Normally, a box & papers should be the cherry on top of a watch purchase; the quality and flavor of the ice cream itself is far more important. However, a handful of watch presentation boxes have had so much creative effort and love poured into them that they become collectible...

In the same way that when you distill Journe to just the essential elements you wind up at a Chronomètre Bleu, when you distill Voutilainen you wind up at the Vingt-8. The Vingt-8 was Kari’s first entirely ground-up design, movement and all, introduced 2011. Kari chose the most simplistic watch...

This is a Daytona with just one line of text. One. Walt Disney was said to repeatedly answer questions with, ‘observe the masses and the do the opposite.’ In the modern era, the Rolex Daytona has more script written at 12 than a Star Wars opening crawl. Today, it reads...

We all know the three neo-vintage QPs that brought watchmaking back from the dead, but the pair of openwork or skeletonized references from AP and VC have always stood a bit apart, out of the spotlight. They’re not just less often seen, they’re divisive. Perhaps they skirt too close to...

In art, design, music, and many other creative disciplines, you are taught the rules first so that you may choose to break them deliberately. This, I never used to understand, why not just lean in to unbridled creativity? I’m not sure I have the answer, but it’s probably something like...

Swatch Group haven’t managed to fuck up every one of their brands just yet. The day a Swatch x Breguet ‘collab’ arrives will be the day I lose faith in modern mainstream watchmaking. Some things weren’t meant to be distilled. Breguet stands for watchmaking quality above all else. Even if...

Volkswagen’s GTI has many unique talents, but one is criminally overlooked. It looks right dropping off McDonalds at your kids football match or friends of the royal family at Balmoral castle. It makes sense in the parking lot of a Moxy or being valeted at Four Seasons. Somehow, it exists...

Omega gave the world the 861 Speedmaster in 1968. Despite many loupe-carrying nerds decrying the changover from column wheel to cam switching, the movement proved so effective for Omega that it remained in production effectively unaltered until 1992. And even then, the change wasn’t huge moving the 1861. Effectively, you...

Stone dial Day-Dates are having their moment. But this, a bloodstone, defies comparison within Rolex. There are maybe a handful of dials as rare as a white metal bloodstone Day-Date across all Rolex models. There are fewer than 10 known, 8 is my best estimate currently. That makes this humble...

There’s no CNC machine at Haldimann, an independent whose philosophy is about as far from Rolex as watchmaking gets. The most modern machine they have is an optical microscope from the ’60s. I suspect if you showed an iPhone to Beat Haldimann he’d shout witchcraft and report you to the...

The Octa Lune is a bit of an enigma. It’s far from the most complicated Journe, but also not exactly a Chronomètre Bleu. The dial seems haphazard until you stare at it awhile, but then after a time nothing else feels as artful. This is probably why it’s one of...

These days, I’m finding a significant amount of delight in the darker corners of Lange. Things like the guilloché Lange 1s, solid backs, steel examples, first gen Datos, early MiGs, obscure Cabarets, but particularly Lange’s simplest offering: the Saxonia. Lange broke its own rules in the early years, one of...

It’s quite a luxury Cartier enjoy to both be viewed as a design-first watchmaker and simultaneously preside over a handful of the most timeless cases ever penned. Rolex’s Sub, Patek Philippe’s Perpetual Calendar, and indeed Cartier’s Tank all take a different approach to marketing, one best explained by looking at...

There are tales from years ago of clients requesting their Pateks from Tiffany specifically to not bear the Tiffany name on the dial. Even today, there are a tiny subset of collectors who believe having two names on a dial detracts from the watchmaker’s equity. Today’s market, however, violently disagrees....

We now live in a world where a good Milsub is a 500K proposition in USD. So how does it make any sense at all that Bundeswehr-issued Ocean 2000 is still just over 20K? This is a combat diver issued, under-hyped, comparatively economic (I suppose anything is when contrasted against...

What happens when you take a master of grand complications and finishing and apply those talents to a time only watch? Arguably the most coveted watch from a living watchmaker. This is watch which has seen its retail price (not secondary market, mind you) raise from ~50K CHF in the...

Meet the king of sleeper split seconds. Blancpain’s six masterpieces are widely regarded to be some of the greatest forgotten feats of neo-vintage fine watchmaking. But this 1186 with an extremely rare tritium ‘Military Dial’ is not just forgotten, almost no one knew it existed in the first place. The...

Yes, Rolex made an orange racing dial, white gold Daytona. Rolex almost never create limited editions or collaborations. But the operative word there is almost. If you’re 22 SAS, a winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, or Dutch Football Team competing for the World Cup, you just might...