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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

🚀 The Escapement

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

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

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

Who is “we”, anyway?

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

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

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

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

Who are watch events for?

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

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

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

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

So, what is it?

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

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

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

The stage

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

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

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

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

Nighttime

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

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

If you can’t make it

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

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

VIP versus GA

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical stuff

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

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

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

Hope to see you in Abu Dhabi! ✌️

Leave a comment

Read more

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

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

Real artists do all the painting themselves, not like Rembrandt

Real artists use brushes, not technology like Cartier-Bresson

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

Real musicians record it live, not like Steely Dan

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

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

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

“Here, I made this.”

— Seth Godin

What about real watchmakers?

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~35 mins

🐐 A Crazy Motherfvcker

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

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

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

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

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

Where it starts

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

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

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

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

He’s never been back to Italy since.

A mythical object

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

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

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

Call who?

‘MJ.’

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

One of twenty-three had arrived.

How collectors lie to themselves

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

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

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

Never ask for money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened here?

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

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

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

Behind the memes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

🚗 Ferrari says please don't buy it

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

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

Enrico Galliera

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

Read more

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

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~37 mins

🎰 What You Lose When Your Watch Gets a Ticker

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

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

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

“Hedging” = pure fiction

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

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

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

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

How does art matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the bull case valid?

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

I do have two pushbacks, though.

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

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

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

Thought experiment

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

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

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

So, what to do with this?

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

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

—

Related link:

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

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latour-shaped hole

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

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

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

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

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

Rolex’s version

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

Read more

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~40 mins

👠 Quality won, luxury lost

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

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

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

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

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

Aspirational class disappearing

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

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

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

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

When a brand becomes the product

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

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

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

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

Handmade fairy tale

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

No sh1t!

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

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

Dead middle

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

Read more

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~35 mins

🤡 Stern, again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Read more

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~30 mins

📊 Three quarters of “nice”

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

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

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

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

Headlines have conditions

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~20 mins

Read more

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

Subscribe now

Estimated reading time: ~40 mins

📉 Swiss Watch Industry - March Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Fhs March2026

167KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

🤔 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.

Leave a comment

🔥 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.

Read more

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Leave a comment

🕵️ 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.

Read more

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

2 months 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, .

Leave a comment

🎤 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.

Leave a comment

🥽 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 🙂

Leave a comment

🤑 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.

Read more

Read more

—

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

Subscribe now

🪈 Owning the Pipes

Read more

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.

Read more

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

Subscribe now

🎭 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.

Read more

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

Subscribe now

💿 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.

Read more

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

Subscribe now

💫 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.

Leave a comment

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.

Read more

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: ~30 mins

Subscribe now

🚀 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.

Read more

Neat!

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: ~20 mins

Subscribe now

🪤 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.

Read more