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📉 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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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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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…

Listen now

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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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—

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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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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In case you missed it… The Swatch Group have issued a scathing open letter to Morgan Stanley Investment Management about its Research “Ninth Annual Swiss Watcher” and it is, to put it mildly, a demolition job. The letter opens by quoting Morgan Stanley’s own Code of Ethics back at them… something about having a duty to “deal fairly and act in the best interests of its clients at all times” − and then it proceeds to explain, in forensic detail, why the Ninth Swiss Watcher fails to meet that standard.

I’ll let you read the letter for yourself, but I’d like to add one additional finding… This year’s report stated that MB&F achieved a turnover of CHF 52 million; this part is correct, and verified by MB&F. The report then assumes an implied retail value of CHF 70 million, and based on this figure, divides this figure by 420 units sold to arrive at an implied average retail price per watch of CHF ~166k. This figure is incorrect.

According to Max himself (on the podcast shared below), MB&F typically has three main revenue streams, one of which is the ~5,000 M.A.D. Editions watches they sold last year.

The ‘number of units sold’ in the MS/LC report is therefore incorrect by a factor of 12. Nevertheless, a very quick calculation; at ~ CHF 3,000 retail price, and 5000 units, this is ~ CHF 15 million of revenue from the M.A.D. Editions. This means the report has overstated the implied average retail price per watch by at least 27%. Funny enough, this is close to the amount they understated Tudor’s revenue in the 2025 report.

Anyway, onward!

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

Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

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🎭 Hajime Asaoka and the economics of scaling craft

I will state upfront, I have no sources in Japan; I can’t pick up the phone and call someone in Tokyo to verify details the way I might with a Swiss contact. Most of what follows is based on published interviews, public records, and a few other documents that I’ve tried to cross-reference and fact-check as thoroughly as I can1.

This is meant purely as an exploration of Japanese independent watchmaking. Grand Seiko is undoubtedly a phenomenal operation - Morgan Stanley estimates they did around CHF 210 million in sales with roughly 50,000 units in 2025, which would rank them approximately 27th if they were Swiss2. Seiko, Citizen, and Casio are world-class manufacturers.

What I’m exploring below is a different part of the Japanese watchmaking landscape; this is a part which most Western collectors know through the Kurono Tokyo hype drops, if anything. There’s a much bigger story behind those sellout launches, and I found the process of understanding it quite eye-opening.

A garage in Otsuka

In November 2024, a watch made by a self-taught Japanese watchmaker named Jiro Katayama won the GPHG Challenge Prize. Here’s an interview he did with Mark Cho:

I was surprised to learn that the brand, Ōtsuka Lōtec, is named after the Tokyo neighbourhood where Jiro works and the Japanese pronunciation of ‘low-tech’ 😂. He had been producing watches since around 2012, but selling exclusively in Japan, mostly through word of mouth. The total output since 2008 was approximately 400-500 watches3.

A few weeks after the GPHG win, three of his watches went to auction at Phillips’ TOKI sale in Hong Kong4. Both the No. 6 and its Shinonome variant hammered at about ten times their upper estimates (i.e. ~£50,000). These watches retail for between ¥400,000 and ¥800,000, so roughly ~£2,000 to £5,000, so the auction results were… wild.

Then, in late 2025, Katayama unveiled the No. 9, which is a fully in-house movement with a tourbillon, jumping hours, retrograde minutes, a power reserve display, and a striking mechanism. All of this is housed within a 13mm high case. This one was priced at ¥17.6 million, so about £80,000-90,0005… this from a guy who learned machining through Google and YouTube6.

All of this raises an interesting question… How does someone go from a kitchen lathe to a GPHG-winning complication? It would appear that the answer to this question traces back to a workshop in Bunkyo, Tokyo, and a company called Precision Watch Tokyo.

Designer come watchmaker

Hajime Asaoka is another guy who didn’t come up through a watchmaking school. He didn’t apprentice at Seiko nor did he train in Switzerland. He graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts with a design degree and set up the Hajime Asaoka Design Office in 19927. For over a decade, he worked as a product and graphic designer, building up serious skills in CAD modelling and industrial design.

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Today I’d like to start with some thank you notes.

Big thanks to Johnny Davis for the enjoyable conversation which led to this feature in his weekly newsletter1. My favourite joke from his newsletter was this one:

If you already know SDC, you’ll recognise the voice below.

If you don’t, consider this an introduction to the second-best watch newsletter you’ll read this week.

Cheeky cvnt… I love it! Thanks again Johnny.

—

Next, another big thank you to the watch world’s favourite “aging retro-grouch” (in his own words, no less!). I’ve never made it on to any ‘recommended reading’ lists (that I’m aware of), so popping that cherry on a list compiled by the OG of watch writing, feels quite special. Thanks again, Jack.

—

And now, on with the show…

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: ~30 mins

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💿 Nobody wants the CD

In some ways, music has always been a status object disguised as an art form, and if we look at how we’ve chosen to listen to it, there’s a cool analogy I thought of which speaks to where luxury markets are heading.

If we ignore things like phonograph cylinders or shellac records, let’s assume vinyl records were the ‘original’ format. Using these was a physical, ritualistic experience; you held the (physical) sleeve, studied the artwork, gently placed the needle on the groove, and enjoyed the sounds, with crackles and all. Then came CDs, which were technically superior in almost every way; more portable, more durable, better dynamic range, and far cheaper to produce. I suppose these lasted about two decades, and the CD dominated because it made sense, and was a rational choice over vinyl.

Then streaming arrived, and something strange happened. CDs declined and then practically vanished, but vinyl came back! In 2023, vinyl record sales in the US overtook CDs for the second year running, despite costing 3-4x more per album and offering objectively worse sound than CDs.

People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That’s 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023, marking the second time since 1987 that’s happened and reflecting the steady 17-year-running growth of vinyl sales.

My point is, the format that sat in the middle and offered the best balance of quality, convenience, and value, is the one that died. The cheap, frictionless option gobbled up everything below it. The expensive, ritualistic, and inconvenient option became a kind of status symbol, and in this example, nobody cared about “the sensible middle ground.”

It gets stranger when you consider that the vinyl “boom” isn’t even driven by so-called audiophiles. Most people buying records today are playing them on £90 Crosley turntables that sound worse than the cheapest Bluetooth speakers. So they’re clearly not buying vinyl for the sound, which must mean they’re buying it for the shelf, or the Instagram photo, or maybe even for the feeling of owning something physical - because really, we live in a world where everything else is rented or hosted in the cloud. Put another way, what we see here is that the object matters more than its underlying function.

In that example, the people who deeply cared about audio quality simply adapted; they moved to lossless streaming, FLAC files, high-end DACs etc, and probably got better sound than CDs ever offered. They’re doing just fine, and I know this for a fact because I know a few of these nerds personally. Nevertheless, the CD ecosystem died completely; the entire commercial apparatus that served the “sensible middle” of the music market collapsed, regardless of whether individual audiophiles found workarounds for themselves.

And that final part of the analogy is the bit that should worry people who care about watches. The equivalent in our world isn’t that knowledgeable collectors will stop finding good watches to buy - because you probably will! You could pick up a Zenith El Primero on the secondary market for ~50% below retail and feel very clever about it. On a trip to Geneva you’ll perhaps discover some new independent making a better-finished chronograph than anything a conglomerate puts out anyway. The point being, you can and will adapt, because enthusiasts always do - just like the audiophiles.

But what about the brands built to serve you? By this I am referring to the whole “mid-tier” sector… the commercial infrastructure of Swiss watchmaking. That’s the part that’s apparently dying a slow and painful death. It is dying for the same reason the CD died, which is the broader market doesn’t care about ‘best balance of quality and value.’ It cares about either maximum convenience or maximum status. The middle, no matter how sensible on paper, is getting more hollowed out.

Having waded through the last Morgan Stanley report last week, I will keep this high-level. About 2% of total Swiss export volumes in 2025 contributed 89% of the industry’s total growth. 29 of the top 50 brands declined year-on-year, with 14 of those posting double-digit drops. The four biggest privately owned brands now control nearly half the entire Swiss watch market by value, and that’s up from about 37% just six years ago.

That is a staggering shift, to say the least. Half the industry’s value is concentrated in four names, and the trend is accelerating. So what happens to everyone else? Well, the honest answer is that nobody really knows, but I think there are some useful ways to think about it.

Imagine a high street with three restaurants - one is a Michelin-starred place that charges £200 a head and has a three-month waiting list for a reservation, one is a lovely neighbourhood bistro doing decent food for £30 or so, and one is a mid-range chain charging £75 for reheated stuff with fancy plating and a wine list designed to make you feel sophisticated.

