Entries by Ian Skellern

Why If Ultra-Expensive Watches Were 90% Cheaper You Would Probably Lose Interest

Imagine you wake up tomorrow and that in-your-wildest-dreams watch now only costs 10 percent of what it did yesterday. Admittedly that’s still very expensive, but now it’s within reach. You might have to tighten your belt for a while, but you can now own that fantasy watch you have long dreamed of. My bet is that you will not be happy for long, and here’s why.

Baselworld 2017 Lights Up With LUME!

While there are no lack of lights, colors, and sparkles during the day at Baselworld, it’s when the lights go down that you get to learn which watches come out and party after the sun goes down.

Here are a few of the watches that I saw donning their colorful glow-in-the-dark party clothes at Baselworld 2017!

Quill & Pad Team Members Pick Their Top 5 Watches From Baselworld 2017 Plus Special Mentions And Biggest Surprises. Warning: Modem-Burning Photo Fest!

The year 2017 wasn’t just good for both interesting and exciting new wristwatches at Baselworld: I’d go so far to rate it as a vintage year. This article started as a pure Top 5 rundown, but the sheer number of superb watches soon had us reaching for our “Special Mention” over spill. And that’s all without the really big surprises. So without further ado, welcome to our team’s top picks of Baselworld 2017.

Nowhere To Hide: Presenting The Greubel Forsey Balancier (With Lots Of Live Photos)

When you strip away complexity, there is nowhere to hide: everything has to be absolutely perfect because the viewer’s gaze has no distractions. Just as the smallest of scratches on the otherwise unblemished paintwork of a new car appear magnified to our eyes, the design and execution of a relatively simple watch have to be flawless.

It should surprise no one that the Greubel Forsey Balancier has achieved that.

Urwerk Celebrates 20th Anniversary In 2017: But For Me The Brand Really Blasted Off In 2005 With Harry Winston Opus V And UR-103.03

In 2005 I visited Baselworld a portable 20x magnification stereo microscope. Over a few days of examining hundreds of watches, there were only two that stood out as having dials that were flawless under the microscope’s intense scrutiny: one was the wild Harry Winston Opus V by a young brand called Urwerk that had yet to celebrate its tenth birthday. This year Urwerk celebrates its twentieth anniversary and what a 20 years it has been!