SDC Weekly 121; Revisiting escapements with Lederer; Universal Genève playing the long game
Swatch removed from benchmark index, Geneva auctions, top 30 countries by quality of life, some thoughts on taking care of yourself, nonviolent communication, and more!
🚨 Welcome back to SDC Weekly… “Here are three words: pine, crab, sauce. There’s a fourth word that combines with each of the others to create another common word. What is it?” You’ll find the answer via an article in the links section below.
Breaking news over the weekend, is more trouble for Nick Hayek; the stock exchange operator SIX announced Swatch Group will be removed from the benchmark Swiss Leader Index (SLI) next month, supposedly due to a decline in their market capitalisation and lower trading volumes in its shares. Also, Warren Buffett will release his farewell letter today, so keep an eye out for that on his website, as this will likely be his last one.
Quick note on auctions
I didn’t bother with an auction warm-up, or round-up, because there are ample sources covering this topic already, and it feels like a waste of your time to regurgitate the same stuff. Here’s a recent round-up from Fratello. What I will say, is the Phillips results feel preposterous. The 1518 appears to have underperformed relative to expectations, but several lots simply defy logic. Take this 5370p selling for more than 1.5x the high estimate; you might think that’s pretty reasonable, until you realise there are 16 listings on Chrono24 alone, for the same watch, and even the most expensive listing is 100k CHF lower that this one sold for at Phillips. Some will say it is irrational exuberance, that there are plenty of rich people who get overly excited at auctions and get carried away with bidding… but I have a different theory.
If you ask around, you will find there are many cancelled bids after these auctions, and some people simply don’t pay for the watches they won at auction. Suppose, hypothetically, that this happens to a lot sold at Phillips; so the auction house threatens to blacklist them, or pursue them via the legal route. In reality, the legal pursuit of this flaky-buyer would be costly and, quite frankly, not worth the hassle. In reality, I suppose, they would simply blacklist this person, and maybe contact the under-bidders to try and complete the sale.
The blacklisted person would not care, because it’s quite easy to find a proxy bidder if they ever want to buy something else in the future. But do you see the problem with this outcome? The public auction result would not be corrected! This means that such an auction would be generating bull$hit results which then form “part of history”; yet, it would be outright false information, as no sale was completed at the publicly stated price. There is no fraud, of course; the public claim is this was the “hammer price” which indeed happened, live, in front of everyone at the auction. However, if the money never arrives, and nobody’s the wiser… who is the loser? We are; the general public who are led to believe these prices. Again, this is hypothetical, and I have no way of proving this… but ask around, and see how many lots go cancelled or unpaid. I think you will be horribly surprised 😉
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Estimated reading time: ~29 mins
Universal Genève playing the long game
Universal Genève dropped six chronographs last week; two sets of three watches, priced at CHF 135,000 (excl. VAT) per set - proceeds will be going to the Geneva Watchmaking School if they manage to sell these sets.
The watches reference Nina Rindt’s famous Compax from the 1960s; she was Jochen Rindt’s wife, the Finnish model who turned a chronograph into a fashion statement by swapping its bracelet for a wide leather cuff she found in Paris. We already know these are not the final retail pieces, but make no mistake, they absolutely are perception anchors. When UG finally launches their retail collection formally, they will be hoping that people compare whatever they charge against these six-figure gold pieces, and not against vintage steel Compax models trading for a lot less. Kern’s strategy is to slot UG above Breitling as their premium offering, and Gallet underneath as the more accessible brand. This is standard luxury brand architecture; create a halo, defend the middle, and scrounge for volume at the bottom.
The more interesting place to keep an eye on, is the vintage market. Right now you can buy an actual Nina Rindt Compax, for around $35k (I saw one on eBay). When reissued UG pieces land next year at whatever price Kern sets, that gap will probably widen. Unless the new watches absolutely nail it on design and execution, collectors will simply buy vintage. Why wouldn’t you? The original pieces are a finite resource, and new production isn’t. Think about it differently; imagine if Rolex newly released a modern GMT and somehow vintage 6542s were trading below that retail price. That wouldn’t last too long. Money would flood into the vintage market until pricing normalised… so maybe that’s what will happen here as well. In which case these charity pieces are actually the final warning to buy vintage UG before everyone figures out the arbitrage.
More importantly, though, will anyone care about Universal Genève in 2026? Brand revivals are very hard (just ask Jean Arnault!). The ones that succeed usually offer something truly novel alongside the heritage story. Right now we’ve seen reissues, charity pieces, and positioning statements, but no indication of what makes a 2026 UG worth owning versus a 1960s UG which is already known to be worth collecting. As for these charity pieces, some people love the aesthetic, and many more just seem to balk at the pricing strategy even though it’s for charity. Almost everyone mentions they’d rather buy vintage. Kern is betting people will warm to higher prices through exposure, and that might work for Breitling’s customer base... but whether it works for Universal Genève collectors, who’ve spent decades hunting vintage pieces precisely because they represent value and authenticity - well, that remains to be seen.
What I do know is which one I’d choose… and I suspect you do too. I wonder how much of this is just Kern trying to manifest success. His jazz hands appear to imply people will queue up to buy UG chronographs at higher prices than a Rolex Daytona; I remain sceptical, but we will find out soon enough.
🔎 Revisiting escapements
A couple of weeks ago, we ended the escapement story at an interesting place. Derek Pratt had solved the tourbillon problem i.e. “how to fit Daniels’ Independent Double-Wheel Escapement into a rotating carriage with only one power source.” In his day, Daniels himself had also concluded that he couldn’t miniaturise this escapement down to wristwatch size and also have it work reliably.
That was because the tolerances were too tight, the components were too small and the geometry too unforgiving. Daniels built his Space Traveller pocket watches knowing they represented the pinnacle of what this escapement could achieve at the time and beyond that, it was not possible, he said.
Bernhard Lederer didn’t get that memo, or perhaps more accurately, he got it and decided to take it as a challenge. The Central Impulse Chronometer that Lederer unveiled in 2020 subsequently won the GPHG Innovation Prize in 2021 and the Chronometry Prize in 2024. It was the culmination of, as we now know, over 200 years of horological development - from Breguet’s échappement naturel in 1802, through Daniels’ pocket watch triumphs in the 1970s, to a fully functional wristwatch in the 21st century.
More than that, Lederer didn’t just “scale Daniels’ work down”, he actually solved problems that had hindered every attempt at this type of escapement since Breguet’s time. Let’s look at how he accomplished this.