When times are good, all three do okay; people eat out more, they’re less fussy about value, and the middle restaurant gets by on convenience and the vague sense that you’re treating yourself despite the sub-par value for money.

When times worsen, the Michelin place barely notices, because its customers aren’t affected by the rising cost of living, and the waiting list just absorbs any slowdowns. The bistro actually does better, because people still want to eat out and they’re now looking for the best meal they can get for the least amount of money. The mid-range chain is suddenly competing with both ends and losing on every metric. It’s too expensive to feel like good value, and too mediocre to feel like a treat.

In this situation, the mid-range chain has a decision to make. Should it invest in becoming better and justifying its prices? Maybe hire a better chef? Should it drop prices and become more accessible? Or does it just… redecorate, add gold leaf to the menu, and hope nobody notices?

I think everyone knows which option most Swiss watch brands have chosen.

Zenith is a useful albeit painful example of this in action. This is a brand that was, by any honest measure, among the most important movement manufacturers in Swiss watchmaking history. The El Primero was launched in 1969 and was the world’s first automatic chronograph movement in a wristwatch with over 50 hrs power reserve. It was so well-regarded that even the mighty Rolex chose it for their Daytona, and today, a ‘Zenith Daytona’ is still a coveted reference among Rolex enthusiasts.

So we have a movement so good that at one point, the most famous watch brand in history used it. And today, the company that made it is now reportedly losing millions every year. How does that happen?

I think the music analogy is actually quite apt here, because Zenith is like the CD. Technically it’s great, it generally does things well enough. And that’s really the underlying problem. This market rewards either extreme accessibility (Casio, Citizen, Tudor, Kollokium, the streaming equivalent) or extreme exclusivity (Kari, Journe, certain Patek & AP, the vinyl equivalent) - and being really good at making watches in the mid-range might be the worst place to be.

Zenith doesn’t have Rolex’s cultural cachet, or Patek’s generational status appeal, or the coolness of a Unimatic or Casio... It doesn’t even have the quirky personality of an independent like MB&F or Moser. What it has is some historical and horological substance, and to me, this is a bit like being the best-sounding CD player in 2026. Might be a little impressive, but it’s also somewhat beside the point.

What we’re buying

So what are people actually buying when they buy a luxury watch in 2026? I think the Zenith example already gives you the answer, but it’s worth making it explicit; people are buying what the vinyl buyers are buying, and that is a feeling, a signal, or a story they get to tell themselves and others.

Engineering excellence is necessary, for sure, but it’s nowhere near sufficient. Rolex wins because its obsessive quality control feeds the myth of indestructibility, and as a result, the substance and the story are the same thing. For Zenith, the product is good but the story is… what, exactly? ‘We made a great movement in 1969 and Rolex used it’? That’s Rolex’s story now, not Zenith’s.

I want to be careful here, because I think it’s too easy to be cynical about this and say ‘it’s all just status signalling and nobody actually cares about watchmaking.’ That’s lazy, and I don’t think it’s true. Most collectors I know personally do care about the craft as well. They care about finishing, about movement architecture, about history and so forth, but, and this is the important bit, they care about all of that within a context of social meaning. The craft matters, but it matters more when it comes wrapped in a story that other people recognise.

A Nautilus is a nice enough watch, but it is also a universally recognised symbol that communicates something specific about its wearer. Those two things are both true, and the second one probably accounts for most of the price premium over, say, a Vacheron Overseas, which is arguably as well-made (or better) and sells for significantly less.

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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: ~35 mins

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💫 Abdulmagied Ahmed Seddiqi, 1950–2026

On the evening of Thursday 12 February 2026, thousands of people gathered at Al Quoz Masjid Kabir in Dubai for the Janaza (funeral) prayer of the late Abdulmagied Ahmed Seddiqi. After the prayer, the crowd moved towards Al Quoz graveyard for the burial. Employees who’d worked alongside him for decades stood in small groups sharing memories, and several described him as a father figure. One employee who’d only joined five years ago said that despite leading a massive organisation, Abdulmagied remembered names and gave people nicknames.. .“that made us feel valued.”

The Seddiqi family shared the news with an Arabic verse which is customarily used when someone passes away: “Indeed, to Allah we belong, and to Him we shall return.” Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai, visited the mourning council to offer his condolences as well.

This was clearly a man who was loved.

For those of you who know the Seddiqi name only through Dubai Watch Week or the retail empire behind it, I think it’s worth understanding the bigger picture surrounding this departed soul. Abdulmagied’s life, to many, may have been solely about selling watches, but in fact, on a macro-level, he was instrumental in opening a door that the Swiss industry had kept firmly shut for the Middle East; after which he held it open long enough for the entire region to walk through it.

From the souk to Switzerland

The Seddiqi story starts in 1950, when Abdulmagied’s father, Ahmed Qassim Seddiqi, opened a small shop in the Bur Dubai souk. Dubai back then was a modest trading port built around pearl diving and creek commerce.

What happened next is, I think, the most interesting part of this whole story. Ahmed Qassim Seddiqi sent his son Abdulmagied to university in Switzerland. Back in the 1960s, international travel was expensive and complicated. Cultural barriers between the Gulf and Switzerland were quite significant, and the Swiss watch industry was (and largely still is!) one of the most insular, relationship-driven businesses on earth. Getting a simple meeting was already difficult, and gaining trust was next to impossible.

Despite what might seem like difficult odds, Abdulmagied studied in Switzerland, and also mastered French. The high-end Swiss watch industry, even today, mostly operates in French. They can speak English, but they think in French; and so, by speaking the language fluently, Abdulmagied removed any friction that would have kept any other Gulf trader at arm’s length. He could sit across the table from the Sterns at Patek or the executives at Rolex and communicate more like a peer than an outsider using interpreters.

He built personal relationships with the families behind the brands, and bear in mind, these were forged in the 1960s and 70s, decades before the modern luxury boom. This of course created loyalty that would protect the Seddiqi’s agency agreements through every subsequent wave of industry change.

His father, Ahmed Qassim Seddiqi never visited Switzerland himself. He built the business from the souk, and his son took it to the world. That generational handoff is the foundation of everything that came after.

It’s important to remember that Abdulmagied didn’t build this alone. He and his brother Abdul Hamied were always a team - Abdulmagied was the elder and the figurehead for decades, but they both worked incredibly hard and were very complementary in their talents. Those who know them well speak of them with equal admiration, and the Seddiqi group is fortunate to still have Abdul Hamied as Chairman today.

Rolex and Patek

The two partnerships that define the Seddiqi empire were established quite early on. Rolex came on board in 1952, just two years after the company’s founding. Patek followed in 1960, making Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons the first authorised retailer for Patek in the UAE.

The Rolex relationship is the bedrock, and it eventually led to the opening of the world’s largest Rolex boutique in the Fashion Avenue of Dubai Mall in 2018 - an 850-square-metre space over three levels. If you ever wanted a physical measure of the trust Rolex places in the Seddiqi family, that building is it.

The Patek partnership arguably holds more symbolism, though, because in 1960, taking on Patek was a statement that the Gulf was ready for watches valued and viewed differently. That bet on sophistication, placed over sixty years ago, looks rather prescient now!

Champion of the independents

This is the part of Abdulmagied’s legacy that I think matters most to SDC readers, and it’s the part that the broader industry tributes seem to underplay. In the early 2000s, independent brands like Journe, Urwerk, MB&F, and De Bethune were risky propositions. They lacked the marketing budgets of Richemont or Swatch Group and as a result, they struggled to get retail space. Most multi-brand retailers viewed them as small-time curiosities rather than serious commercial prospects.

Abdulmagied saw something else in them; he gave these brands retail space in one of the world’s fastest growing luxury markets. More importantly, he gave them liquidity by paying upfront for orders at a time when cash flow was a huge problem for most independent makers. If you wanted to understand why Dubai became one of the top markets globally for independent horology, this is the answer. It wasn’t magical or inevitable at all; it was clearly a choice made by a retailer who understood that artistic merit and commercial viability could coexist.

Max Büsser put it like this (discussing the Seddiqi 75th anniversary collaboration last year):

“I have been privileged over the last 27 years of their 75-year history, to have counted the Seddiqi family as very close friends. They welcomed me when I was at my most vulnerable, they many times helped me when I was down, and were there to celebrate our greatest achievements together.”

That quote tells you everything you need to know; when Max talks about vulnerability, he’s talking about the early years of MB&F at a time when the business could have folded at any point. The Seddiqi family backed him when the smart business decision might have been to fill those shelves with more variations of Hublot.

