runs at 5 Hz (36,000 vibrations per hour), and it delivers roughly 30% more energy to the balance than the standard Chronergy escapement. It is, without a doubt, an industrial marvel, and it’s backed by 7 patents on the escapement alone and 16 total for the calibre.

Cleguer’s Innate still arrives at the same result (tangential impulse, twin wheels, self-starting, dual impulse) but instead uses hardened steel and ruby on a watchmaker’s bench. It beats at half the rate (2.5 Hz, 18,000 vph), uses a massive 12.9 mm free-sprung balance, and has traditional chronometer-style teeth on the escape wheels. Where Rolex uses lightness and speed to overcome inertia, Cleguer uses careful geometric balancing of heavier components at slower speeds.

It’s a bit like two architects solving the same design problem; one uses carbon fibre and computer-modelled stress analysis, and the other might use stone and centuries-old masonry principles. Both may have used different tools, but physics doesn’t change, and so both buildings stand up just fine.

I think the philosophical tension here is pretty fascinating, and this is something we’ve been writing about here for a while. Silicon offers lighter weight, complex profiles, and is suitable for mass production - but it’s brittle, can’t be repaired with traditional tools, and its long-term durability measured in centuries remains unproven (because it hasn’t existed for centuries). Steel and ruby are heavier, require some lubrication, and demand precision from the watchmaker - but at least they’ve been proven serviceable across centuries by anyone with a decent set of tools.

Why only 36 hours of power reserve?

The Inspiration One’s mainspring actually stores enough total energy for about 55 hours, but Cleguer discards roughly a third of it on purpose. He does this using a Maltese cross stop-work (also known as a Geneva stop-work) which is integrated onto the barrel ratchet.

Historically speaking, this is a significant mechanism and it physically prevents the mainspring from being wound to its absolute maximum tension or running down to its weakest. The pin on the driving wheel rotates into a series of slots on a cross-shaped wheel; when it hits a closed slot, the winding stops. Going the other direction, when the watch unwinds to a certain point, the pin hits the closed slot from the other side and the movement is force-stopped with some tension still remaining in the spring.

I spoke with Mathieu via email about this, and he said:

“I chose 36 hours in a provocative way; I’m annoyed by the idea that “we are selling mechanical watches like electric cars.” We only talk about power reserve without talking about the drawbacks of increasing the power reserve. That behavior of the industry is only possible due to the absence of chronometer concourse nowadays
And by purposefully having a small power reserve, it guides people to ask me why. And in a time only watch, a daily wind is not a supplice3, and I developed the all winding system to be pleasing with a loud click, 90° gear for smoothness...”

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Quick warning before you start: this is what I would call a ‘low-substance’ SDC post. I had some time to kill and I decided to delve into this silly annual ritual of predictions. I already have a ‘redemption’ post in the works which I’ll share later this week - so if you’re short on time, skip this!

We’re in peak prediction season again, which means the …

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

Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

🕰️ Beyer Chronometrie, 1760–2026

Beyer Chronometrie is closing… after 266 years. The world’s oldest watch retailer, founded in 1760 (around the time when George III was on the British throne), will shut its doors at the end of this year. Patek is buying the business and will convert the entire 600-square-metre, three-storey space on Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse into another Salon, joining Geneva, Paris, and London.

The multi-brand section (Rolex, Tudor, IWC, Chanel, etc) will be removed but ~25 employees who currently staff the existing Patek boutique (which has been operating inside the Beyer space since 2011) will keep their jobs. Sadly, the remaining 35 or so staff are on their way out.

Regarding the family’s watch museum, one of the most important private horological collections in the world, SJX writes:

According to Tages-Anzeiger, the impressive watch museum now located in the basement of the Beyer store – which has been in its current spot for almost a century – is not part of the sale, and will most likely be relocated to another venue in Zurich.

I think this is one of those stories that seems to be about a shop in Zürich, but the gravity around it feels more intense… I remember seeing industry veterans react with shock when they first saw the news dropped into various chat groups. After looking into it a bit more, I think I have a better understanding of their initial reaction.

Succession problem

René Beyer, who ran the business as the eighth generation of the founding family, died unexpectedly in April 2025 at the age of 61. He had no children, and his sister Muriel Zahn-Beyer, who took over, has no children either. So that’s basically it… end of the line.

What’s crazy is how we’ve seen this movie before, quite recently in fact. Jörg Bucherer died in 2023 without heirs, and his retail empire (which is the largest watch retail group in the world) was sold to Rolex. Isn’t it curious how both family businesses had no succession plan, and then both got acquired by the dominant brand partner?

René Beyer apparently saw this coming, though. According to his sister, he’d been thinking about the future of the business for some time, and Patek had in fact acquired a minority stake in Beyer back in 2024. The full sale was, in her words, “the logical consequence of a partnership that had grown over decades.”

Beyer was one of the few retailers on earth that carried both Rolex and Patek, and these sorts of relationships exist almost entirely because of personal trust between families built over generations. If you sold Beyer to a third party (like a private equity firm, another retail group, or anyone outside the circle of trust) there would be a very real chance that Rolex or Patek (or both) would have pulled their allocation from the stores eventually. And I guess without those two brands, there is no Beyer. The business would essentially fail to continue commercially, regardless of what name sits above the door.

So the ‘choice’ faced by Muriel Zahn-Beyer was not much of a choice, all things considered. She could either sell to Patek (who already had a stake and a long-term relationship), keep a third of the employees, and preserve something... Or try to sell externally and the brands would walk away - which would effectively destroy the value of the thing she is trying to sell. I thought about whether she could have approached Rolex, but given the Bucherer deal is still fresh in everyone’s mind, I suspect the deal would not have passed due to competition laws… Rolex owning both Bucherer and Beyer might be a step too far, even for them.

Patek’s revolution

I wrote about gatekeepers and retail carriage a few months ago, and one of the things I mentioned was that Rolex and Patek were, until the Bucherer deal, the only two major Swiss watch brands that had essentially zero direct retail presence. AP had already gone almost entirely mono-brand. Cartier, Omega, everybody else in the top tier are all heavily invested in directly operated stores.

Rolex and Patek were like the anomalies in the matrix; the ones who still believed in the multi-brand retail model, or at least in letting someone else deal with leases and shop assistants while they concentrated on making watches. Then Rolex bought Bucherer, and one of those two anomalies disappeared.

Now Patek is opening yet another directly-owned Salon, and while the Stern family will probably tell you that this is a sentimental decision driven by a longstanding friendship (and it partly is - Thierry Stern did an internship at Beyer, Adelrich Beyer did an apprenticeship at Patek in 1880 and met his wife there, so the families seem close), let’s think about the real-world dynamics for a second.

Patek has been steadily reducing its retail footprint for a decade. Morgan Stanley estimates they’ve gone from over 400 points of sale to under 300 globally. The forecast is that they’ll eventually get down to under 150 doors, with a gradual expansion of directly owned Salons including maybe 10-12 additional brand-owned locations over time.

The Bond Street Salon in London generated £89 million in revenue in its 2024-25 financial year from a single shop. When you’re doing those kinds of numbers, the economic argument for owning your own retail is fairly compelling, even if you’ve spent the last century insisting that the third-party retailer model is sacred.

So I think this isn’t some sort of grand pivot for Patek at all, and more like a gradual, considered, very Patek-like slide from wholesale toward DTC. They’re just doing it politely, one dead retailer at a time, instead of making some grand strategic announcement. Besides, according to Miss Tweed, Thierry reckons it will take 10 years to pass the baton to his two sons.

Domino effect

If we zoom out a little, it might help paint a clearer picture.

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Now… let’s rewind.

If every one of those people who piped up about the watch in the first scenario had found the watch on their own, and then thought about it in isolation without any subsequent group discussion, what would they have thought? It might have been something more moderate like “it’s alright” or “not for me, but I can see the appeal.”

In the first scenario, the group looked like a place for sharing opinions, but in reality, it ended up manufacturing enthusiasm. This phenomenon is called group polarisation, and you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s quite well-documented in social psychology.

Today we will be discussing an old paper by Cass Sunstein which sets out a lot of the core research in detail, and the key issue we’re addressing is this: when a group of people who already lean in a certain direction discuss something together, they almost always end up leaning further in that direction than any individual would have managed on their own. So what can we do to stop this? Should we try to? Why?

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Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

How it works

It would be too easy to chalk this up to basic peer pressure or social conformity and leave it at that. Sunstein reckons it’s more interesting than that, and identifies two specific mechanisms which will sound familiar if you’ve spent any time in collecting circles (or reading SDC).

The first is social comparison, and if you really feel like doing a deep-dive into this topic, you’re in luck, because I have a 3-part series on this exact topic. Basically, people want to be perceived favourably by others in their peer group, and they also want to perceive themselves favourably. So when you hear everyone else’s opinion, you adjust your position to maintain the relative standing you thought you already had in that group.

If you considered yourself a ‘knowledgeable and discerning collector’ before the discussion started, and the group consensus seems to be trending toward excitement about some new release, you are more likely to shift your own position to stay ahead of (or at least be consistent with) the others1.

Don’t brush this off as someone ‘weakly’ going along with the crowd; what we’re talking about here is more subtle than that. You’re trying to stay in the same relative position to the group, so as others shift, you will shift too. Generally, you end up somewhere more extreme than where you started.

The second mechanism Sunstein covers is a limited argument pool. When a group is already leaning in a particular direction, the arguments that surface during a discussion will naturally be skewed in that direction. If a large proportion of your group are mildly enthusiastic about a watch, the discussion will produce far more reasons to like it than reasons to be sceptical. The few sceptical thoughts someone might have had get drowned out, or simply never get voiced at all. So in total, maybe you hear 10-20 arguments in favour, 1-5 lukewarm caveats, and 1-5 ‘serious’ objections... odds are, you will end up more enthusiastic than you were before starting.

This is basically a supercharged version of concepts we explored in this old post about probabilistic collecting, where I talked about how we process information and evaluate evidence with inherent biases. Group polarisation takes the standard confirmation bias - which is an individual tendency - and puts it on steroids, because now it’s happening across a whole group at the same time.

