It’s a bit trite to say that as an indie watchmaker he pursues ideas others ignore and finds a unique interpretation of classic horological themes; that’s what an indie watchmaker is supposed to do. Nevertheless, both aesthetically and technically, Chaykin’s work is without direct comparison. Latterly, he has become well known - perhaps better known than ever - for his Joker and subsequent ‘Wristmons’ designs, watches with eyes for indicators which turned out to lend themselves very nicely to pop-culture influences. These opened up opportunities for collaboration with more affordable indie brands like Louis Erard and Behrens. In 2024, Chaykin surprised the world with the ThinKing, an ultra-thin design that snatched the outright title from Richard Mille’s Ferrari UP-01. Chaykin founded his company in 2003 and is 50 years old; younger than many of his peers who have been in business for a similar time, because he didn’t come up through the Swiss ranks. He’s completely self-taught and in 2010 was admitted to the ranks of the AHCI, the first and to date only Russian watchmaker to receive the honour. His latest watches include the ThinKing Mystery and Matroskin.

A note on paid subscriptions

Free subscribers can now read one free newsletter per month, thanks to a new feature Substack has introduced. Unlike the way I used to operate - whereby the first newsletter of every month was free - this lets you choose which Issue you’d most like to use your free credit on. After that, you’ll be prompted to join the ranks of the faithful, or wait a whole month - God, that’s ages - before it re-sets. Let me know what you think!

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Q&A with Konstantin Chaykin

I’d like to start by saying this isn’t how I like to do things. In an ideal world, an interview should happen in person. Next best, and most common, is over the phone or a video call. This is usually good enough to establish a rapport, but does have its own difficulties. Quite often, especially in interviews with celebrities, who generally would rather be doing anything else, you’ll find they’re trying to do the interview during another activity. Often they’re in the car - I’ve interviewed the captain of the All Blacks, Sir Ian McKellan and a former USAF fighter pilot, among many others, while they were driving or being driven (not at the same time, sadly) and it is rarely a recipe for getting someone’s undivided attention.

Quite a long way further down the journalistic list of preference is the interview by email. This is often insisted upon by big brands and universally detested by writers, who are well aware that the answers are being written by the PR team and passed in front of the CEO for his or her sign-off and have been carefully edited to avoid including anything off-message.

I don’t normally agree to this kind of interview. If a magazine needs a quote or two and it’s the only way they’re going to get them, sometimes you have to go along with it, but I wouldn’t do an entire profile this way.

For this conversation, however, Konstantin Chaykin answered a list of written questions: we had a language barrier to surmount, and while we could have tried to have a call through an interpreter, neither of us could find the time - and that’s hardly a perfect situation either. I can’t be certain that he wrote every word himself, but I am choosing to trust him and his team, not being a giant faceless corporation nervous of upsetting things. There was only one topic that they said they would not discuss, which you might be able to have a guess at. I’ve edited his answers for length (barely, though), and my questions to make me sound really smart1.

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TFW: You said recently (to Fratello) that your magnum opus has not yet been created. Do you have any idea of what it could be?

KC: I truly hope that my greatest work is yet to be created—and thank God for that. I can see and feel that it is possible to create pieces that cannot even be fully conceptualised or grasped just yet. For now, they exist only partially in my head, but bringing them to life will require overcoming a long series of obstacles.

A magnum opus, strictly speaking, should be a singular creation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the most complex piece, nor does it need to encapsulate the entire volume of one’s creative output. But by definition, it signifies the ultimate work of a lifetime. And internally, I would hate to claim that I have already created something of that scale.

A true magnum opus, in my view, must absorb all accumulated skills and experience, while simultaneously expressing the depth of the author’s vision and my personal philosophy. It must stand out so noticeably among other creations that it can be unconditionally recognised as the main one. Today, I am rather gathering individual fragments of this future magnum opus—much like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces must one day come together into a single whole.

There is another vital milestone—my long-held dream of recreating the clock of Ivan Petrovich Kulibin. It was a clock meant to be his crowning achievement, but unfortunately, he was unable to finish it. I have been working on this since 2007. Next year will mark twenty years since the inception of this project. Completing this massive research effort and recreating the clock will be an incredibly important chapter for me; I have been living and breathing this project for nearly two decades.

We are not talking about a restoration here, but specifically a recreation—or, more accurately, a reconstruction. I believe this work will make a significant historical contribution and serve as a major milestone in my creative journey.

TFW: How do you feel about “competitive” horology, i.e. acquiring records for the thinnest, the most complicated, etc? Does that motivate you?

Records are not interesting in and of themselves. Pushing a specific parameter to its absolute limit is not just a craftsman’s task. Above all, it is a question of invention.

An idea or an intriguing challenge presents itself. You begin to study existing solutions, world records, the work of your predecessors—and as an inventor, you immediately ask yourself: “How would I solve this problem? Can it be done differently?” If the thought won’t let you go, you keep living with it, searching for angles, and at some point, the realisation hits: the solution is found.

After that, all that’s left is to move on to implementation—to solve a technologically and mechanically complex puzzle. Therefore, the origin of such records usually stems not from a desire to set a record for its own sake, but from the drive to find a fresh answer to an existing, complex problem. And if the solution truly happens to surpass previous results, that is simply a consequence of the work done.

TFW: You take on some horological challenges that have a particularly mathematical slant, e.g. the Computus clocks, the Mars Conqueror family… do you enjoy this side of watchmaking, the theoretical calculations, the problem-solving element, in particular? What other complicated problems do you consider important to try and solve one day?