Max’s tribute on Instagram speaks to his love for the man as well:

Thank you Magied. Thank you for being there for me, when virtually no one was. Thank you for trusting me when it was a gigantic leap of faith – not once, but twice. Thank you for always being so kind and caring, notwithstanding your busy schedule and very important responsibilities.

Thank you for opening my eyes to this incredible country and its people. Thank you for always making me feel so welcome. Ever since that day, 27 years ago, when we first met in Dubai, you helped change my family’s and company’s life in so many ways. I will always try to make you proud.

Yesterday was such a sad day for all of us. My thoughts are with your beautiful family.

Dubai Watch Week

Dubai Watch Week launched in 2015 and has grown into what many consider the best watch event in the world. While Hind Seddiqi leads DWW as CEO, and Mohammed Abdulmagied Seddiqi drives the broader corporate strategy, the ethos of the event is, I believe, a direct inheritance from Abdulmagied’s own journey.

He went to Switzerland to learn, and spent decades building relationships based on knowledge and appreciation instead of just focusing on purchase orders. DWW exists because someone in the Seddiqi family understood, long before it became fashionable to say so, that the watch industry’s future depends on making collectors smarter and not just trying to make them spend more.

Beyond watches

Abdulmagied’s influence naturally extended well beyond retail. The family’s philanthropic work is worth noting briefly. In 2008, Abdulmagied announced a $5 million donation to the Dubai Harvard Foundation for Medical Research; the auditorium at the Harvard Medical School Dubai Center now bears the Ahmed Seddiqi name.

In 2020, during the pandemic, the family donated AED 10 million to the Al Jalila Foundation for COVID-19 research. They also endowed the Ahmed Seddiqi Chair in Gulf and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Sharjah with AED 15 million, specifically to preserve regional history as the Gulf modernises at extraordinary speed.

The corporate restructuring into Seddiqi Holding in 2007 was quite a significant move as well. In the Gulf, family businesses often fracture by the third generation and this move seems to have preempted a future problem. Abdulmagied and Abdul Hamied prevented any drama by professionalising the organisation together - and once again, the complementary nature of their partnership was on full display here. They brought the watch retail business, Swiss Watch Services (established back in 1964), the Mizzen fashion arm, and Seddiqi Properties under one governance structure. Swiss Watch Services alone is a fantastic asset; it employs Swiss-trained watchmakers and holds authorised service centre status for brands that rarely grant it to third parties, meaning a watch bought in Dubai can be serviced in Dubai.

What he leaves behind

Abdulmagied is survived by his four sons (Mohammed, Hassan, Ahmed, and Mansour) and his brother Abdul Hamied. His other brother, Ibrahim, predeceased him. The third generation is firmly settled, with Mohammed as CEO of Ahmed Seddiqi, Hind as CEO of Dubai Watch Week, Osama as vice-chairman of Seddiqi Holding1.

The family statement described Abdulmagied as “a devoted father and a deeply cherished member of our family... known for his warmth, generosity of spirit, and quiet strength.”

It feels like “quiet strength” is on point here; Abdulmagied’s influence was built on relationships cultivated over decades, on handshakes in Geneva that were honoured across generations, on the silent patronage of paying independent watchmakers upfront when they needed it most, on establishing service infrastructure that other markets still lack, and on the insight that educating your customers is better business than simply selling to them. None of this is social-media worthy at all, but it is absolutely more powerful than your usual sales tactics.

The watch industry has lost many good people over the years, and the loss of Abdulmagied is worth a pause as well. He represented a kind of bridge between the old souk trading culture and modern luxury retail, between the Swiss establishment and the Gulf market, and maybe even between commerce and culture itself.

That bridge will stand, because he built it well.

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I’d like to extend my deepest condolences to the entire Seddiqi family, their employees, and the wider community who knew and loved Abdulmagied Ahmed Seddiqi. May he rest in peace.

🔨Should watchmakers get paid when their work is resold?

Last week, SDC subscriber (and prolific-commenter!) sent me this note:

A thought for one of your pieces, maybe (unless you’ve already covered it, which wouldn’t surprise me).

An artist, early in her career, sells one of her paintings to Mr. X for $1,000. Five years later, the artist has become a huge success. And Mr. X, smelling a nice return on his investment, decides to auction the painting he bought from her, and gives it to Sotheby’s to handle. It hammers at $250,000. All of which goes to Sotheby’s and to Mr. X. None to the artist.

Of course, if you swap out ‘painting’ for ‘watch’ and ‘artist’ for ‘watchmaker’, this essentially describes the independent watch market since the hype cycles began in 2021.

I’ve been chewing on this for a few days, and what follows is my attempt to unpack the legal, economic, and psychological dimensions of this question.

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🚀 Rolex’s Beige Box Gets Bigger

Early in January, Coronet reported that Rolex plans to increase the size of its certified pre-owned (CPO) presentation boxes to match its standard green ones. Nobody cared at the time, admittedly because it seemed like pointless ‘packaging trivia’, but upon reflection, I think it may tell us something about where Rolex is heading.

Since launching CPO in late 2022, Rolex has used beige boxes roughly half the size of the green ones you get with new watches. The official line was sustainability, which nowadays is perhaps fair enough. However, the practical effect was the creation of a subtle hierarchy effect, where a green box means new, and a smaller beige box means... well, NOT new. It’s akin to a “full experience” versus what we could call “the sensible alternative.”

Now, by making the boxes the same size, Rolex is reducing that distinction. They’re signalling that CPO isn’t really a “lesser” path to ownership - it’s more of a parallel one, with somewhat equivalent prestige. It’s still not a full-green experience, but it’s a little closer. In fact, by matching the physical size, they are essentially institutionalising the “second-hand” purchase, and betting that the official Rolex certification is becoming a Veblen good in its own right, perhaps even more prestigious to a certain buyer than the “newness” of the watch itself. And of course, if you look at the numbers, you begin to understand why they’d bother with all this.

Half a Billion Dollars and Just Getting Started

In the Morgan Stanley Q4 2025 SDC post, some interesting discussion took place in the comments about where all this is heading. In addition, one line from the report is worth recalling as well: “We estimate Rolex CPO sales exceeded $500 million last year, surpassing the annual primary-market turnover of most Swiss brands.”

That’s pretty crazy right? Rolex has built a side business, inside their main business, and it’s already larger than most of their competitors’ entire operations. To make matters worse for the competition, it’s growing at 60% annually. If that growth rate holds (admittedly a big “if,” largely dependent on how many pieces they can convince owners to part with), you’re looking at something like:

• 2026: ~$850 million

• 2027: ~$1.4 billion

• 2028: ~$2.2 billion

Now perhaps this growth will slow down, and it may only hit $2 billion by 2032 or whatever - but I’d guess other brands will perform worse over this period as well… which means, at some point in the next 2-4 years, “Rolex CPO” will rank among the top five Swiss watch brands by revenue. Again, that’s not Rolex the company, it’s just their pre-owned programme 😂!

Closed Loop = Central Bank

Rolex has essentially built a streamlined way to cash in on the same watch multiple times. They sell you a Submariner, you wear it for a few years, trade it in for something else, and Rolex sells that same Submariner again through CPO - which currently commands a 28% premium over equivalent grey market pieces.

The trade-in mechanism is particularly clever if you think about it. Someone walks into an AD hoping for a new GMT, learns there’s a long wait, but the salesperson offers to take their old Sub as a trade-in toward a CPO GMT they can leave with today. Rolex captures both ends of that transaction (the old Sub, and the CPO GMT), and the customer stays in the Rolex family, walking out enjoying the GMT they wanted in the first place. Don’t forget, the grey dealer who might have bought that Sub, gets nothing.

This system is circular, self-reinforcing, and at some point it will become unstoppable (who can forget Amazon’s rise to where they are now). Every CPO sale potentially creates the next piece of CPO inventory via trade-in. On top of that, every trade-in keeps the customer inside the Rolex ecosystem. Buy a Rolex, trade it in for another Rolex… repeat indefinitely.

There is also a deeper level of control at play here. By becoming the largest player in the secondary market for their own watches, Rolex is effectively acting like a Central Bank. If the market starts to dip, they can adjust their “intake” or trade-in valuations to support a floor price. This “Price Floor Control” mechanism will protect the brand equity of every Rolex ever made, and make the purchase feel less like “luxury spend” and more like a “high-yield savings account.” I’m not sure this is necessarily a good thing for watch enthusiasts, but it’s good for the pocketbooks of anyone buying Rolex.

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Neat!