WhatsApp problems

Last year I wrote this joke-essay about a collector’s wife, where she mentioned her husband being in at WhatsApp groups, ‘…constantly buzzing with photos, questions, memes, and what appears to be endless debates...’ She described the phenomenon of her husband disappearing into the toilet to entertain a long discussion about whether someone should ‘pull the trigger’ on a purchase.

Based on my own participation in many such groups, I’d wager that in the vast majority of those ‘should I pull the trigger?’ discussions, the answer from the group is yes. Always yes... pull the trigger, life is short, you deserve it, suits you… worst case, you can sell it, but at least you tried it.

Why is that? Well, because the people in that group are all insane watch collectors. They’re already predisposed to think that buying watches, in general, is a good idea. This means the argument pool is inherently skewed toward acquisition. Nobody in a watch collecting WhatsApp group is going to say “honestly bro, you probably have enough watches and should put the money into your pension or something more sensible” because that’s not why they’re in that group. I mean, that’s exactly why people don’t ask their financial advisors whether they should buy a watch.

Even if people in the WhatsApp group think you shouldn’t buy the watch, they’d rarely ever say so, because it would mark them as someone who is negative, or maybe just doesn’t really ‘get the watch.’ And if the person ends up buying the watch, then this person will be remembered as the naysayer. It’s like if your friend is in a serious relationship and then asks you whether he should marry the girl… this actually happened to me, and I was honest with the guy about why she might not be good for him, and he ended up marrying her anyway - this affected our friendship forever. I can’t change who I am, but you get the idea… the WhatsApp group, generally speaking, will produce exactly the kind of one-directional argument pool that Sunstein describes in his paper, and the guy in the toilet finishes his dump having been nudged closer to a purchase he was already considering.

Sunstein also brings up these ‘iterated polarisation games’ which is what happens when the same group keeps meeting and having discussions over time. His prediction is that the groups’ overall views should get progressively more extreme with each round of discussion. Now, in this paper, Sunstein says there aren’t formal studies of this, but argues it’s a plausible real-world phenomenon - he apparently didn’t look hard enough because there is this study published a few years before Sunstein’s paper, which tested the iterated discussion idea. They manipulated how many times group members expressed their views and how many times they heard others express theirs. They found that repetition increased extremity, and that the effect was strongest in groups where members repeated each other’s arguments and incorporated them into their own reasoning.2

I am sure you’ll agree, this is basically a perfect description of what happens in any active WhatsApp group. Someone says “the finishing is incredible,” then someone else repeats it in their own words, then a third person brings up a comparison to back up this line of reasoning, and the uses that reinforcement when making the case to a fourth person... every repetition, according to the research, will compound the reinforcing effects.

What about the “real” critics?

You may be wondering who these real critics are? Well, I have a collector friend who goes by the nickname - this guy loves arguing, and he’s constantly on a pursuit of truth and objectivity. To demonstrate this, he identifies flaws and shortcomings on watches he owns and enjoys wearing, and maintains that no watch can be ‘perfect’. I brought him up as example because he’s the one guy who, in our circles, doesn’t seem to ‘conform’ to the theory I described at the start.

To address this apparent outlier, I want to point out the distinction in the literature between authentic minority dissent and role-based dissent - the second one is basically people playing “devil’s advocate”. Research has found that people who hold a different view and express it because they truly believe it are very effective at improving group decision-making. Such people force the group to consider alternatives, widen the argument pool, and reduce polarisation.

But but but… and this is the key part, devil’s advocates and known contrarians are significantly less effective, even when they raise the exact same points (as the authentic minority). The reason for this is that the whole group tends to discount the argument (from the devil’s advocate) because they’ve already ‘categorised’ the source in their mind… “That’s just Kevin being Kevin” they might say to themselves. So apparently, the arguments from these known contrarians are processed differently by the group when they know (or believe) that person is ‘performing their usual role’ instead of expressing any serious conviction regarding the issues they raise.

Back to my friend - he’s actually in a more interesting category because he isn’t even playing devil’s advocate… he usually does believe in being rigorous and critical. But the issue he faces, is that his contrarianism has become so predictable that the group has essentially absorbed it into the social structure or the group dynamic.

What follows is not specifically about my friend, it’s a more general breakdown of the archetype; and it turns out, being a known ‘critic’ seems to create a couple of problems…

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Estimated reading time:…

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Btw… If you watch only one video this week, watch this one. I had no idea Tudor still uses so much manual labour in their manufacturing process. Many perhaps think of these watches as ‘mass produced’ or fully ‘machine made’ - this video provides a look behind the curtain and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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

Estimated reading time: ~45 mins

🗽 HSNY at 160 - A Dispatch from The Plaza

On March 26, 1866 - just last week 160 years ago, as it happens - a group of German immigrant watchmakers sat in a tavern in downtown Manhattan and decided to start something new. They called it the Deutscher Uhrmacher Verein, which translates to the German Watchmakers Society… and this thing they started, is what later became the Horological Society of New York (HSNY). It is the oldest continuously operating watchmaking guild in America, and one of the oldest in the world.

I mention the tavern to highlight how the origin story of America’s watchmaking guild really is just a group of craftsmen having a drink together and realising they should probably band together and help each other out. That’s kinda how every good thing in this hobby starts, too - someone says something interesting at a table, and the rest follows. Even Redbar started with some lads chatting in, well, a bar called Redbar.

Anyway, here we are, 160 years later… and the HSNY’s annual gala took place on Saturday, March 21st, at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. François-Paul Journe received (in absentia) the Howard Fass Award for Lifetime Achievement. London Jewelers were honoured on the occasion of their 100th anniversary. The gala co-chairs were Romain Gauthier, Kevin O’Leary, and Roger W. Smith OBE. The Society also announced $450,000 in scholarships to 55 watchmaking students, five watchmaking schools, and three independent watchmakers - up from $160,000 the year before.

I wasn’t there - but lucky for us, my friend Ron, was.

Quick word on Ron

is a surgeon. He will also tell you he is a surgeon, at every available opportunity, because that’s apparently what surgeons do. He is a guy who enjoys thinking for the sake of thinking, almost as much as I do, and he has become somewhat infamous in the comments section of SDC posts - the kind of reader who dissects every word, nudges you toward an adjacent thread you hadn’t considered, and leaves you chewing on something for days after.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Ron twice in person. First, briefly at Dubai Watch Week. Then again a couple of weeks ago when he was in London with his family. There would have been a third time, but that didn’t work out for reasons we need not get into, right Ron?

Ron also writes his own Substack - Think Like a Surgeon - and is a published author. His most recent book, Triage For Watch Collecting, co-authored with his wife Rachael (also a surgeon, obvs), lays out a six-step system for collecting without regret. He is about 30 years my senior (lol!), a parent, and someone whose life advice I value pretty much because he’s been through most of the things I have yet to figure out.

When we met up in London a few days before the HSNY gala, the event came up in conversation, so I suggested he write about it. What follows is his account of the evening - his words, unedited. I sent him a handful of questions, but Ron being Ron, treated them more as starting positions than constraints. So think of this as part interview, part essay, part dispatch from inside ballroom at The Plaza.

One last thing before I hand the mic over... Ron wanted me to include a financial disclosure, so here it is: Ron and his wife paid for their own tickets and have no sponsors or financial ties which would bias his commentary. They paid for their own table, which they filled with friends who paid for their seats.

Now, over to Ron.

Before the Gala

The first question I asked Ron was for him to set the scene; walk into The Plaza and tell me what hits you first. But Ron, characteristically, went off-script because the story of the gala, he argues, doesn’t start at The Plaza, but the day before.

Ron writes:

For the first and probably not last time I’m going to go off-script here. You ask me to set the scene. Rather than beginning with the HSNY Gala on Saturday evening, I’d like to begin with the informal events preceding it. Many people come into New York City on Friday to begin their watch-based activities.

I know of many people who coordinated group visits to specific boutiques or dealers for Friday and Saturday before the Gala on Saturday night. My wife and I spent Friday night at Bucherer Time Machine for a private event to commemorate the birthday of Erika “Watch Miss GMT.” It was great fun to meet people whom I had previously known only from the online world and I also got to spend time with good friends.

At that Bucherer event and other boutiques, several people picked up special timepieces they had previously ordered or had been “on the list” and had hoped to acquire. (I saw two titanium Yacht Masters picked up within 30 minutes of each other.)

Providing a notable watch to a client just prior to the HSNY gala is good marketing as that client is likely to wear the new acquisition at the Gala and share their delight with others.

Saturday was much the same as Friday night, with more people arriving from out of town. There was increasing chatter in the various groups about meetups at various boutiques and ADs, and my wife and I, together with a number of friends went off to Jean Rousseau.

Yes, straps are important to us all! See: “Billion-Dollar Strap Gap” in your SDC 139 newsletter and discussion in the comments.

So now we get to Saturday evening. The festivities began at 6 p.m. but it’s always been my contention that it is better to arrive late than to arrive ugly. It always takes me some time to reach that state, but once it was achieved, my wife and I stopped off at the Moser Boutique in Midtown, where we met up with a small group before all heading to the gala.

One of the attendees shared with us special watches he was bringing to the gala, a pair of pièce unique watches by Biver. They had elaborate engraving on the case, lugs, and bezel and enamel dials made by the atelier of Rexhep Rexhepi. Very cool to see and it was a taste of things to come as there were many spectacular watches at the gala.

Now I can answer your question and set the scene for you as we arrive at The Plaza. Preferring to get on with the festivities, our group walked through the lobby without delay to get straight to the cocktail hour at the Terrace Room.

On the second floor in the Terrace Foyer, there was a red carpet and a sponsor backdrop against which people took photos all night.

From there we proceeded to the Terrace Room which is separate from the Grand Ballroom in which the gala itself would take place.

It’s a fantastically decorated and opulent room. The architecture certainly grabbed my eye, but what hit me first was the energy of the room. Unlike the stock photo of an empty room which I shared above, the room was packed with people wall to wall.

There was a positive energy and immediately I sensed friendliness and collegiality among the attendees. Everyone seemed happy to see everyone, as if we were one big family.

