Timepieces are the original traveler’s gadget. In fact, historically speaking most long distance travel and navigation was reliant on suitable timing instruments. Back when A. Lange & Sohne only made pocket watches they would occasionally put together a watch with two dials and movements in it for clients who needed a watch to track two […]

Second to telling the time where you live, the most useful function a watch can have is the ability to tell you the time wherever else you might be. Travelers used to jet setting with a dedicated “world time” watch often never go back to a single time zone watch given the ease of reading […]

“Micro-decoration” (as I call it) is a thing of love. It is the process whereby fine watches are made even finer because of an enormous amount of time spent on making the movement look pretty. There are functional uses to decorating a movement – such as corrosion prevention and ensuring that parts fit together properly, […]

A Study In Consistency Isochronism. A strange word that means a lot in the mechanical watch industry. The idea really being that something moving in the watch does so at a consistent rate–this is the basis of accuracy in a watch. Some high-end watches experiment with a trick to improve isochronism by using two parts […]

Richard Mille and John Simonian walk like good friends with arms around one another. They are smiling as though reminiscing about fond memories. Richard Mille is the man behind the phenomenally successful ultra high-end, technically sophisticated sports watch brand, while John Simonian has long been known as the most important name in Independent watch brands in the United […]

There exists a place between gadgetry and luxury where Richard Mille watches are positioned. You absolutely must have an appreciation for mechanical gizmos to ‘get’ Richard Mille – even more so than you do for “normal” high-end mechanical watches. Forget for a moment that Richard Mille himself partially created the brand as an homage to the high-tech […]

When Movado purchased the rights to the “Museum Dial” clock designed by Nathan George Horwitt in 1947, it changed the face of the brand forever (no pun intended). By the 1980s Movado was more or less primarily known for the Museum Watch, almost exclusively. It was not until a few years ago that Movado wished […]

There exists in psychology a concept known as the hierarchy of needs. This forces us to have a set of wants and desires no matter how comfortable our lives are. The idea is that after a person has satisfied basic elements of life and subsistence, their needs move up the ladder to things such as […]

Are you sure this isn’t a German watch? Yes, it is in fact Swiss. What surprises me is that Blancpain – one of Switzerland’s oldest watch makers – has developed a timepiece that is so straight forward in its unapologetically functional design, and has such a niche, yet useful complication. I tend to typically regard […]

A lesson learned eons ago and since then routinely dismissed is that watch dials should be easy to read. In modern times you’ll find even very high-end watch makers pushing the envelope of design and visual complication to create timepieces that look modern, but often eschew predictable function. One school of thought teaches that to […]

What you can’t easily tell by looking at the dial of this attractive and artsy timepiece is just how complex the mechanics of it actually are. A mere handful of watch makers have been able to achieve the development of the movement type located on the inside — for its sheer defiance of how standard […]

The quaintness of Switzerland seems an odd venue for the design and dissemination of future craft such as this C1 Radar watch from Concord. With the majority of timepieces coming out of Swiss shops being linked in various forms to the past, it requires a sincerely rebellious spirit to break the mold of tradition. Concord […]

When it comes to design, it is often said that a sure-fire formula for success is to make something for yourself. Too many products today are conceived by talent and birthed by committees. Good designs and ideas get molded and degraded by the need to satisfy the many. If a good designer puts their heart […]

Musical watches have a very long history that begins with bells — church bells more specifically. Historically speaking it was a luxury to have the time, expensive if one could have it at all. There was a long period when clocks were large affairs, huge machines that could take up part of a building. Small […]

Jules, have you lost weight? Looks that way as this Audemars Piguet Jules Audemars timepiece sports a very slim case that is just 6.7-mm in thickness. Few things feel as liberating on the wrist as a mysterious slim mechanical timepiece. I use the term mysterious in this case for a very good reason. The sensible good looks […]

Jacob & Co. deserves a lot of respect (and thanks) from the watch industry. Founder Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo is one of the modern luxury watch industry’s most courageous people. No doubt many of Jacob & Co.’s design are polarizing in terms of taste, yet the brand heralded in a new era of risk taking and visual assertion […]