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🪤 Novelty Traps

Jack Forster published something yesterday which I had been thinking about for a few weeks now - I had a different draft of this post and I kinda scrapped/repurposed it to accommodate Jack’s excellent thoughts. Jack counted the brands showing up in Geneva this April, and the total is absurd. Watches & Wonders has 66 exhibitors, Time To Watches has 93, Chronopolis (a new independent-focused show) has 20… and that’s not counting the “pirates” (Jean-Frédéric Dufour’s term) who are formally exhibiting at hotels and boutiques around the city. Jack’s pretty reasonable estimate was over 200 brands competing for attention across seven days.

If you wanted to see everyone, you’re looking at ~28.6 brands per day. So at half an hour each, assuming you can teleport between meetings, that’s just over ~14 hours of appointments daily - which of course leaves no time for writing, eating, sleeping, or basic hygiene. Jack, unsurprisingly, did all the math.

What I find fascinating is how everyone involved inherently knows these numbers; the brands know, the journalists know, and I have to presume the organisers definitely know. And yet, the system persists.

Why is that?

Prisoner’s dilemma (of presence)

It’s kinda obvious that there’s a game theory problem here. If you’re a brand, skipping Geneva feels dangerous. Your competitors will be there, press will be there, collectors will be there... which means your absence might be interpreted as weakness, or worse, irrelevance. So you pay your CHF 5,250 minimum at Time To Watches (or up to CHF 50,000 for a larger stand) and you show up - even if you suspect the return on investment is questionable.

The result is what you see here; everyone’s rational individual decision to attend seems to have created a collectively irrational outcome. Two hundred brands competing for finite attention means most brands get almost none. The noise floor rises, and signal becomes harder to detect, as it were. Except, nobody wants to be the first to defect, because what if their competitors benefit from their absence?

MING decided the game wasn’t worth it this year, and they may be one of the most visible and interesting independents choosing to sit out1. It is reasonable to presume they’ve done the calculation and concluded that their direct relationship with collectors matters more than the marginal exposure from being one of many brands in this sea of brands. They might be right, but then again, MING has the luxury of a fairly established audience. A newer brand doesn’t have that option… or at least, doesn’t think it does.

Attention budget

From a collector’s perspective, you have finite attention, finite time, and but for a select few, finite money. Every brand that demands your attention is competing with every other brand for these scarce resources. This has always been true, but clearly the scale has changed.

Jack notes that in 2015, the SIHH had just 16 brands and Baselworld had 288 watch brands among its 1500 total exhibitors. Combined, that’s 304 brands at two shows, spread across different cities and different times of year. Today we have 200+ brands in one city across one week, and that’s before counting Geneva Watch Days in September, Dubai Watch Week in November, I Am Watch in Singapore, various events in Milan and Prague, and LVMH doing their own thing in January.

The event calendar now creates structural pressure to produce novelty. If you’re attending four or five major shows per year, you need four or five “stories” per year i.e. four or five reasons for journalists to write about you. In other words, the calendar demands content.

As a result, brands create variants instead of innovating; limited editions of existing models, collaborations, new straps perhaps... just to have something to show.

Diversity camouflaging uniformity

Jack makes another great observation; he compares the current watch landscape to the Cambrian Explosion, when life on Earth went from relatively simple organisms to an extraordinary diversity of body plans in a geological eyeblink. But then he notes how mechanical watches haven’t changed in any significant technical aspect since the ~1920s and 1930s.

So yeah, there may be thousands of watch brands out there and tens or hundreds of thousands of models, but fundamentally they’re all variations on the same engineering. The apparent diversity, therefore, is built on necessary uniformity.

This means that when 200 brands show up in Geneva, many of them are, at a technical level, offering essentially the same thing in different packaging. The differentiation is indeed aesthetic, narrative, and otherwise tribal - which we’ve all inherently understood already, but perhaps need a reminder sometimes.

In the end, it’s about which story resonates with you, which community you want to belong to, and which identity you’re constructing. The watch itself (mechanically speaking, anyway) is just table stakes. recently wrote ‘Storytelling Is No Longer Optional’:

There’s a meaningful difference between marketing and storytelling. Marketing exists to sell a product and explain its features. Storytelling helps collectors understand intent, context, and point of view. Storytelling provides context. Collectors tend to recognize when they’re being marketed to, and they also recognize when a story feels incomplete.

Communication-to-production ratio

As you’re aware, Rexhep Rexhepi tends to announce very little, but he also makes vanishingly few watches - and so, this ratio feels appropriate. The scarcity of his communication mostly mirrors the scarcity of his production. When he shows something, it kinda matters a bit more.

Journe makes about 1,000 watches a year, and after the Furtif release, I’m not sure people care as much about what he’ll announce next. There’s a bit of fatigue setting in because communication has outpaced accessibility of the watches (not that this is any fault of the brand’s). Besides, many people just want an Elegante at this point, and even that possibility feels ever more theoretical as time goes by. So for Journe, any announcements are akin to ‘entertainment’ as opposed to information any average person can act upon.

Rolex makes at least hundreds of thousands of watches, and the MS report says, millions of watches. Their relatively restrained communication calendar makes sense because when they announce something, a meaningful number of people might actually buy it eventually… For me, their ratio seems to work just fine.

Now, what about brands making 5,000 to 75,000 watches a year acting like they need the communication cadence of someone making 500,000? I was reading the NYT earlier, and encountered this crazy paid advert from Patek. They’re generating attention they can’t satisfy, creating desire they can’t fulfill, and building awareness among people who will never become customers2. As far as I am concerned, each time they do this, they’re training their audience to tune out altogether.

What gets lost

The system we have now does serve some participants quite well. I mean, the biggest brands get the lion’s share of attention regardless. As Jack notes, some of them don’t even make appointment slots available through the Watches & Wonders booking platform. If you want a meeting, you contact their PR director directly - and even then, unless you’re a VIP you won’t get an appointment3.

The system also serves media outlets with commercial interests; if your business model involves selling watches or partnering with brands, the shows are where those relationships get built and maintained. The editorial coverage is, in some sense, a side effect.

What gets lost is the collector who wants to understand the landscape, or the enthusiast trying to figure out what’s actually good or what they like - this is the person who doesn’t already know which 20 of the 200 brands are worth their time.

Jack puts it well:

Whether or not this constitutes a glut of watch brands depends a great deal on your appetite, but the total number of watches you would have to have some knowledge of, in order to have a broad sense of the state of the industry and of the art of watchmaking, is clearly high enough that no individual watch enthusiast, journalist, or single media entity can keep track of everybody.

This is naturally combined with the presence of interest-specific communities online and in private or semiprivate venues like LinkedIn, which further encourages the Balkanization of the enthusiast and collector communities.

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Given we’ve already covered tariffs in the past, you might be tempted to roll your eyes but bear with me for a second. This time, the impact on the luxury watch industry would still be significant but it would be asymmetrical! Germany is a fairly prestigious watchmaking nation (Lange, Glashütte Original, Nomos, Sinn etc), and they are directly in the crosshairs this time. UK will also suffer, with the likes of Bremont, Christopher Ward (partially Swiss, but UK HQ), Studio Underd0g, and even independents like Roger Smith!

I guess it also depends on how this is enforced; usually tariffs are applied based on “Country of Origin” but if the US applies them based on “Brand Headquarters” (less common but possible in trade wars, and nothing seems impossible with Trump!), French giants like Cartier, Chanel, Hermès and Louis Vuitton could get screwed.

Anyway, today we will investigate the MoonSwatch Moat and ask why, after all these years, no other group has managed to replicate Swatch’s alchemy. Later, we go deep on the concept of “Carriage” - how distribution gatekeepers determine what you buy, and why some are losing the visibility war. Finally, we wrap things up with a lesson on Beat Error and what a timegrapher can teach us about parenting.

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🌙 MoonSwatch Moat

A couple of years ago Swatch dropped what might be the most audacious product in modern watch history. They took the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, which was NASA-certified and Neil-Armstrong-approved, replaced the case with a bioceramic plastic one, coloured them like a packet of Skittles, stuck a quartz movement inside, and sold it for $260+. The industry lost its collective mind, and Swatch Group stakeholders all ran off to the bank.

People queued overnight, fights broke out in some cities, and the secondary market prices hit insane levels for watches that actually cost less than dinner at Nobu. Nick Hayek sold over 2 million of these things by 2023, probably laughing the entire time while smoking cigars during press conferences.

And yet, here we are nearly 4 years later, and despite its success, nobody else has tried to copy the MoonSwatch. It’s curious, don’t you think? Not Richemont with their stable of icons, not LVMH with their marketing juggernaut, and not even the Japanese giants with their volume manufacturing expertise.

Why is that?