With the muted lighting and the cacophony of the assembled crowd, the room itself was merely a backdrop. My lasting impression is of the energy of the crowd.

Watches He Wore (and Why)

I also asked Ron what he wore on his wrist, because what you choose to wear to an event like this is its own kind of storytelling. He didn’t disappoint.

Ron writes:

I was drawn to the SDC newsletter years ago because you look at watch collecting through the lens of the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of our choices. Along those lines, I always double-wrist at watch events because I hope to share the narratives behind my watches, and sharing two stories will be better than sharing one. I wasn’t the only double-wrister in attendance and I also knew of a few people who brought watch rolls to share their watches with fellow watch enthusiasts.

My initial plan was to double-wrist two different gold watches to this elegant event. The first one is a c. 1913 Longines chronograph, said to be the first chronograph ever in a wristwatch.

I suppose that distinction is notable enough but here’s my personal narrative: When my wife and I finished our surgical training and began our career as full-fledged surgeons, her father got for us a pair of matching Longings pocket watch chronographs graduated to pulsations (i.e. pulsometers), c. 1907.

So I have a soft spot in my heart for early Longines chronographs. The Longines wristwatch I wore comes in a 35 mm case so I thought for the second wrist I’d wear something with a bit more heft.

My original choice for the second wrist was my wife’s gold-cased Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance. It is a perfect match for the HSNY gala: mechanical elegance, engineering excellence and definitely a conversation piece.

But my wife surprised me with a new watch just prior to our trip. For our upcoming wedding anniversary she found on the secondary market a watch I’ve coveted for some time, the off-catalog H. Moser & Cie x Undefeated Streamliner Chronograph Friends and Family Edition.

I had to wear that watch to the event, obviously, so now among my two prior choices I had to leave one back at the bank vault. I left the Armin Strom, and wore the Longines chronograph to pair with the Moser chronograph.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share the watches my wife wore. Her two wrists were adorned with the Moser Streamliner Tourbillon Bucherer Blue and the MB&F SP One.

While I am at it, I think this is a good moment to also give credit to my wife, Rachael Keilin, for getting us to this point in “the journey.” Years ago, I was satisfied with having a Rolex or two, and didn’t follow the watch world that closely. My wife was interested in high horology and I lagged far behind her. During the depths of COVID and the virtual edition of Watches & Wonders in 2021, she learned of the Lange & Sohne Little Lange 1 Moonphase with Aventurine Dial and decided she had to have it. She dragged me to join her to visit the nearest Lange boutique, at Zadok in Houston, four hours away from our home. There I learned about Lange, VC, Breguet, FPJ, and other brands.

And now, here we are, on this great journey together.

160 Years - Did it Feel Historic?

I asked Ron whether the 160th anniversary actually felt historic, or whether it was more of a regular party that happened to have a birthday. His answer surprised me a little.

Ron writes:

Recall that this was my first time attending the HSNY annual gala and I have never attended an HSNY event prior to this gala.

I would say that the evening felt like a visionary event as much as a historic one.

It was shown to us several times that $450,000 in scholarships were awarded this year by the HSNY. I came across a short video from last year’s HSNY gala and saw that in 2025 they announced $160,000 in scholarships. That’s a tremendous increase in just one year!

The legacy of the HSNY is a precondition for its ability to bring together so many individual collectors and industry members to the gala and to contribute financially and spiritually to the future of American watchmaking.

François-Paul Journe

For a lot of collectors, Journe now enjoys an almost mythical status. I wanted to know what the mood in the room was when his name came up, and whether Ron got any sense of the man himself. Turns out, he didn’t even show up to receive his award.

Ron writes:

The FPJ speech via video brought to mind a recent conversation you and I had in which we spoke in passing about the “Uncanny Valley.”

At some of the larger surgical conferences which I attend the meetings are held in conference rooms larger than the ballroom for the HSNY gala, and like the gala, have several large projector screens onto which are projected live video of the person speaking. On some occasions a scheduled speaker is not providing their presentation live in person but rather it is presented via a pre-recorded video.

I’ve noticed that it takes more concentration for me to focus on those presentations. Cognitively I note a difference between a speaker presented via a pre-recorded video on a large projector screen and a live speaker on that same large projection screen. My subconscious registers the pre-recorded speakers as not being part of the event unfolding in front of me.

FPJ did not attend the event in person and delivered a pre-recorded speech in French subtitled in English. From what I recall he gave his reason for not attending that it was his birthday and he was spending it at home with his elderly mother. On the video he spoke of his personal and professional history in the city of New York. Accepting the award in person on his behalf were his brother Laurent and General Manager Pierre.

To me and others at my table the award and his speech seemed perfunctory.

Honouring London Jewelers

London Jewelers were also honoured at the gala, which I found interesting because it represents the retail side of the equation, not just the maker. I asked Ron what he thought that choice says about the broader ecosystem.

Ron writes:

Through my professional affiliation with a hospital in a Catholic health system, I learned of a phrase coined by a Catholic nun who was president of a network of non-profit hospitals: “No margin, no mission.”

If we allow that it is proper for a Catholic nun to both recognize and proclaim the primacy of profit in the delivery of health care, then we have to give a nod to the retail side of the horological ecosystem.

On the retail side of the watch world, some are just here for the ride and they would just as soon be selling cars, purses, or Labubus. They are here because their forte is selling and watches happen to be the pond into which they have jumped. Even worse, there are some watch sellers with impure motives. Those we can ignore.

There are retailers who don’t know the difference between an onyx dial and one made of VANTA Black or how to swap out a strap. Those we can ignore.

The retailers we should recognize and celebrate are those who are as much watch enthusiasts as their clients. We all know those in the retail side who are eager to educate, and who get as excited as we clients and collectors are when they come across a notable watch.

I recall that when we acquired the aforementioned vintage Longines wristwatch chronograph, my wife messaged Roman Sharf, who many know only as a retailer, but we know as a kind gentleman who enjoys sharing his encyclopedic knowledge and love for watches. Roman responded with an enthusiastic two-paragraph text message about the Longines chronograph and its 13.33Z caliber. That kind of knowledge and enthusiasm is what many retailers in this space have to offer the ecosystem.

I have friends who live in Philadelphia who have the opportunity to visit with Tim Mosso and learn from him. Nearly everyone I know recognizes the positive contributions of Tim Mosso to the broader ecosystem and that’s not discounted by the fact that he works on the retail side. We need great retailers who elevate our knowledge, like Roman, Tim, and so many others.

While I have no personal experience with London Jewelers, I’ll note they’ve established a scholarship for watchmaking students, and given the recognition by the HSNY, it is clear to me that they are the type of retailer that the horological ecosystem benefits from and without whom our ecosystem could not survive.

Co-Chairs

The gala’s co-chairs were Romain Gauthier, Kevin O’Leary, and Roger Smith - three very different figures in the watch world. I asked Ron whether any of them left an impression.

Ron writes:

Let me take a bite of the juiciest part of the steak first: Kevin O’Leary. When contemplating the perception of a public figure, I often think of this tweet and reply and its commentary on the public’s perception of celebrities whom they have never met.

A couple of years ago I ran into Kevin O’Leary as a guest of events sponsored by H. Moser & Cie surrounding the F1 Miami Grand Prix. At an early evening cocktail party announcing the release of new Moser models at the time, and a day or two later at the race I was intermittently around him. Those few times that I directly interacted with him and when I observed him in conversations with others, he was an absolute gentleman, inquisitive about watches, and listened more than he spoke.

I’m a light consumer of popular culture media or “news”, so my exposure to Kevin O’Leary’s public persona is limited. He certainly appears to draw visceral responses from people.

You know Godwin’s Law, right? “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches one.”

After the HSNY gala, in one of my watch groups more than one person shared memes from social media mocking Kevin O’Leary, including one from an Instagram watch account in which the individual remarked that it would be a dilemma if they had to choose between killing Hitler or O’Leary.

Referencing that tweet I shared above: to people who say “I just hate Kevin O’Leary”, my response is “no, honey, you don’t. You hate an artificial persona fed to you by a sophisticated marketing machine.”

One of the people seated at our table briefly spoke with Mr. O’Leary at the gala and asked for a photo. She said he was an absolute gentleman during her interaction with him. That mirrors my prior experiences with him.

Next.

Romain Gauthier happened to be seated at the table next to ours. Every time my gaze traveled in his direction, he was smiling and enjoying his interaction with the others at his table. At one point I did go up to him and say, “I need to get a picture of you and I for KingFlum” and his eyes lit up and he smiled. He was very happy upon hearing you mentioned. He left a very positive impression.

I never saw Roger Smith. Here’s what a friend in the watch world says of their interactions with him that evening:

“He remembered us from Dubai. I can say that a few of us were at Dubai Watch Week very late one of the days, just about 30 minutes to closing. Roger was still at his booth, just him and one of his employees. He spent a solid 30 minutes with us and was incredibly kind, warm, and polite.”

“ [Of their interactions with Roger Smith at the HSNY gala] For a giant of the watchmaking world, he couldn’t be any more regular of a guy. It would be easy for him to be haughty or conceited, but he’s genuinely just a very nice man.”

Scholarships

The HSNY awards watchmaking scholarships at the gala. I wanted to know whether that part of the evening stuck with Ron.

Ron writes:

The program for the gala and charity auction listed several scholarships. We learned that for 2026 the HSNY awarded $450,000 in financial aid to 55 watchmaking students, five watchmaking schools, and three independent watchmakers.

If you look at the auction results for the charity auction and do the math for the revenue from tickets sold, you might ask yourself: how much of this money is going to the scholarships? Is the charity auction really a charity?

This is another spot where the HSNY shines.

Recall that famous proverb: “Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or a Swiss charity to open their books.” (See here and here for examples.)

Unlike their European counterparts, all US charitable organizations including the HSNY, have to file an IRS Form 990 which provides detail of their finances. Those forms are publicly available on several online platforms readily found with a simple web query.

The HSNY takes an additional step in publishing their annual reports and an independent accountant’s review, along with their 990 forms on their website.

So I’m struck not only with the breadth of the contributions given by the HSNY but also its stewardship.

