From the public’s perspective, Rolex’s surge into its movement revolution began with the now anachronistic-sounding Basel 2000 World Watch, Clock, and Jewelry Show. But the evidence of a long-term engineering campaign was mounting at the patent office and in the dealers’ showrooms as this article by Tim Mosso highlights.
Not many brands have the same depth of history as Breguet. It is one of the oldest watchmaking brands surviving today, established in 1775 by Abraham-Louis Breguet. Raman Kalra reflects on why the brand hasn’t kept up with its peers and what they can do to bounce back.
If you want to love Rolex, but you love mechanical movements more than you love watch brands themselves, rejoice: Tim Mosso thinks that we are living in the halcyon days of Rolex movement innovation and shares a few well-illustrated technical and movement highlights right here.
It’s already time for the latest update in GaryG`s series of articles providing a completely subjective, unscientific, and unofficial history of watch photographs online. The big trend he has recently seen is the emergence of storytelling as a dominant theme in how watches are displayed. And while he lauds the rise to prominence of many more women among the population of online watch shooters and commentators, the emergence of boob shots with a watch hardly “empowers women” . . . or does it?
Not everyone wants to own an iconic watch. Some want to stand out for their individuality or even go under the radar. Ramon Kalra shares his thoughts on collections from some of the largest watch brands that he doesn’t feel get as much attention as they deserve.
As a collector, and a fairly visible one at that, GaryG has been paying attention to reports of muggings and thefts of watches and wondering whether it makes sense these days to wear valuable pieces in public. He polled a group of 20 watch enthusiast friends on their personal safety while wearing watches to learn what steps they take to keep safe.
You can like everything, but you can’t buy – or keep – everything! Inevitably, the choices involved lead at times to regrets; for GaryG, along with many of his pals, the sadness is much more often about pieces they sold too soon or failed to buy rather than pieces they were sorry about buying in the first place. Here’s a story of shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Big brands are now making beautiful, reliable, and relatively accurate “traditional” mechanical watches, but the handcrafted work many of us value is disappearing. Highly skilled watchmakers and artisans are rare and expensive: there just aren’t enough of them available to churn out the large quantity of nice watches now being sold. And why bother when nobody seems to have noticed?
In recent years, several factors have come together resulting in the exponential rise of microbrand watches. This new microbrand wave is one of the biggest developments in the broader watch market. I would mention here that not all microbrands are equal. There are many watches out there that, to be honest, are not worth your time. However, some microbrands are getting it right as Raman Kalra highlights here.
Timepiece repairs can be expensive and often take a long time, so you generally want to avoid damaging a watch. Here John Keil lists five common things you may not be aware of that can damage a watch and how to prevent them.