The easy answer is that everyone’s scared of diluting their brand equity. The more interesting answer is that the MoonSwatch is a trick that can only be performed once, by one specific magician. Everyone else is missing at least one crucial ingredient.

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Oh, btw, I saw one of the AP novelties for 2026 and mark my words… everyone is going to accuse them of copying Cartier 😂.1

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🖼️ The Art of the Con

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With all that in mind, I am sitting here staring at a blank page wondering where to begin. I think it would be helpful to map out what’s happening, and then explore what might happen next. Of course, given this is primarily about watches, we’ll also talk about what all of this means for the luxury watch market.

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🚀 Maduro, Missiles, and (Luxury Watch) Markets

Venezuela

On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces struck multiple military installations in Caracas; La Carlota air base, Fuerte Tiuna military complex, the Port of La Guaira were all hit. Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured during the operation, transferred to USS Iwo Jima, then flown to New York. They’re now in DEA custody facing narco-terrorism charges amongst other things, and arraignment is expected on January 6.

This came after months of escalation and posturing. The U.S. conducted 35 strikes on alleged drug vessels under “Operation Southern Spear,” killing 115+ people. They declared Venezuelan airspace “closed,” imposed a naval blockade, and deployed 11 ships including the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group. About 15,000 U.S. personnel are now positioned in the Caribbean and Gulf region.

The operation was formally designated “Operation Absolute Resolve.” Trump has already announced intentions to “run the country” temporarily, but for now, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has been appointed Acting President by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, demanded Maduro’s release, and is refusing cooperation with the U.S.

The operation itself was supremely efficient; to the point where you wonder how they took so long to ‘get’ Bin Laden and others. According to tactical reports, Delta Force and FBI Hostage Rescue Team operators were inserted directly into Fuerte Tiuna’s compound by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment using stealth-modified helicopters. Before they arrived, EA-18G Growlers had jammed Venezuelan air defences (Russian-made S-300 and Buk systems) and this created what one analyst called a “digital blackout.” The ground phase only lasted about 25 minutes or so!

Maduro was reportedly heading toward a five-level underground bunker (built by Chinese engineers, obviously) when the raid began, but did not reach the blast doors in time. The resistance came primarily from Wagner Group mercenaries and Cuban-trained Presidential Guard. Casualties have been estiamted at between 40-60 Venezuelan and mercenary forces, with zero American fatalities (but two wounded).

Since the operation, Trump has already doubled down; in an interview mentioned by The Atlantic yesterday, he issued a direct threat to Rodríguez: “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” He also confirmed that “rebuilding there and regime change, anything you want to call it, is better than what you have right now” – which is clearly a wild reversal from his 2016 position against nation-building. When he was asked about Greenland, he said: “We do need Greenland, absolutely.” Secretary of State Rubio’s comment that the world should “take notice” would suggest that Venezuela may indeed not be the last intervention.

I am no expert but by many accounts this is already the most significant U.S. military intervention in Latin America since 1989. It’s also the physical manifestation of the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (“Donroe” lol!), which designated the Western Hemisphere as America’s top strategic priority - they explicitly deny “non-hemispheric competitors” (read: China and Russia) the ability to control strategic assets in the Americas.

The international response has been predictably, umm, bifurcated1! Brazil’s Lula condemned it as “an unacceptable line” and “grave affront to sovereignty.” Colombia deployed border troops. Argentina’s Milei hailed it as a “victory for freedom.” China and Russia condemned violations of international law (also lol!). The UN Secretary-General declared himself “deeply alarmed.” Of course he did.

If you’re a new subscriber and are wondering what this has to do with watches, bear with me. We’ll get there eventually. But first, we must look at the other major geopolitical pressure point.

Taiwan

From December 29-30, 2025, China conducted “Justice Mission 2025” which was purported to be the largest Taiwan-focused military exercises since Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit. The PLA deployed 130+ aircraft, 14 warships, and 8 coast guard vessels. Ninety aircraft crossed the median line, and live rockets landed just 44km off Taiwan’s coast (the closest PLA projectiles have ever come to Taiwan itself).

This marked the first large-scale exercise explicitly rehearsing blockade scenarios and the first breach of Taiwan’s territorial waters. The exercises followed Trump’s approval of an $11.1 billion arms package to Taiwan (the largest in history, exceeding total Biden administration sales). It includes 82 HIMARS systems (rocket launchers) with ATACMS missiles2, autonomous aerial vehicles, and Javelin missiles.

Despite all these military tensions, U.S.-China economic relations kinda stabilised after the October 2025 Trump-Xi meeting in Busan. Tariffs came down from peak levels of 145%/125% to 30%/10% through November 2026. China generously committed to purchase 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually through 2028.

But a key point in all of this was that Taiwan “did not feature prominently” in their discussions. Some analysts suggest this is because “an increasingly confident China feels no need to discuss Taiwan with the U.S. anymore.” That’s not exactly comforting, is it?

Xi Jinping’s New Year 2026 address declared Taiwan “reunification” as “unstoppable.” Taiwan’s President Lai committed to raising defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2030 and announced a $40 billion supplementary defence budget. The PLA has been directed to achieve readiness for a Taiwan operation by 2027 - this is the “Davidson Window” (cited by U.S. military assessors).

So… we’ve got Venezuela exploding on one side of the world and Taiwan simmering on the other. Keep this in mind as we consider the Swiss watch industry which is trying to navigate the fallout.

Beyond oil

The conventional explanation for the whole Venezuela situation is based on oil and access to heavy crude. Trump himself has leaned heavily into this framing so far, and it makes intuitive sense to everyone who hears it, given Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven reserves. That said, there is a compelling alternative thesis circulating in strategic circles that deserves some attention, and that is the oil narrative is actually a distraction, and the real driver was critical minerals and national security which is reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The argument goes like this; Venezuelan oil production has collapsed from 3 million barrels per day to roughly 700,000, and their infrastructure is heavily degraded. If this were purely about oil, the operation would have happened in 2019 during the Guaidó crisis when production was higher (and international support much stronger).

The timing right now, corresponds to a few other interesting events; the Pentagon elevated critical minerals to being a “top strategic priority” (allocating $7.5 billion under recent legislation), China imposed rare earth export restrictions last year (we discussed it here) which demonstrated willingness to weaponise supply chains, and the Chinese purportedly gained “indirect operational control” of Venezuelan mining operations.

Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc (111,843 square kilometres across Bolívar and Amazonas states) contains documented deposits of coltan (the ore for tantalum), rare earth elements, and cassiterite. Investigative reporting has documented Chinese buyers operating directly at mining sites, and coordinating with both Colombian guerrilla groups who control physical security and Venezuelan state security (they facilitate transport). One miner described seeing Chinese operatives and ELN commanders “eating together, buying material together, and getting off the helicopter together.”

Tantalum is lovely in watches, but it’s also essential for capacitors in military electronics, missile guidance systems, and radar equipment. Who knew! Rare earth minerals also enable permanent magnets in precision-guided munitions. The United States is 100% import-reliant for 12 critical minerals and over 50% reliant for 28 of the 50 minerals classified as essential to national security. As we all know, China controls 91% of global rare earth processing. So when Pentagon weapons systems potentially incorporate materials extracted “under Chinese supervision in Venezuelan territory, then processed in Chinese refineries controlled by Beijing” … you can see why this might concern the U.S. even more than oil and money!

That’s bad enough, but this is also a convergence of all three major U.S. adversaries in one location. China is controlling critical mineral extraction, Iran is operating IRGC drone manufacturing facilities with 2,000-kilometre range (sufficient to reach Florida), and Russia has 120+ military advisers under a general who commanded the Kakhovka Dam operation in Ukraine. So it turns out, Venezuela may have become the only place in the Western Hemisphere where all three established an operational presence. From a Pentagon perspective, breaking Chinese supply chain dominance, eliminating Iranian manufacturing capability, and expelling Russian military presence may have been primary objectives – with oil being the convenient ‘public messaging’ choice.

I am not saying the ‘oil thesis’ is wrong, and both explanations likely contain some truth. Trump talks about oil because voters understand oil and the Iraq precedent is already established. Pentagon planners may have approved the operation for entirely different reasons, but what matters for our purposes is recognising that the strategic calculus here is more complex than “America wants Venezuelan crude.” The critical minerals angle, in particular, has implications for manufacturing supply chains that extend well beyond defence – including, by the way, the CNC machines and electronic components used in watchmaking!

Watch market recap

Through November 2025, Swiss watch exports declined 2.2% year-to-date, November specifically was down 7.3%, and volume fell to historic lows (December data isn’t released yet). The industry, it seems, is shifting decisively toward high-value pieces.