Conversations Between Courses

Events like these are often as much about the conversations between the courses as they are about the programme itself - if not more. I asked Ron who he ended up talking to, and whether any encounter surprised him.

Ron writes:

A logistical note here. The tables for the gala are placed so close together that it’s challenging to move around the room. This is probably by design as the gala organizers likely want to discourage foot traffic during the event. And, let’s be real, the more tables they can stuff into that room, the more revenue they make for their charitable causes. So during the gala, you’re going to be at your table much of the time and limited to conversation with people at your table or those adjacent to you.

The chance to mingle is at the cocktail hour preceding the gala and the after party, which is held in the same space, the Terrace Room.

The conversations which I’m still thinking about have nothing to do with the content of those conversations. Instead what I remember is the feeling I came away with.

Years ago and on separate occasions, on the internet I came across two different accounts by individuals recounting their encounters with the Dalai Lama. They both shared similar experiences: when you spoke with him, you felt an intensity of focus. He made you feel like you were the only person in the entire world.

Those are the kinds of conversation partners which leave a mark on me. I had a few of those conversations, and it speaks to the caliber of the people brought together by the HSNY gala.

Who Was in the Room?

Collector events can sometimes feel like they’re for a very specific crowd - the old guard, the ultra-wealthy, the trade… I asked Ron whether this felt ‘accessible’, or whether it felt like you felt like you needed a secret handshake to feel welcome in the room.

Ron writes:

Well of course the HSNY gala is going to have all of the above, old guard, industry, ultra-wealthy, and social media types. At no time did I feel as if the event was not accessible to all.

By way of example one of our guests was our 21-year-old daughter who lives in New York City. As expected and encouraged, she often broke free from her parents, and mingled in the crowd. She had a splendid time, and like everyone I spoke with, felt at ease with the attendees whom she met.

Empty Seat

I gave Ron a final open-ended question and asked him to tell me the one thing about the evening, good or bad, funny or unexpected, that he most wanted people to know about. This hit me hard...

Ron writes:

One of your earlier questions asked about the sense of history of the HSNY and whether or not that resonated with me. It resonated more after the fact than during the event. This ecosystem is a historic one that we too often pass off as a hobby. Let’s recognize that it borders on an obsession not only for the purveyors of the craft but for us collectors and enthusiasts. Through the wonders and ills of smart phones and social media, many of us now spend hours every single day interacting with the horological ecosystem in some manner

It is up to us all to be worthy stewards of this craft.

Lastly a personal note and a personal plea. At our table for the HSNY, we had two empty seats throughout the evening, as one couple who was to join us didn’t attend. Those spaces were for Richard Teevan and his wife. My wife and I came to know Richard years ago as he was the administrator for the H. Moser and Cie Owners and Fans Facebook Group. He was also the moderator for several other watch enthusiast Facebook groups and known in the New York City region for his eclectic watch collection.

I had last been in contact with Richard a few days before the HSNY gala. He didn’t respond to a message I sent him on Saturday, nor did he arrive at the gala.

I later found out that Richard unexpectedly passed away on Thursday, two days before the gala.

Years ago I deactivated my Facebook account as the cost greatly exceeded the benefits but I rejoined around 2023 solely to join the Moser Fan Facebook group, the group run by Richard. In that group I found that Richard had truly created a safe space for collectors at all financial brackets and for female collectors such as my wife. Almost every single Facebook group or WhatsApp thread in the watch enthusiast community will from time to time devolve into topics unwelcoming to women. Richard, and the community in the Moser fans Facebook Group never let that happen.

We don’t often get to say our final goodbyes to those who had a positive impact on our lives but at least on the Facebook group I would routinely and publicly thank Richard for his hard work in maintaining a community that brought many people together and elevated our horological ecosystem.

I have many memories of the HSNY gala including that of the empty seat at our table, a seat which should have been occupied by Richard. It’s one of many reminders that time is fleeting and that when you find someone in your life who’s making an effort to be a positive force, take a moment to thank them for their efforts.

Just as the HSNY aims to elevate the horological ecosystem for the next 160 years, so should we all.

Update (31 March): The following image was sent to me via email by :

Final thoughts

Ron’s piece started with the energy of a packed room and ended with an empty chair. I don’t think I could have planned such a crazy arc if I’d tried. I didn’t know Richard Teevan, but I do know the kind of person Ron is describing, because this community is full of them - Ron himself, is one of them. These are the sorts of people who do the unenviable work of making spaces feel safe, welcoming, and worth being part of. People like this never get honoured at galas, and are rarely thanked enough… and then one day, they’re gone, and only then do folks realise just how much the fabric of a community depended on them holding it together.

A bit of a sombre note to end on, but that I think it does highlight why the HSNY should be applauded. It was founded in a tavern by people who recognised that the craft matters, but also, that the community around it matters as well; and here we are, 160 years later, and that idea is still very much in focus. Whether it’s a German immigrant watchmaker in 1866, a Catholic nun talking about margins and mission, or a bloke running a Facebook group with kindness and consistency… the line running through all of it remains the same: the ecosystem survives because people, humans, choose to care for it.

Thank you, Ron, for taking the time to write this, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t put out a cosmic thank you to Richard, for the community he built.

I’ll end with a word of thanks to all of you who have continued to spend your valuable time leaving comments on SDC posts - I appreciate them, and I know other readers do as well. SDC - and this community - is richer because of people like you… and as the saying goes… people like us, do things like this 🙂

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🤑 Meylan at Moser Loves Margin

There are many amusing lines in this interview, but I particularly enjoyed the part where Edouard Meylan (CEO of H. Moser & Cie) explains his view on margin to his team:

I always tell my team: you like Formula One? You need margin. You like innovation? You need margin. You like new movements, new materials, new factories? You need margin.

A quick note before we begin. The original interview - at the time of writing this - states that Meylan wants to “maintain our entry level around $50,000.” I’ve since learned - via someone who spoke directly to Claudio Terjanian (Head of Moser USA) - that this is a typo. The figure Meylan actually said was $15,000. Clearly this is a horrible mistake, because if Moser’s entry level was indeed heading towards being $50,000, we’d be having a very different conversation… one that would probably involve questioning whether old Ed had taken up smoking crack as a recreational pursuit. I mean, a $50k floor would put Moser’s cheapest watch in the same postcode as Patek’s average retail price, so yeah, probably a typo. Anyway, at $15,000, the picture is somewhat coherent, and makes for some interesting analytical fodder. Everything you read below is based on the correct figure of $15k1.

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recently wrote a sharp post about this exact problem, riffing off a camera reviewer’s observation that truly ‘objective’ reviews are both impossible and undesirable. His point, which I think is bang on, is that readers don’t actually want objectivity; they want honesty. People want to know what a watch feels like to live with, from someone who isn’t being paid to tell them it’s wonderful (or sh1t!).

Forster illustrated this with a hypothetical ‘objective’ (and hilarious) theatre review that reads like a spec sheet – seat count, stage dimensions, the height of the actors in metres – and the comparison to typical watch coverage was, well, a little too close for comfort. His conclusion was that the real question a reviewer should be asking is “What kind of watch is this watch trying to be, and how well does it succeed?”

That resonated with me, because when my friend Mr Rehaut wrote his guest post on SDC last year, he answered that question extremely well from a first-owner’s perspective. He described a watch that was trying to be the antithesis of everything you might expect from Rolex, and succeeding at it completely. What he didn’t cover – because he couldn’t, at that stage – was what it’s like to live with the thing, day after day, for months.

I can now cover that part, so here we are. The review I said I’d never write.

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Estimated reading time: ~12 minutes

How it happened

I should declare my biases up front… that’s what honest reviewers do, right? First, Mr Rehaut is a friend, and his writing made me want this watch before I’d ever held one in my own hands. Plus, the steady drip of wrist shots on his Instagram feed kept my desire simmering for the better part of a year.

I mention this because desire is rarely rational and the source of desire matters even more. If someone you trust and respect loves something, it is kinda hard to separate their enthusiasm from the object itself. Second, I was already deep into a ‘titanium phase’ thanks to my C6 from Romain Gauthier which I wrote about before. The C6 had converted me to the gospel of lightweight watches, and the idea of Rolex delivering their own interpretation of that experience felt hard to ignore.

I should also mention I have no relationship with any Rolex AD. Despite owning several ‘Rolices’1, I had close to zero chance of getting allocated a TYM through normal retail channels. So I did what any reasonable collector does when conventional routes are closed… I threw a Hail Mary into a buy/sell WhatsApp group and said I wanted one - even at a premium. For context, I recently went into Watches of Switzerland on Oxford Street to adjust the bracelet. The sales assistant was surprised to see this watch, and told me she had only seen one other in ~18 months; just a data point on how uncommon these are.

My friend Ike – the same friend who’d let me try his TYM months earlier, on the day he picked it up – reached out to me privately. He’d only worn the watch about three times since buying it, and had no interest in keeping it. He generously offered to sell his watch to me at cost.

I remain grateful, and even though he didn’t ask, I made a gentleman’s agreement with him that if I ever decided to move it on, he’d get first refusal – at cost, obviously.

As I’ve written before in my Watch Collecting Etiquette essays, principles matter. Ike has more money than the governments of many small countries, so I doubt this arrangement will ever be consequential to him financially. The point was never about the money, though. It was mainly about demonstrating that the favour was received in the spirit it was given. Pay it forward if you can; it tends to come back in spades.

In case it wasn’t clear from my retelling above, I ended up buying the very first TYM I tried on - I just had a ~9 month gap between it first landing on my wrist and owning it. It’s a small story, but it is my story… and as watch nerds I am sure you can appreciate the delightful serendipity of it all.

First impressions

The first time I held Ike’s TYM in person I was struck by two things - the weight, and the colour. The weight is legitimately baffling; if you’ve ever handled a standard Submariner or GMT and then immediately picked up the TYM, your brain malfunctions for a second. It feels like someone has replaced the internals with air. Mr Rehaut covered the technical side in his post (the ~45% density reduction of titanium versus 904L steel) but statistics fail to capture the visceral surprise. You know it’s going to be light, you’ve read the reviews and what have you... but your hand/brain still doesn’t quite believe it.