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Rolex 2026 Price Hikes (US)

Rolex’s January 2026 US price list is out, and while there are more details at the end1 for those who want to pore over every reference, here are the high-level takeaways.

$10,000 Submariner - the no-date Submariner (124060) has crossed the five-figure threshold, moving from $9,500 to $10,050 (the date version (126610LN) goes from $10,650 to $11,350). This is one of those psychological barriers that probably matters more in conversation than in practice - if you were prepared to spend $9,500 on a watch, you’re probably not walking away at $10,050, fine. But it does mark something, don’t you think?

The Submariner was, for a long time (which admittedly might now seem like a long time ago), the “accessible” Rolex sports watch. This was one which anyone could theoretically save up for. At five figures, it kinda feels like it’s moved to “luxury asset” territory as opposed to “expensive tool” territory. Whether that distinction means anything to you, probably depends on how you think about these things.

Gold is up more than steel - the pattern across the entire catalogue seems to be that steel models are up ~5-6%, and gold models are up ~8-9%. The gold Daytona breaking $50,000 is also kinda notable. You might be wondering whether this jump reflects gold prices, margin expansion, or just Rolex testing how much the market will bear... I’d say it’s probably all three.

Entry sports keep creeping up - the Explorer (124270) moved from $7,500 to $7,900, and the Air-King (126900) went from $7,750 to $8,150 - so they’re both now “almost $8,000” for time-only steel sports watches. This essentially creates more breathing room for Tudor in the $4,000-6,000 bracket, which is presumably the point. The “affordable Rolex” is increasingly a contradiction in terms - until it disappears entirely.

The overall picture - Rolex has enough brand equity to push prices upward without worrying about demand; plus they can afford to turn down production to ensure they don’t flood the market and achieve a favourable supply/demand balance. Steel increases roughly match inflation, and gold increases exceed it for the reasons we discussed. In today’s market, the practical implication is likely that the secondary market premiums should compress slightly as retail catches up - as opposed to before, when the premium would stay constant The main takeaway is that Rolex continues to move upmarket, and this leaves more space below for Tudor and everyone else fighting over the lower-end of the price spectrum.

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November FHS Update

We kinda covered this in last week’s long read, so you will already know that the November Swiss watch export data is a right mess. For posterity, I wanted to cover the FHS November report in more detail.

Total exports dropped 7.3% to ~2.2ish billion francs, and the headline number that everyone’s focused on is the United States, down -52.3%. Swiss watch exports to America plunged by more than half in a single month, and as WatchPro points out, this is Trump’s tariff chaos coming home to roost. They wrote:

“Luxury watch prices are higher by double-digit percentages in America than for any comparable wealthy nation, and the chaotic rollercoaster of tariff rates has shaken confidence within the world’s biggest watch market.”

I suppose when the US market effectively ‘closed’, all those watches still being made needed to go somewhere. So brands did what they had to do, and redistributed stock to markets that were still functioning. The numbers seem to tell that story, anyway.

For November specifically:

WatchPro also mentioned that UAE grew 21%, Canada 18%, and Saudi 12%. I think the problem with this ‘solution’ of redirecting inventory is that it creates artificial demand in markets that may not have actually wanted those particular pieces at that particular time. If brands are forcing watches onto markets based on logistical necessity instead of consumer appetite, it’s fine as a short-term fix - but yet again, it stores up problems which will worsen the future (longer inventory days, close-out sales for old stock, eroding brand equity and so on).

According to Oliver Müller who is involved with the Morgan Stanley/Luxecosult report, Rolex, AP, Patek, RM, and Cartier account for 55% of Swiss watch industry value, and they are expected to have grown 3% to 5% in 2025. If you do the maths on that, the consequence is straightforward. If the total industry is down 2.2% and the top players (more than half the value) grew by several percent, then everyone else must be getting hammered! (Müller suggests around 8% down for the rest).

This bifurcation2 has been building for years, but it’s accelerating hard. Demand is concentrating into fewer brands, and that concentration is becoming more extreme. The watch industry is developing a “winner takes all” dynamic that’s brutal for anyone outside the top tier. The retailers speaking to WatchPro confirm this i.e. demand in America remains robust, but it’s concentrated into those same five names.

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The FHS breaks down performance by export price category, and there’s only one segment showing growth: watches in the CHF 200-500 bracket grew 6.8%. Everything else declined.

“Above CHF 3,000” is a rather opaque way to categorise things, and I really wish they would offer more granular breakdowns so we can see the ‘middle squeeze’ in the numbers. This segment should theoretically be more resilient because buyers at the higher end in this segment have wealth that ignores market turbulence. The fact that it’s declining faster than the mid-tier by volume suggests something interesting is happening with mix - but I am not sure what.

This was interesting, as I would have expected the precious metal dip to be the largest given the gold price. Maybe this supports the hypothesis that precious metal segment is skewing towards higher-value pieces, so even as volumes drop, the rich will still buy rich-people stuff.

So right now, as buyers, this environment should theoretically create some good opportunities. Brands need to move watches, retailers need to make sales targets, and the balance of power is shifting slightly towards customers with cash to burn. But you really need to be selective. The great bifurcation means that deals on top-tier pieces will be minimal, but everything else will be readily available for negotiation.

December data will only arrive in January, but given November’s trajectory, I’d guess 2025 will close somewhere around 2-3% down overall? I suppose that’s disappointing but not catastrophic... The industry has weathered worse.

Now, will 2026 begin a recovery or bring further decline? The tariff situation remains fluid, China shows no signs of rebounding, and the concentration dynamic continues to intensify. The optimistic reading is that tariff reductions will allow American demand to flow normally again, and that will stabilise the overall picture. The pessimistic reading is that fundamental demand is weakening across the board, and the tariff chaos has simply exposed that weakness, not caused it.

I lean towards the pessimistic reading mainly because people have underestimated the macro effects in the USA - here’s an example of the currency effects - and this is just one of the problems which has arisen due to the tariffs:

The one thing I’m confident about is the great bifurcation 😂 - by this I mean, 2026 will see further divergence between winners and losers. If you’re in the big five club, you’ll probably be fine. If you’re not, you need to figure out what makes you different, or you’ll keep getting crushed. The best solution right now, would be to cut production, and start downsizing. Protect your brand by preventing a supply glut.

The watch industry’s old playbook - make nice watches, tell a good story, build relationships with retailers - doesn’t work anymore when demand is concentrating so heavily. You either need to be in the mega-brand club, or you need to find a genuinely defensible niche. The middle ground is sinking fast.

Maybe that’s too grim a conclusion from a single month’s data, and December may yet surprise us all. Hey, who knows, the tariff reduction might unleash pent-up American demand and everything will bounce back beautifully!

But, fvck, I highly doubt it!

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🧸 “Kidults” With More Money?

I’ve been reading a lot about the “kidult” phenomenon in recent months, and I couldn’t help but wonder how (or how much) this applies to the watch industry. Kidults are essentially adults who buy toys - that’s the short version anyway. The longer version involves $1.5 billion spent by over-18s on toys in Q4 2024 alone, which means grown-ups are the toy industry’s most valuable demographic - not toddlers. Circana reports that kidults now account for 28% of global toy sales, and that number has climbed 2.5% in the past two years. In the first half of 2025, US toy sales to adults rose by 18%.

“I have been following the toy market for many years and cannot recall the last time all countries Circana tracks were growing at the same time. The surge in sales can largely be attributed to consumers aged over 12-years-old, who have shown unprecedented growth and are consistently outperforming traditional kids’ trends. Products such as building sets, trading cards, games, plush toys, and collectibles are seeing increased demand from both teens and adults.”

Frédérique Tutt, global toys industry advisor at Circana.

The main products driving this trend range from the obvious (Lego, which now has 142 sets designed specifically for adults) to the viral (Labubu, those fuzzy monster dolls that generated $423 million for Pop Mart in 2024) to the nostalgic (Jellycat, whose plush toys helped the company double its profit last year). Lady Gaga loves Squishmallows, Rihanna clips Labubus to her handbags, and a 50-year-old toy industry marketer named Bob Friedland moved out of his condo because he needed more space for his Lego collection.

“The children’s market has turned into a playground for brands aligning with nostalgic franchises from the 1980s to the 2000s. They have a special allure for Millennials, Gen Z and children today. Offering collectible toys and games steeped in nostalgia will capitalise on this multi-generational appeal. By 2027, the global toys and games market is anticipated to grow by $70.12m. Collectible toys are predicted to skyrocket to a market value of $35.3bn by 2032.”

WGSN

The reasons given for this explosion are consistent across every piece of research I’ve read. Melissa Symonds at Circana reckons: adults buy toys for “positive mental health benefits, as they spark nostalgia and bring escapism from global turmoil.” The FT’s Anjli Raval offered a more sobering take: “For many, that thrill of ownership can be a substitute for bigger life milestones. When owning a home or starting a family can feel out of reach, completing a toy collection is relatively achievable.”

So, to summarise, toys offer stress relief, nostalgia, escapism, the dopamine hit of a successful hunt, community belonging, display culture, and a collectors’ journey from casual interest all the way to obsession.

Does any of this sound familiar?!

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If you’re new to SDC, welcome! Check out older editions of SDC Weekly here, and longer posts in the archive here.

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🖐 The FFC Double Standard

Francis Ford Coppola’s F.P. Journe FFC prototype sold for $10.755 million at Phillips New York on 7 December, smashing the record for any F.P. Journe watch and for any independent watchmaker. You’ve probably read about this already, because the watch world couldn’t shut up about it since it happened; in fact, even this morning, over a week later, random news outlets are covering it. For me, there’s something else in this story that speaks to the absurd hypocrisy in how this industry treats collectors.

I saw the above video on Instagram; François-Paul Journe sitting there with Coppola, all smiles, radiating support and warmth as this man prepared to sell the unique watch that had been made specifically for him. This was a watch that emerged from their friendship… from Coppola’s idea about using a human hand to indicate time, and from many years of collaboration and prototyping. Journe seemed to be genuinely and visibly delighted about this sale. And you know what? Good for him. That’s exactly how it should be.

But wtf?

If you ever thought you needed ‘permission’ to sell a watch, there it is in that video. If you’ve been sitting on a piece that’s worth “life-changing money” for you, but felt guilty about selling it because of some imagined loyalty to a brand, this sale should be your wake-up call. François-Paul himself is sitting there with his mate Francis, and he couldn’t be happier about this watch going to auction.

So why is it that when regular collectors… people who actually saved up, who waited on lists, who built relationships with boutiques… decide to sell their watches, they’re treated like pariahs? Why do brands punish them, blacklist them, whisper about them in disapproving tones as if they’ve committed some cardinal sin?

Do you recall Sly Stallone and his Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime? He flogged it at Sotheby’s for $5.4 million just a couple of years after getting it, and landed in Thierry Stern’s bad books. The watch media had a field day with it, and many wrote pointless articles about his “classic flipper behaviour” as if he’d committed a crime. Thierry himself moaned about it, going on about how it’s not fair for a client that may have been waiting for the piece for many years and then sees it being sold, and how he gets emails from people complaining about watches being sold to certain individuals who then resell them.

But so what? Stallone bought a watch. Then he owned a watch. And then he sold a watch. That’s how ownership works, the last time I checked! If Patek didn’t want him to sell it, they shouldn’t have sold it to him in the first place. But they did, because he’s famous, and because it’s good for the brand to have Sly Stallone wearing their watches.

This is what really gets me - brands create artificial scarcity, build up these elaborate relationship games, make collectors jump through hoops to get allocated a watch, then have the audacity to act betrayed when someone needs or wants to sell. They reap all the benefits of inflated secondary market prices and then guilt-trip the very people who created that value in the first place.

—

Which brings me back to François-Paul and his good mood in that video. If he’s this supportive of Coppola selling a unique prototype made specifically for him, then he really ought to extend that same grace to every single person who owns one of his watches. You can’t have it both ways, and frankly, this applies to every brand playing these games. If you’re going to celebrate celebrity sales at auction, and smile for the cameras when a $10 million result comes through, then you forfeit any right to complain when Mr Nobody from Royal Tunbridge Wells sells his Black Label Optimum because he needs to pay for the house extension he promised his wife.

When brands treat this dynamic so preciously, deploy emotional manipulation to prevent you from making rational financial decisions about your own property, and create systems designed to make you feel guilty about exercising basic ownership rights... just walk away.

We need to normalise not feeling bad about selling, and to stop participating in a system where the house always wins and you’re made to feel like a villain for wanting to cash out. Sell you watches when you want to.

#rantover

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🤝 Seddiqi and Saudi Arabia

Dubai Watch Week hosted a panel featuring Mohammed Abdulmagied Seddiqi (CEO of Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons), Yasmine Alshathry (Founder of CLÉ, a Saudi luxury platform), and moderator Munther Al Muzaki. The room had live translation equipment, because the whole talk was in Arabic. As it happens, this might be one of the most fascinating watch industry conversations of the year; not for what was said, but for what wasn’t said!

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Don’t worry… I won’t bore you with a long story about the new Breguet Expérimentale 1 - we covered that last week 😂. But… FWIW, look at how much nicer it could have looked with a more ‘traditional’ case:

Vacheron released three new Traditionnelle Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin models, this time in a dainty 36.5mm case… but guess what? They cost $100k+, so I guess brands are indeed ‘leaning in’ to the UHNWI segment because let’s be honest, nobody with a limited budget will be buying this thing…

Oh, and Miss Tweed finally wrote about Bennahmias taking control of De Bethune, but this is old news for SDC readers. As it happens, Bennahmias was trying to buy a 60% stake in DB for 100m CHF, but sources have since told me this deal has now fallen through, as they couldn’t make it work. There was also some supposed link to Greubel Forsey in these discussions (1916 was hoping to use the money from selling DB to buy into GF), but I have been unable to piece it all together in a sensible way from credible sources … so for now, there’s nothing else to say on the matter.

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

Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

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👨‍🔧 Ondřej Berkus, Post-Auction

$137,160

That’s what someone paid for an Ondřej Berkus “Minion 2” at Phillips in New York last week. It was a stainless steel regulator tourbillon with a titanium cage and Grand Feu enamel dials. The estimate was $30,000 to $60,000, so the final hammer came in at more than double the high estimate, and more than double the original price, too.

“Fucking hell, really?” was Berkus’s response when I asked him about it1. “I couldn’t believe it. I’m happy it didn’t sell for peanuts, that’s for sure.”

He was watching the auction on his phone while Frozen played on the TV, with his wife sat next to him. The numbers kept climbing, and Berkus kept muttering “Really? Surely not!” to her as the bids rolled in. The whole thing felt surreal to him. Still does, apparently.

This wasn’t actually the first Berkus at auction, despite what Phillips claimed in their catalogue essay. Back on 9 November 2025 in Geneva, a Berkus “Remontoire Dead Beat Seconds” sold for 69,850 CHF. That’s around $50k less than the Minion 2, but it was also Phillips who auctioned it. The Geneva catalogue even stated “we are delighted to offer one of his creations for the first time in an international auction room.” So when the New York catalogue claimed “it is consigned here as the first Ondřej Berkus watch ever to be offered at auction”… well, that’s just not true!

The Geneva result probably helped to lay the groundwork for the New York result. A strong initial auction creates a reference point, and that reference point can become a ‘soft floor’ for future sales. People see 70k CHF and start thinking 100k+ is, well, reasonable?! Whether that logic holds for long is another question entirely.

Ondřej himself is well aware of this too; what I love about Berkus‘s perspective is his refusal to get carried away. The internet loves to throw around words like “genius” when results like this happen, and some of his followers have been calling him exactly that. He’s not buying it; “only those who haven’t met me make that mistake,” he joked… “Imposter syndrome hitting hard as well for sure.”

His perspective is that this is ONE result - one watch, one auction, one outcome. Until there’s a track record of this happening consistently, he reckons you can chalk it up to hype, the promotional work Phillips did, or simply the fact that it was in fact, a nice watch. He’s not about to pop champagne over a single data point. “Let’s not lose our shit over one result,” he told me.

This level-headedness is connected to his recent life changes. Berkus moved from the Czech Republic to Italy, found a place he loves, made a training facility for his horses2, and built a daily routine that gives him peace. A few years ago, he might have celebrated more visibly. These days, he’s content to leave his phone in the car when he visits the stables, because there’s zero mobile reception there, and this seems to be exactly what he needs.

“It’s doing wonders for my inner peace … Deep down I’m still the same guy though. You’ve known me for some time and although my house and the cars are nicer right now I just want to be in the workshop or around my horses and could care for little else.”

Berkus has previously described his waiting list as being “longer than his life expectancy.” Now that auction results are pushing six figures, that problem will only intensify. More people will want his watches, and there’s still only one of him.

His plan for handling this is, well… he doesn’t have one! Not in the traditional sense, anyway.

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as I thought,” he laughed when I asked. “I’m not gonna handle anything really. Just gonna go where life takes me.”