The colour is harder to describe and, I think, harder to appreciate from photos. In person, the TYM is not ‘dark grey’ in the way a charcoal suit is dark grey. It’s more like a kind of industrial matte that shifts between tones depending on the light; sometimes almost gunmetal, sometimes closer to slate, and under certain indoor lighting, a somewhat drab battleship grey. Mr Rehaut touched on this too – under standard yellow indoor lights, the brushed titanium can look a bit dull, almost cheap.

My brother-in-law, who knows very little about watches, commented on how slick the matte tones looked, and my 10-year-old son said the matte bezel reminded him of “Batman’s body armour.” I think my son might be the ideal reviewer for this watch. Batman’s body armour is probably the most accurate description anyone has offered.

Daily life

I’ve been wearing this watch exclusively for nearly two months now. Two months of daily wear teaches you things that an afternoon at an AD or a weekend at a GTG will never teach you.

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The moment you decide to buy a watch - something you want but do not need - you enter Morgan Housel’s world. If you’re a relatively new SDC reader, you might have missed my summary of Housel’s previous book; in which case, a book about the art of spending money might seem like an odd fit for a watch website… After all, the function of a watch is obsolete, and the cost is entirely discretionary - there is no “art” in blowing cash the way we do.

Except, there is; as soon as you spend large sums on something you don’t need, all the issues Housel covers (status vs utility, scoreboards, envy vs contentment) will be on display, right there on your wrist.

This book, The Art of Spending Money, is less of a financial guide and more of a psychological adventure into the messy reality that follows your accumulation of wealth. I suppose if watch collecting were really just about separating utility from desire, this book would be the textbook.

To be quite honest, this book is the necessary, and arguably harder sequel, to previous book, The Psychology of Money. It tackles the moment you’ve finally built up wealth and now face the challenge of somehow just ‘being happy’ with it.

Most of this book skips the budgeting and financial planning you’d expect. It’s more about the fact that spending money has little to do with maths or accounting, and everything to do with social pressure, identity, envy, and the stories we tell ourselves.

There is no universal formula to any of this, because the ultimate measure of success is, as Housel puts it, “the psychological distance between what you have, and what you want.”

Estimated reading time: ~18 minutes

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Highest ROI - time, not money

I’d say the main takeaway from the book is that the ultimate purpose of capital is to buy back your time - not to acquire more assets. Housel draws a distinction between two states; being rich (easy to measure, lots of expensive stuff) and being wealthy (complex to measure, maximum control over your own life). The foundational principle, Housel suggests, is that “spending money is the clearest window into what you value most.”

Every buck you spend tells a story; whether you chose a vintage piece over a new one or skipped eating out for a month to fund a grail, your choices will reveal what matters most to you. The tragedy is in knowing how many people live a life that tells the wrong story.

The book argues quite persuasively that “wealth without independence is a unique form of poverty.” Housel contrasts the miserable, spending-obsessed Vanderbilts (whose enormous fortune was spent solely on winning status competitions) with the ‘uncelebrated’ contentment of Chuck Feeney, the Duty Free founder who gave away his entire fortune. Until I read this book, I hadn’t heard of Feeney, which speaks to Housel’s point.

Feeney tried mansions, jets, and yachts, but supposedly realised it wasn’t for him. He found his joy in giving, which then led to his quote: “I realised one day that I was happy when I was giving my money away and I was not happy when I wasn’t giving money away.” Feeney was essentially free, and the Vanderbilts were prisoners of (other people’s) expectations.

The ultimate financial asset, therefore, is personal independence. Housel captures the essence of its ROI quite nicely: “You can’t put a price tag on waking up and doing what you want with your day.”

Warren Buffett, despite his billions, still lives in the same house he bought in 1958. This is because wealth, to him, represents the freedom to spend every day reading, thinking, and working with people he enjoys. Mansions, Bentleys and yachts are simply irrelevant to his actual goal, which is… autonomy.

Magic carpet

There’s one story in the book about a man named Michael May, who suffered a terrible accident as a baby that left him completely blind. A miraculous surgery restored his vision at age forty-six meaning he could see the world for the first time in his life.

As May left the doctor’s office after his surgery, he walked through the lobby and the carpet caught his attention.

“Look at those shapes! Look at those colours!” he told his wife excitedly. In that moment, it was better than the most beautiful thing his mind could imagine. He couldn’t understand why the other patients were just sitting there, ignoring this carpet. At one point he stopped and mumbled, “That’s blue. Oh my gosh, that’s blue.”

He was getting probably ten thousand times more pleasure from looking at an office carpet than you or I would ever get from the most epic Maldives sunset. Now of course, given he had never seen anything before, everything that might be ordinary to the average person was just… extraordinary.

I love this story because it frames the single most important idea in the book very neatly, in a way that anyone can understand. The point is, joy comes from contrast, not from a constant state. A good life is about having everything you need, and some of what you want, sometimes. The corollary is that if you have everything you want, you are likely to appreciate nothing you have.

I think I’ve written about this more times than I can count, so I don’t need to tell you how this applies to watches. Can you remember the excitement of getting your first proper watch? I can. It was a giddy, almost childlike feeling… and I don’t think I have ever come close to that feeling since - despite eventually buying many objectively ‘better’ watches (nicer movement, more prestigious brand, more expensive, etc). So for all of us, our first ‘proper’ watch was carpet-level beautiful because what came after ‘no proper watch’ felt monumental.

Housel makes the point that a $500 dinner rarely makes you five times happier than a $100 dinner. The contrast, not the amount, is what makes you happy. Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently offered some diet advice that captures this as well; you should mostly eat food you know is healthy, but you should also occasionally let yourself eat food you know isn’t healthy. Otherwise what’s the point? There’s a financial version of this, which is that when you’re content with what you have, an occasional treat or surprise can feel incredible. When you expect nothing, everything is a surprise.

One of my high-school roommates has a private chef, and this dude eats five-star meals, three times a day, and has customised snacks in between. I’d lie if I said I wasn’t a little jealous… but I also wonder whether the joy would fade over time. In his case, there’s no anticipation or looking forward to a rare high-end restaurant meal… there’s no gap between a ‘normal’ meal and some insane delicacy. Does he get more pleasure out of his epic dinner than a kid would get when their dad offers a surprise trip to Pizza Hut and the kid savours their first bite? I kinda doubt it.

All of this is to say, so much of being happy with your money is fighting the hedonic treadmill1 - the way you quickly get used to something you once considered a luxury. The antidote is to understand that occasional treats can produce more joy than perpetual luxury. Christmas morning feels great because it happens once a year. The same joy can be had when the luxury items in your life become occasional treats rather than constant needs.

Here’s an excerpt from the book which captures this quite well:

Shackleton and his twenty-seven-man crew then spent nineteen months—from January 1915 to August 1916—rowing eight hundred miles to safety in tiny lifeboats, with nighttime temperatures hitting ten degrees below zero.

They were constantly freezing, wet, hungry, and sleep-deprived. They survived—and all of them did survive—on an occasionally captured seal and foraged seaweed. It’s one of the most astounding survival stories you’ll ever hear.

But, for me, the most emotional part of the story comes at the end, when Shackleton’s crew finally made it to a whaling station on South Georgia island, sixteen hundred miles east of Argentina, where they received aid.

Author Alfred Lansing writes:

“Every comfort the whaling station could provide was placed at the disposal of Shackleton [and crew]. They first enjoyed the glorious luxury of a long bath, followed by a shave. Then new clothes were given to them from the station’s storehouse.”

They were then served a hot meal, and slept for twelve hours. Can you even imagine what that must have felt like? Can you imagine how good it must have felt to have a bath, a hot meal, and a warm bed after being constantly frozen and starving for nineteen months?

Even if the water was lukewarm and the food was half-stale, that must have been one of the most pleasant and fulfilling evenings anyone has ever experienced.

Contentment is all that matters

Housel formalises the carpet idea as an equation: Happiness = Circumstances – Expectations. He illustrates this by contrasting the billionaire Larry Ellison, who perpetually craves more, with his own late grandmother-in-law, who was poor by any reasonable definition but wanted nothing beyond her garden, her books, and her friends. Ellison has everything, and she had almost nothing; guess which one was happier.

His antidote is to stop asking what else you need to be happy. Instead of trying to push your circumstances upward (a race you can never win), try to manage your expectations downward. Housel concludes: “In the end, money’s greatest gift is enough, not more.”

It’s worth internalising the concept we covered in the Michael May section earlier; the hedonic treadmill is real, and once a luxury becomes your baseline, it stops feeling like a luxury. This is a topic close to my heart, and I wrote about it a while ago:

Social debt and scoreboards

We think we want nice stuff, but what we really want is respect, admiration, and attention. The purchases we make are just proxies, and the pursuit of these proxies is often rooted in trauma: “The more you were snubbed while poor, the more you enjoy displaying your wealth.” This is a catchy quote, but I’m not sure it applies universally.

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—

Ariel Adams raised an interesting point in his recent post, Why Used Prices Dominate Industry Confidence. His general point is that the watch industry has a data problem - “no sh1t”, you might say. Specifically, he argues that pre-owned price indices (a la WatchCharts, Chrono24, Bloomberg Subdial Index) have become a proxy for ‘brand health’, when in fact, they are really just a proxy for brand popularity. Anyone who has ever eaten at a Michelin-starred restaurant with a three-month-long waitlist and sh1t food in small portions will tell you - popularity is not the same thing as quality!

Overall, he points out that the watch industry guards its data closely, so analysts default to the one thing that is freely available - pre-owned asking prices - and then draw sweeping conclusions about brand health from what is, at best, a popularity contest. Adams then argues that sales volume is a better metric, but goes on to concede it’s basically unmeasurable. He also points out that most tracked prices are asking prices, not sold prices, which is a big problem but at least it’s one we’re all acutely aware of.

Where we align

His ask-vs-sold price distinction is important and one could argue it isn’t discussed enough. Regular readers will recall that we covered exactly this problem when looking at the divergence between the Bloomberg Subdial Index and WatchCharts back in 2024 - we have two indices tracking ostensibly the same market, but producing different results because of differences in methodology, data cleaning, and how they handle discounting.

Adams is making the same point when he says the data most people cite isn’t as clean as the charts make it look. Anyone who has listed a watch on Chrono24 and then sold it for 15% below ask already knows this anyway. This reminds me, he’s actually describing a textbook instance of the streetlight effect1 i.e. using data because it’s visible rather than because it’s useful.

He’s also right that auction prices often tell you more about the competitive dynamics between six wealthy bidders than about global demand for a product. The F.P. Journe results at the end of 2025 were extraordinary, but extrapolating from them to “the brand is worth X” is really just a category error. Those prices were set by a very small number of people with very specific motivations, and not by “the broader market” in any meaningful sense.

Where we don’t align

The trouble starts when you notice what Adams doesn’t do, which is offer any alternative. His preferred metric is sales volume but by his own admission, this is unmeasurable. So the essay essentially says: “the data everyone uses is sh1t, the data I’d prefer doesn’t exist, but trust the people who travel to markets and talk to insiders.” This is an appeal for people to defer to authority - more specifically to the authority of people like... Ariel Adams. 😂

This isn’t meant to be a joke, but it’s pretty funny to me. When Adams argues that the best insights come from “constantly traveling to various parts of the market to study what is happening on the ground and with consumers,” he’s describing his own value proposition. Of course, that doesn’t make him wrong, but it’s worth keeping in your peripheral vision.

Now about a month ago, Ariel argued brands should embrace lower prices to drive volume and keep Swiss factories going strong. If you pair that sentiment with today’s argument that ‘low pre-owned prices signal healthy volume and not brand weakness’, the combined position is as follows: sell more, at lower prices, and when all those watches flood the secondary market and prices drop, that’s all good too.

Really? I mean, it’s logical if you’re optimising for factory utilisation, but much less sensible if you’re a collector who’d prefer the thing on your wrist to hold its value, or if you’re a brand that wants to preserve whatever brand equity you have left. Adams is giving advice to the industry of course; but collectors and enthusiasts reading this should remember they’re eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. I also just think it’s bad advice overall, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

What can we do about this?

Adams left us hanging, so let’s try and fill in the blanks ourselves. If pre-owned prices are a flawed signal but sales volumes are also not readily available, what should we look at?

Triangulation instead of indexing is a good place to start. Pre-owned prices are one input, not the input. The idea is to cross-reference pre-owned prices with other information like AD allocation patterns (are waitlists growing or shrinking? how long did your mate wait for a Submariner?), CPO uptake (Rolex’s RCPO now reportedly controls 10% of global Rolex secondary sales, which is a legit signal), and grey market discount depth (if a new watch is available at 30% below retail on the grey market, that tells you something about demand regardless of what any report says). Oh, and with pre-owned prices, maybe I am stating the obvious but always search for ‘sold’ prices not ‘ask’ prices - send DMs if you have to, but trust nobody completely. 😂

Absolute values are less important than the spread. What I mean by that is the pre-owned price falling from 120% of retail to 100% is a completely different signal to one falling from 80% to 60%. The former could be defined as ‘speculation unwinding’; the latter could be a good signal of demand dropping. In short, the relationship between market price and current retail is more important than the price itself.

Watch what brands do, and attach less value to what they say. Pay attention to things like boutique openings or closings… or to production cuts or production expansion (admittedly harder to do without deep monitoring). Another signal might be to notice whether they are launching CPO programmes or ignoring the secondary market. The gist of this point is to point out that behavioural signals are harder to fake than any price chart.

Finally, try to zoom out a bit more. Monthly pre-owned price fluctuations are mostly noise, and quarterly trends are maybe signal. Annual trends can sometimes be useful, but even then, things like tariffs can muddy the water substantially. If you’re checking WatchCharts weekly and adjusting your collecting strategy accordingly, wtf are you reading SDC for!?

In conclusion… I’d say Adams is right that the industry’s got a data problem, and that too many people draw sweeping conclusions from thin evidence. However, I do not think the answer is to abandon data in favour of vibes and frequent flyer miles2. Just don’t forget you are buying a watch to wear - it is not a share you’re buying to trade. If the thing on your wrist makes you happy every time you look down at it, no price index will ever take that away from you.

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

Estimated reading time: ~32 mins

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🪈 Owning the Pipes

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A quick note before we start. This post is probably the most ‘academic’ thing I’ve ever posted. It involves motivation theory, open source software research, French philosophy (again), and something called ‘analogue intelligence.’ I promise it all connects to watches eventually. If all this academic stuff isn’t your cup of tea, no hard feelings - I have added a ‘short version’ at the top so you can get the gist of it. Normal service resumes next week. If it is your cup of tea, well, you’re my kind of weirdo.

Short overview

If you’re not sure whether you should read this in full, this is a kind of TL;DR for the whole post and everything which preceded it. A Harvard professor read my essay about why luxury should feel like a sin, and wrote an informal and slightly academic response. His big idea is that watch collectors are driven by three types of motivation - extrinsic (investment, status, signalling), intrinsic (the hunt, the craft, the joy of it), and prosocial (sharing knowledge, mentoring, supporting independents). His research on open source software developers found the same structure, and the communities that thrived were the ones where all three motives coexisted.

My argument in this essay is that the balance between these three is shifting in a bad direction. The 2020-2024 bubble redirected community energy from understanding watches to pricing them. Brands are now optimising for the wealthiest buyers and sidelining the passionate enthusiasts who built the cultural infrastructure around their products. Also, the knowledge base that collectors built over decades is now more fragile than anyone realises, because nobody deliberately built it; it just emerged from people who were obsessed.

We conclude with a concept the professor calls ‘analogue intelligence’ - this is the kind of human knowledge, taste and craft that can’t be reduced to just ‘data.’ The watch community is one of the places where this kind of intelligence gets produced and passed on. If we lose the conditions that make such a thing possible, the watches themselves end up being just… expensive metal.

If any of that sounds interesting, read on! If not, the takeaway is that you should keep sharing what you know, keep helping newcomers, and keep paying attention to the weird details nobody else notices. The commons was built by obsessive people who happened to be generous, so it can be maintained by them too.

Right, let’s begin!

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Bataille, luxury transgression, and the idea that watching your money burn is the whole point of collecting. The thesis, loosely, was that the 2020-2024 speculative bubble sanitised watch collecting by making every purchase feel ‘responsible,’ and that the real pleasure of luxury comes from the irrationality of it all. What is irrational, to be precise, is spending money you probably shouldn’t on an object that does its one job worse than your phone… and then feeling great because you had the freedom to do this irresponsible thing.

Based on a comment from long-time reader , I labelled these people ‘sinners’ - and I definitely didn’t expect a Harvard Business School professor to pick that up and run with it. - and I’ll copy this from his official bio page - “is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in technology management, innovation, digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI).”

This legend published a response which built a framework around the sinner concept. He connected it to his own research on open source software developers, and sketched a general theory of collector motivation - in doing so, he has given us some excellent food for thought.

Below is my attempt to take his framework, stress-test it against what I see in our community, and follow it through to some new conclusions…

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Estimated reading time: ~ 25 mins

What Lakhani found

In 2003, Lakhani and his collaborator Bob Wolf surveyed 684 software developers across 287 open source projects to try and answer a question: why do people write code for free?1

The dominant assumption in economics was that they were doing it for career advancement, reputation, or because their employers told them to. We can call these extrinsic motivations.

That turned out to be wrong; well, kinda. They weren’t wrong about extrinsic motivations existing, but they’d underestimated everything else. The single strongest predictor of how much effort a developer put into a project had nothing to do with career signalling or compensation - it was creative flow; the feeling of being so absorbed in a problem that time seems to dissolve.

More than 61% of respondents said their open source project was at least as creative as anything they’d ever done in their lives. 73% reported frequently losing track of time while coding. The second strongest cluster was what they called obligation or community-based motivation which is a type of ‘felt duty’ to give back to ‘a commons’ that had formed you or contributed to making you who you are.

Their conclusion was that the most committed contributors had motivational drivers where intrinsic and prosocial2 motivations coexisted with extrinsic motivations in complicated (and constantly shifting) proportions. In short, no single motivation stood out, and thriving communities were the most diverse in terms of ‘what motivated who.’3

So the obvious question: does the same thing apply to watch collecting communities?

Three registers

Lakhani’s model splits collectors’ motivations into three broad categories - given that the rest of this essay depends on understanding how these interact, I would urge you to read these carefully… I am mostly paraphrasing his definitions, so if you already went through his essay, you can skip these three.

Extrinsic motivations are the ones we tend to talk about the most; investment rationalisation, store of value, wealth signalling, taste signalling, access signalling, and legacy all come to mind here. These are real and legitimate motivations, and they also include something more interesting, which is counter-signalling - I’ll come back to that later.

Intrinsic motivations are where the ‘sinner’ lives (from the previous essay). We can break these down even further… the hunt (episodic, dopaminergic, problem-and-solution structured), curation (the work of building a collection that means something as a whole), and aesthetic and engineering appreciation (the thoughtful engagement with a single object, but in your own head). It is also worth flagging autonomy and identity i.e. the assertion that ‘I choose this’ and ‘this is who I am’ - as these sit somewhere between intrinsic and extrinsic depending on how you think about it. Lakhani writes:

Both of these resist easy categorization. Autonomy may be less a discrete motivation than a psychological register in which other motivations are expressed. Identity sits uncomfortably between intrinsic and extrinsic — the self-image concern that feels internal but may be a form of inwardly directed signaling.

Prosocial motivations are the category that - as Lakhani points out - collecting literature has mostly neglected. Rather than trying to define it, I will list examples because that’s much easier. This category includes stuff like knowledge sharing, patronage of independent makers, mentorship, institution building, and the ‘felt duty’ to leave the hobby better than you found it. There is no ‘clear cut’ definition beyond some kind of broad brush label like ‘somehow doing good, for the greater good’ - which actually works for me.

What I particularly like about this approach is that it doesn’t force you to pick one. A single act of collecting, say, buying a rare independent piece from a maker you’ve followed for years - this can express investment rationalisation, taste signalling, aesthetic appreciation, and also still advocate for ‘patronage’ … all at the same time. The motivations are bundled, and the proportions - the ratio of each motivation - will change depending on your personality, where you are in your collecting journey, and what the market (and your friends) is (are) doing around you.