He does leave a few spots each year for watches that are too fun to postpone, regardless of whether they come from his own imagination or a client’s wild idea. This keeps the work evolving. Beyond that, he’s not interested in “capitalising” on the hype by raising prices dramatically.

“I feel like my watches have gotten ridiculously expensive already,” he admitted, “while still somewhat affordable in a world of 100k time-only watches. And I’m being paid fairly for what I’m doing. So no plans to ‘capitalise’ on the hype. I can’t be trusted with money anyway. I just do more and more stupid shit.”

The flip side is that demand filtering might happen naturally. Berkus estimates that close to half the people on his waiting list will eventually drop off, either because life happens, they get tired of waiting, or they find something else that catches their attention. This doesn’t worry him. Even if half disappear, he’ll still have more work than he can complete in a lifetime.

Some of you might remember when I covered the SJX controversy back in September. Brandon Moore wrote an article about Berkus for SJX Watches, and while the piece seemed positive, Berkus felt misrepresented. Moore had written that Berkus “intentionally leaves many components in a visually rough state” and compared him to another independent who supposedly believes “the mainstream obsession with finishing is misplaced.”

Berkus didn’t love that framing, and felt his innovations were being glossed over (but his perceived shortcomings were amplified). The wolf’s teeth gears, for instance, required him to calculate the profile, design custom tools, have them made, and figure out how to cut the wheels because the tool can’t be centred as easily as a symmetrical cutter. Yet the article mentioned some “old dude” (Derek Pratt) and moved on.

I guess the word “rough” carries some baggage; it suggests carelessness or inability to some. “Selective” or “intentional” as alternatives, might do more to suggest artistic vision. Semantics matter, but regardless… Berkus seems to have moved past all this. When I asked whether the auction result confirms that the world finally understands his aesthetic, he didn’t even care to revisit the SJX piece.

“I truly believe that the SJX writer would understand as well if he bothered to do the actual research work. But that’s ancient history now, really. I haven’t really thought about that article since.”

The market seems to have rendered its own verdict anyway. $137k speaks louder than any written review after all.

One piece of ‘news’ (to some) is that Berkus’s wife has apparently discovered her talent for finishing. She’s in training, attending a masterclass with Philippe Narbel in January, and will be helping in the workshop afterwards.

“That will cut down on our combined shop time significantly and let us actually enjoy the country we moved to,” he explained.

This is worth noting because finishing has always been the bottleneck for one-person operations. Machining is where Berkus’s passion lies. He’s said before that finishing is fine, maybe even fun, but it involves performing the same motions over and over for days at a time. Having his wife take on some of that workload could help increase his output without compromising the hands-on nature of his watches; not that he plans to do this, but I’m just saying!

The conventional wisdom says artists need struggle to fuel their creativity. Once you’ve “made it,” the edge dulls; financial security can sometimes breeds complacency. Berkus, however, doesn’t see this as a problem at all.

“It’s not struggle for me, never was,” he said. “I love what I do and while I’m making a watch, usually three or four more versions or evolutions are coming together in my head. I see them as finished pieces when I close my eyes.”

The workshop is where he moves watches from his imagination to his hands. And once they’re finished, he doesn’t seem to suffer from any sentimental attachment. He’s already thinking about the next one.

“Which is kinda liberating cause I’m saved from the emotional strain of ‘letting them go’.”

This emotional detachment might be what allows him to see his watches in the auction market without feeling like he’s losing something precious. For many independents, seeing their work flipped at auction within months of delivery is painful. Berkus seems totally unbothered, which tracks with the man I know.

One image from Berkus I can’t get out of my head is him sitting in a busy airport, tuned out from everything around him, doodling in a notebook. He mentioned that getting paid to do the thing that annoyed all his teachers throughout school is hilarious when you think about it. I’d agree 😂!

Also, he actually doesn’t have some impossible dream watch he’s been too scared to attempt. When an idea arrives, he sketches it immediately, even if it’s just on a post-it note. These post-its accumulate around the workshop, and sometimes he’ll glance at one and see how to improve or develop the concept. He adds a note and keeps going.

“This is where having to do commissioned work actually comes in handy cause otherwise I’d just be messing with ideas on paper or computer and not getting any work done,” he admitted. The specific commissions keep him grounded. Without them, he’d probably spiral into endless concept development and never deliver anything… the client work forces him to work, and to ship.

What the auction tells us

So what does $137k for a Berkus actually mean? On one hand, it validates the independent watchmaking space broadly. A self-taught knife maker from the Czech Republic, now living in Italy, with no formal website and a business run entirely through Instagram, has produced watches that command six-figure prices at major auction houses. Yes, it’s just one watch, but hey, it happened! The pipeline for independent success clearly doesn’t require a Swiss finishing school or decades of restoration work at a major maison. It requires vision, stubbornness, and apparently a willingness to live on the fringes until the market catches up.

On the other hand, again, one result is still one result. Simon Brette’s titanium piece sold for 203k CHF at a recent Geneva auction, and I wrote at the time that as he delivers more pieces, prices might settle lower. The same logic applies to Berkus. More watches at auction will produce more data points, and eventually, we’ll have a clearer picture of where the market actually values his work versus where a single excited bidder was willing to go.

The Geneva result at 70k CHF and the New York result at $137k aren’t directly comparable either - different watches, different complications, different audiences. The Minion 2 had the tourbillon and the Grand Feu enamel dials, and the Geneva piece was titanium with a deadbeat seconds display and remontoire. Both are impressive, but they’re not really the same thing.

There’s an old post on Monochrome Watches; a friend of mine visited Berkus in his workshop and wrote about something called the “Berkus touch.” He described it as intangible but undeniable. Despite the varying case shapes, hand styles, and complications across different watches, something connected them all.

“You’re like a mad scientist,” the author muttered during the visit.

“No, I consider myself more of an alchemist,” Berkus replied.

That framing feels apt, I think. Berkus takes metals and materials we think we understand (damascus steel, mammoth tusk, meteorite) and transforms them into something that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else. The word “impossible” doesn’t seem to exist in his vocabulary.

If there’s a house style, it’s probably sub-40mm watches in cushion cases with minimalist bezels, laser-etched subdials, some kind of retrograde, and a remontoire because… why not? But even that description feels too constraining. Each watch exists in dialogue with its client, and no two are entirely alike.

Final thoughts

Berkus has now appeared at Phillips twice in quick succession, and the results have been strong both times. His waiting list stretches into the next decades, and his wife is training to help with finishing. He’s found peace in Italy with his horses and his workshop. But really, he’s still the same guy, by his own account; still unfazed by external validation, and still mostly interested in the next watch than the last one.

“On a global scale, even on the scale of the watchmaking industry, it means close to nothing,” he said of the auction result. Maybe he’s right, or maybe it hasn’t hit him properly yet - might be a bit of both, too… He did mention he tends to be slow sometimes 😂!

Either way, I reckon we’ll see more Berkus watches at auction in the coming years. The Geneva and New York results created two reference prices, and you bet that secondary market dealers will have noted this. This means collectors sitting on early commissions might be tempted to test the waters.

Whether prices hold, climb, or settle back down remains to be seen, but for now, the self-taught alchemist from Czechia has produced six-figure auction results while watching Frozen with his wife.

Not bad for a guy who once described himself as “unemployable.”

—

The full “interview” is included in the footnotes below3.

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🏭 Studio Underd0g Buys Its Own Factory - Horologium

A few weeks ago I argued that the watch industry is consolidating around players who control critical choke points in the supply chain. Swatch Group owns ETA and Nivarox, Richemont has Valfleurier, Rolex controls Kenissi, Hermès took a stake in Vaucher and LVMH just bought into La Joux-Perret. The big boys are securing their manufacturing futures because movement supply is now more of a strategic consideration which seems to be growing in importance.

What I didn’t explicitly cover is how this same logic applies all the way down the food chain. If you’re a microbrand pumping out a thousand watches a month, your supply chain is just as vulnerable as Hermès’ was before they locked in Vaucher, heck, maybe more so!

We now have some evidence that I was right about consolidation, though from an unexpected direction. Studio Underd0g (SU), the playful British brand known for Watermel0n dials and pizza-themed chronographs, has acquired Horologium Limited.

Initially I thought this was a standard vertical integration play, but commentary from Studio Underd0g founder Richard Benc helped me clarify the picture. This was actually not a pre-meditated exit strategy by the founders, but a negotiation that pivoted towards the end. According to Benc, Studio Underd0g had already secured a minority stake in Horologium Limited in 2024 to secure its supply chain - this actually aligns with Companies House filings showing Goldap Holdings Ltd (Benc’s holding company) acquiring a stake (25-50%) in April 2024.

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