One of the more interesting findings from Lakhani’s research was that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations didn’t crowd each other out. So in that example, being paid to contribute code didn’t reduce creative enjoyment. The watch equivalent is that you can love a watch and also know it’s a decent store of value - without one feeling undermining the other. The problem during the watch bubble was the extrinsic motivations mostly overrode the intrinsic ones.

By the way, Lakhani’s reframing of my ‘sovereign expenditure’ concept is also much cleaner than I managed. The sinner isn’t irrational at all; they hold a different worldview in which financial returns don’t matter. The obvious test here is to note that when markets tank, the sinners keep buying watches. I mentioned in a comment on his post, that when you see someone buying a new watch knowing they’ll lose a fat proportion of their money via instant depreciation, those are intrinsic and prosocial collectors in action. The extrinsically motivated ones would never do something ‘so dumb.’

Flow states and accidental commons

Lakhani’s finding that creative flow was the strongest predictor of effort in open source projects, maps onto the watch community really well.

Think about collectors who put in the most effort - I specifically don’t mean ‘money’, I mean effort. These are the people who make special trips just to visit an atelier or a manufacture, and they spend their days reading about horological history, technical specs of new movements, or creating collector’s guides as a way to document their scholarship of some obscure vintage genre. These are the people who can tell you about transitional models that nobody’s documented yet, because they spent six months cross-referencing auction catalogues with production records. These people are experiencing something very close to what Csikszentmihalyi described as flow; when skill meets a challenge at the right level, it results in complete absorption, and time just seems to dissolve.

Anyway, like the developers in Lakhani’s study, these folks self-select into challenges that match their skill level. A newer collector might achieve ‘flow’ by learning to distinguish a ‘normal’ Daytona from an error dial variant. A veteran gets it by hunting down rare Patek Amagnetics in Eastern Europe… it’s all the same thing, just with varying levels of difficulty.

What fascinates me is how this effort compounds prosocially without any upfront intention. Even if you find a collector who deep-dives into reference variations for their own satisfaction, this work still ends up producing useful knowledge which the whole community can benefit from. I’ve seen random people online who spend hundreds of hours documenting random things they find interesting… they didn’t set out to build “public resources”, they were just scratching an itch they had. The commons just emerged as a side effect. To be honest, I see SDC this way; if I ever stop writing, I’d probably drop all paywalls and make the whole archive free; so thank you in advance for contributing to the commons. 🤓

I do wonder whether Lakhani’s data showed the same pattern - I would guess the answer is probably yes. Lakhani mentions the Ranfft movement database as perhaps “the purest expression” of a community-maintained resource for watch calibres. It’s a good example, partly because of what it represents and partly because of what’s happened to it; as far as I can tell, this is more of a static archive now than an actively updated project… which kind of proves the point about fragility.

This is important to understand because it speaks to the broader fragility of the commons; it wasn’t “constructed” nor is its existence deliberate. Nobody held a meeting and said “right chaps, let’s build a shared knowledge base for the benefit of future collectors.” It just grew organically from thousands of individual acts of intrinsically motivated effort. This means it can decay just as organically as it came to be, if the conditions that produce those intrinsic motivations happen to change.

What happened to the commons

During the 2020-2024 speculative bubble, the priorities of the commons were redirected from something inherently intrinsic, to something extrinsic. The community was still collaborating, maybe even continuing to produce shared resources, and still exhibiting what Lakhani would call obligation or community-based motivations… but the knowledge being shared was now different.

The focus on history, stories, or other such ‘nerd info’ gave way to price tracking, strategies on how to get allocations, analysis of market premiums, and a whole new wave of grey market ‘dealer-collectors’ popped up all over the place. Community energy that had previously gone into understanding what watches are, got redirected into understanding what watches are worth.

You could easily argue this was still a form of ‘commons maintenance’ in a different commons, and that’s basically true. The people building spreadsheets to track Nautilus premiums across different markets to find arbitrage opportunities were doing something collaborative and useful within their frame of reference. They had their own version of flow; their own version of “skill matching the challenge.”

But of course, this shift had consequences; if the main community activity is price tracking, the people who were contributing the ‘traditional’ knowledge would find themselves talking to an audience that’s no longer listening. Which means, the incentive to produce that kind of content will weaken. Some of these contributors were doing it purely for intrinsic reasons, and they kept going regardless. Others needed at least some community recognition, and when that recognition shifted toward whoever could predict the next hot piece, they kinda fizzled out.4

Before you run off to the comments, please understand that I am not trying to romanticise the ‘old’ pre-bubble knowledge commons. Forum culture had its own pathologies like gatekeeping, status hierarchies based on post count or frequency, and the occasional tyrant (see: Massena5). So yeah, the pre-bubble commons may not have been “pure” but its dominant orientation was, I think, more toward understanding watches as opposed to pricing them - and I think that does matter. I am not saying it was some kind of golden age of pure prosocial motivation.. people were always operating across all three of Lakhani’s registers simultaneously, but post-bubble, the balance shifted.

The question we need to ask today, is whether it has shifted back.

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Which made me wonder: why does anyone bother getting defensive over watches?

Estimated reading time: ~ 18 minutes

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Pringles flavours

To understand the absurdity of watch forum warfare, I figured we could ‘start simple’ by thinking about how we handle normal differences in regular taste - and I mean taste quite literally here.

If your mate prefers Pringles BBQ crisps and you’re a salt-and-vinegar person, nobody loses sleep over it. You might give each other a bit of stick depending on who does the shopping for your road trip, but you basically just… move on. The human brain is actually very good at accepting such benign differences in preference. Neither choice is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and both of you understand this instinctively.

When you scale that preference up the hierarchy of social, cultural, and financial investment, this is when tolerance goes out of the window. If you find yourself at Wolfgang Puck’s steak restaurant in Mayfair (very good btw), and order a steak well-done instead of medium-rare, I’m pretty sure everyone at the table will judge you… just like people will judge you if you turn up wearing a Hublot, well, anywhere. These are still just preferences - the same as Pringles - but they happen to carry ‘social weight’ now. What I mean by this, is that your choice becomes a proxy for your taste, your intelligence, and your identity.

In the world of watches, this dynamic reaches a fever pitch; a person might have a deep, inexplicable preference for an Omega over a Rolex (or the other way around), and the truth of the matter is that people simply like what they like. Attraction, be it in romantic love or indeed in watches, is inherently subjective… and yet, the debates are endless, sometimes vitriolic, but more often than not… fiercely defensive.

To understand this in more detail, we need to dig into how your brain makes choices.

By the way… the irony that I’m about to construct an elaborate (albeit research-backed) argument about why people construct elaborate arguments, is not lost on me 😂 - consider me Exhibit A if you must.

You decide before you start thinking

We all love to think of ourselves as highly rational connoisseurs. We might look at spec sheets, compare power reserves, examine finishing, determine what is ‘good value’, and then decide which watch is best for us... right?

Wrong.

Modern psychology has actually unraveled this assumption. Human beings operate on a principle that researchers call ‘affective primacy’ i.e. the emotional reaction to an object happens instantaneously, and often before your conscious mind has even started processing. Your preference for a particular brand is rarely the result of some dispassionate technical analysis and it almost certainly has roots buried far deeper than that.1

A specific dial colour might trigger a subconscious memory of a formative childhood holiday. A particular brand might carry emotional weight because your father or grandfather wore one. A case shape might evoke something comforting that you can’t quite articulate. You simply ‘know’ you prefer one watch over another because you experience a kind of visceral sense of rightness when you look at it.

The problem is that we suffer from something which psychologists call the ‘introspection illusion.’ When someone asks you why you prefer a particular watch, you have no conscious ‘instant recall’ to the emotional or historical variables that actually shaped the preference you have today. You can’t say “Oh I bought this watch because its shade of blue reminds me of my favourite blanket as a child” because you don’t even know that’s the case. Your brain hasn’t given you access to that information explicitly.

So what are you supposed to do? You now have an explanatory void, and to fill this void (i.e. to maintain your self-concept as a rational decision-maker) you convince yourself that “logic” must be the answer… so you start talking about movements or whatever other sh1t you need to talk about, to convince yourself that you have rational beliefs.2

Pivot to merit

Now let’s talk about post-hoc rationalisation - another well-documented psychological defence mechanism. The sequence is always the same, where you make a decision intuitively, and then you build a logical justification for it after the fact, both for your own peace of mind and to defend the choice against critics.

In the Rolex versus Omega context, this plays out fairly often, and you’ll recognise it immediately. The Omega person might aggressively assert that the Co-Axial escapement and METAS Master Chronometer certification render their watch anti-magnetic to 15,000 gauss, and that this stuff constitutes ‘objective superiority’. The Rolex person counters that Rolex’s Superlative Chronometer standard has stricter internal tolerances, that the movements are historically more reliable, and that 904L steel is better than 316L.

Both parties then plunge into highly specialised debates about isochronism and amplitude that neither is typically qualified to have. Or they may just turn to market prices and point out how the secondary market price ‘proves’ one is better than the other. The fatal flaw in all of it is that ‘better’ simply isn’t quantifiable here. Both watches tell time with a degree of mechanical accuracy that exceeds daily necessity, and neither is as accurate as a cheap quartz Casio. If one person just enjoys wearing the Omega more than the Rolex (or vice versa), the other person cannot possibly prove them wrong. In other words, this whole debate is just a performance, not a pursuit of truth.

What makes this insidious is a related phenomenon called choice-induced preference change (CIPC). Decades of research findings have shown that people report significantly higher subjective valuations for items after having selected them. fMRI studies have revealed that this isn’t just ‘social performance’; the act of making a difficult decision triggers rapid emotion-regulation processes in the brain, and this literally alters how you encode subjective value - i.e. your brain rewrites its own assessment to justify what you already chose.3

So when someone tells you that your watch is overpriced or technically inferior, your brain registers this as “someone poking a hole in a justification that your brain has worked very hard to construct” - it’s not just “someone challenging your preferences.”

With this reframing, it’s much easier to see why people can be triggered so easily.

By the way… none of this implies that technical differences don’t exist or don’t matter. A Co-Axial escapement is, objectively, an innovative achievement in watchmaking. Movement finishing does vary enormously across price points. Technical knowledge absolutely is valuable and worth developing. The underlying issue is not ‘the fact that people discuss technical merits’; the issue arises when technical arguments become a disguise for emotional preferences that the person can’t or won’t acknowledge. There’s a difference between “I appreciate the innovation in a Co-Axial escapement” and “anyone who buys a Rolex over an Omega is dumb, because METAS.” The first is legit enthusiasm, and the second is your internal lawyer talking.

Your mind is a lawyer, not a judge

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That’s right… It’s that time of the year when everyone moans about Daylight Saving Time. Clocks in the US changed this weekend, but clocks in the UK will not change until 29 March - which means we have a few weeks of extra confusion.

I once wrote about DST in some detail but mentioned it in his newsletter yesterday, and had his annual rant this weekend stating, “Daylight Saving Time Is A Terrible Idea And Kills People” 😂 - so I need not say much more other than confirm “fvck DST” is an accepted trope in these here parts…

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.

Estimated reading time: ~29 mins

🤹‍♂️ Inside the MB&F M.A.D. House

I was in Geneva last week for meetings with brands about our upcoming event, and MB&F was kind enough to extend an invitation to check out their infamous manufacture, aptly named the M.A.D. House. I must be honest with you… I had low expectations going in.

My perception of MB&F, for many years, was that it was a design and marketing company. ‘Maximilian Büsser and Friends’ as a brand name - to me - spoke to Max’s role as the chief artist who comes up with weird and whacky things, and then all the various ‘friends’ do the real work. Max then goes on to spin fairy tales and connect emotionally with watch nerds - something he is exceedingly good at - and people fawn over his genius when he really did very little beyond drawing pictures and convincing others to turn it into reality.

So yeah, that was my read on MB&F for quite some time, and I wrote as much in SDC Weekly 115 when discussing the établissage model. My exact words were:

MB&F is literally founded on the principle of working with other specialists for each component. Max openly celebrates his friends in the brand name, and partners are doing the actual watchmaking while he handles the marketing.

Turns out, I was wrong!

Max himself was scheduled to be there during our visit, but was unable to make it to Geneva; due to the ongoing conflict in the Gulf region, he couldn’t fly out of Dubai. That was a shame, because I would have liked to speak with him directly. I’ve watched most of his major interviews and features, I’ve listened to most of his podcasts, and I’ve read a lot of what he’s said over the years… so I had a decent picture of the man in my head already. Maybe next time… if there is a next time!

Nevertheless, Cédric Roussel (Client Relationship Manager) gave us the tour, and what follows is everything I took away from the visit. I’ve also done some additional homework afterwards to fill in a few blanks, so any factual references about the building or the brand that go beyond what I saw are drawn from public sources which I’ll reference where relevant.

Crazy castle in Carouge

The first thing you notice when you arrive, is that this place looks bonkers. It’s a mini-Hogwarts-looking villa in Carouge which is nestled in some sort of industrial area. Carouge is a suburb of Geneva sometimes called the ‘Greenwich Village’ of the city and the building itself resembles something out of Harry Potter. It’s got a sort of half-timbered construction, asymmetric spires, wooden shutters, and heavily textured stone walls. It was built in 1907-08 by two architects named Edmond Fatio and Charles Meysson, originally as a private home for a wealthy Swiss family who ran a ceramics factory. The architectural style is known as Heimatstil, which roughly translates to ‘homeland style’ - a movement that rejected industrial sterility in favour of romanticised regional architecture.1

I had no idea about any of this before arriving, and to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have cared much anyway. But, standing in front of the building, I did start to understand the appeal. There’s a wind sculpture by Anthony Howe outside the entrance; one of those kinetic metal pieces that catches the breeze and creates these swirling, slightly hypnotic waves. It’s a fitting introduction to the place.

The building is protected by the Swiss Heritage Society, which means MB&F can’t drill into the original walls or ceilings.2 This constraint shaped everything about the renovation. Cédric walked us through how every fixture and fitting was customised to avoid damaging the original structure. The entrance, for example, looks like it has this grand modern fixture, but it’s actually a temporary structure placed in front of the original fireplace (the fireplace is still there, preserved behind it).

The lighting setup in this room was particularly clever as well; there’s a retrofitted cage of sorts that hides all the wiring inside the steel beams used for reinforcement, painted brown to match the original wood. I forgot to get a picture of this, sorry - but fwiw you wouldn’t notice it if nobody pointed it out, which is the point, and so the picture would not have mattered! They tried to stay true to the essence of the building but still upgraded it to meet the practical demands of a modern Swiss watch manufacture. The original herringbone wooden floors are still intact as well. The ornate door frames, the wood panelling, the hand-painted ceramic tiles embedded in the walls are all from 1908.

The renovation apparently took about 18 months, and the search for the building was delayed by the pandemic. MB&F previously had their operations split across two locations in Geneva’s Old Town, which from what I understand, was a logistical headache that got in the way of the collaborative energy they needed.3

Where the magic starts

We started on the ground floor, which seemed like the technical core of their operation. Cédric took us to the prototype area first, and this is where you might find all the new unreleased stuff. There was a new, unreleased watch on one of the tables - it will be unveiled soon, probably in the next couple of months. We were told, politely, that we weren’t allowed to see it. Rules, however, are meant to be broken - I shall say no more.

One of the more fascinating parts of this tour, was the tooling work - or more precisely, the pre-and-post work. You see, with MB&F watches, the cases all have weird shapes, which means there is no ‘standard way’ to do anything. This creates a cascade of problems that the MB&F team has to solve from scratch, every time they make a new watch. I’ll give a few examples...

Custom gaskets. Every MB&F watch needs a gasket to seal the case, and because the cases are so unconventional in shape, they have to make every gasket themselves from scratch. Weird and wonderful cases need weird and wonderful gaskets… duh! I didn’t think about it before, but it makes perfect sense. You can’t go to a standard supplier and order a gasket for a case shaped like a bulldog or whatever.

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Estimated reading time: ~12 minutes

The concept, as explained on the website, is as follows:

“The watches that collectors spend lifetimes chasing, now on Courtyard. Every Premier Watch Box contains one authenticated timepiece, unworn or very good condition with Box and papers - yours to keep vaulted or ship to your door anytime. Not the one? Sell it back for 95% of its market value or list it on our marketplace with 0% fees!”

We really should call a spade a spade… this is a loot box, or close enough anyway1. The mechanics (variable reward, surprise reveal, gamified unboxing) are the same ones which Belgium’s Gaming Commission classified as gambling in April 2018, and that the Dutch Gaming Authority also flagged2 in the same year. The underlying asset being an authenticated watch rather than a digital sword or whatever, doesn’t change what happens neurologically - and I’ll come back to whether that comparison is entirely fair in a bit.

A friend who read a draft of this essay pushed back on that framing by the way; a watch, he argued, is something in a way that an NFT or digital collectible simply is not. He mentioned how watch collecting has survived the quartz crisis and the smartwatch, and I reminded him how The Bored Ape Yacht Club did not survive 20233. He is right that there’s a worthwhile distinction to be made; physical objects tend to accumulate more ‘legitimacy’ over time and purely digital speculation struggles with this. But my point is meant to be narrower; the whole ‘gamified acquisition’ mechanics are the same, even if the thing you’re acquiring is real and enduring. The dopamine hit from opening the box doesn’t know the difference between a digital Bored Ape and a physical Rolex - it’s all about the neurological reaction.

Anyway, let’s take a quick look at the numbers.

The Premier Watch Box is priced at $10,000 and Courtyard publishes the probability breakdown for what you might receive. Using the midpoint of each payout range and multiplying by its probability gives you an expected value of ~$10,780 which, on the surface, sounds mildly positive.

The thing is, that number ($10,780) deserves a lot of scepticism, and I’ll get to why in a moment. First, let’s just look at the mechanics. The top tier ($40,000–$160,000) carries a probability of 0.1%, so one in a thousand. If you’re thinking “well, 1,000 attempts and I should hit it once”, that’s not how probability works. If you play exactly 1,000 times, you have roughly a 63% chance of hitting it at least once.

Using the probability formula P = 1 - (1 - p)^n4 here’s how many tries you’d need to hit the top tier at least once:

• 50% Chance (A coin flip): ~693 attempts

  • If you try 693 times, you are equally likely to have hit the top tier as you are to have missed it.

• 75% Chance: ~1,386 attempts

  • At this point, it is statistically more likely than not that you’ve hit it.

• 90% Chance: ~2,302 attempts

  • Highly likely.

• 95% Chance: ~2,995 attempts

  • Very highly likely.

• 99% Chance (Near certainty): ~4,603 attempts

  • Even with a 99% probability, there is still a tiny 1% chance you could try 4,603 times and STILL never hit the top tier.

If these numbers mean nothing to you, here’s a straightforward takeaway: to get to 95% confidence, you need to make nearly 3,000 attempts - at $10,000 per box, that’s $30,000,000 (thirty million dollars) spent to be ‘very highly likely’ to win a watch worth somewhere between $40,000 and $160,000.

In other words, the house is most definitely not losing sleep over this arrangement.

For the 76% of outcomes sitting in the two lowest tiers ($8,000–$10,000 ranges), you’re essentially paying $10,000 to win somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000. You started with $10,000 in real cash… i.e. actual money that can buy actual things… and you end up with a watch, whose liquidation value comes back to you at 95 cents on the dollar if you sell it back.

So even at the best-case outcome in the lowest tier, you’ve paid $10,000, received something worth (at best) $10,000, and absorbed both the authentication and storage overhead that Courtyard built into the pack margin before you ever played.

This is fine as a business model - perfectly legal, logical even. But the 95% buyback guarantee is really just a question of framing; it caps your downside at 95% of the pack price, which itself already carries a premium over the cost of the underlying assets. The guarantee doesn’t protect you from the spread; it is the spread.5

There is also an inherent valuation problem, because the expected value calculation above only holds if the stated ‘market values’ are real (they are not).

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