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I also wanted to take a minute to talk about The British Bench, a curious and rather ambitious new project that’s passed my bow this week. Set up by IT worker and former military man Stephen O’Connor, it aims to put forward a comprehensive framework for grading geographical provenance. O’Connor’s gripe - reasonable - was that there is no official standard for a British watch and therefore a number of brands could be said to be getting away with sweeping statements about their place of manufacture or design. I’ll invite you to discover it for yourselves - it’s something that a few years ago I would have thought guaranteed to invite conflict, but may benefit from warmer attitudes towards supply-chain transparency today. The tier-based system O’Connor has come up with seems robust enough, but he has set himself a challenge and no mistake. Anything like this requires all the major players’ buy-in, and while it looks like he has some, there’s a lot more to do. I wonder what the Alliance of British Watch and Clockmakers makes of it all - you’d have thought assessing a degree of ‘Britishness’ might fall under their remit. There’s an interview with O’Connor here, if you want to know a bit more.

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The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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GPHG 2026 By The Numbers

I did my GPHG voting this week, like a good little Academy member. In the last couple of years I have changed the way I approach the awards process in The Fourth Wheel; as I wrote last year, it is a very useful dataset if you can interpret it properly.

I hesitated over returning to the same ground but then reasoned that if I am going to take a primarily data-led approach, the only sensible thing is to build on last year’s work. Also I made space for a rant towards the end, so stick around for that.

M’learned friend wrote recently about the importance of not misunderstanding the GPHG’s longlist stage so for any recent arrivals (there has been a recent flurry; welcome!) a quick re-cap. Brands pay CHF8001 to appear on the longlist, there is no other screening process. I don’t think it’s even necessary to prove that you have manufactured a watch at this stage2. Not that I’m implying otherwise, just making the point that the real scrutiny - and the point at which anyone who is going to be impressed should start to really care (at least in terms of the result of the awards) comes at the end of August once the shortlist has been announced. Tune in then, imagine you’re hitting the Netflix ‘skip recap’ button and take it from there.

But I care about the longlist as a dataset in itself, because I think it tells us a few things. We have our eyes open: we know it’s a pay-to-play marketing tool. That gives us a rare, maybe unique insight into the marketing strategies of hundreds of brands.

The vital statistics

In 2025, 184 brands entered 302 watches, which as I noted last year, felt like a hell of a lot and was indeed a rise on historic levels. This year - when, as a side note, I felt the voting was less onerous; maybe I entered a flow state and just ran the whole thing on vibes - 194 brands have entered 320 watches.

As before, the vast majority of these are attacking the Petit Aiguille and Challenge categories; this increasingly feels like a two-tier GPHG developing. Part of me wonders whether these two categories should be spun out into their own separate entity… but of course the whole appeal of paying your 800 francs is being able to say you’re on the same web page as AP.

Indies vs the world

By my calculations, there are just 23 brands that you could reasonably call ‘establishment’ names - that’s major group brands or long-standing quasi-indies like Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux. Even that count is generous, because it includes indie-in-all-but-ownership brands like Daniel Roth, Gerald Genta, Minerva (hello!), and Ferdinand Berthoud. There are fewer mainstream watches on the longlist than ever before.

Last year I wrote that 30 of Morgan Stanley’s top 50 estimated leaderboard by revenue were absent; this year, it’s 28, but the MS list itself contains more indies than last year, so the trend is actually further away from the mainstream. This year LVMH has only fielded five watches from TAG Heuer to represent its core watch division. Richemont has let IWC back on the field (for all the good that’s going to do), but taken off serial winner Van Cleef & Arpels, presumably to let some of the other jewellery brands have a go for a change. If it wasn’t for the Montblanc-Minerva split, it would be its slimmest representation ever, and it skews massively towards dressier brands. It’s the same story all over: Bulgari, Dior, Gucci, Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Piaget are the ‘mainstream’ brands I’m talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of their watches, but these are the companies that, taking the long view, still need to earn the acceptance of the watch community.

Audemars Piguet, with six watches entered, is by a clear margin the most credible major company in attendance. Chopard comes next, also with six. Swatch Group has somewhat bizarrely submitted just two watches: the Blancpain Grande Double Sonnerie (which it must be hoping will ‘do a Breguet’) and the Longines Hydroconquest, which is more likely to do a runner. It’s actually a perfectly nice watch, but doesn’t have a hope - if it makes it to the shortlist, it’s on brand recognition alone.

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Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that, a little while ago, took to social media asking for inspiration. Among the many ideas suggested was “what’s the best watch for £25,000?”. I dismissed it as a non-starter, because, duh, there are loads of great watches for twenty-five big ones, and besides, who needs me to tell them that? The thought sat down and made itself comfortable in a temporarily unused corner of my mind, however, and when I could ignore it no longer I engaged it in conversation to find that actually, it is a lot less obvious than it sounded. I would now go so far as to say this is actually a bad budget for buying a new watch, which is the kind of thing that sounds just terrible taken out of context. But if this is your world - and you’re here, so it kind of is - then I think you’ll be surprised by how right I am.

Or you’ll disagree strongly, in which case I will be only too happy to see what gems I have overlooked. To the comments section!

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Can you buy a great watch for £25,000?

Yes. But it’s much easier to buy a pretty average one.

If this sounds ridiculous, let me explain.

Firstly, there are great watches at almost all budgets, for a given definition of ‘great’, and if the idea of spending £25,000 on a watch isn’t for you, I would steer you towards my piece from a couple of months ago on the best watches for £5,000. I don’t take lightly what this amount of money can mean to people; my first proper (i.e. postgraduate) job paid less than this and that was only 15 years ago.

It might have made sense to look at £10,000 next, but I think I’d be here all day. Although the goalposts keep moving, that is still a brilliant budget to buy any number of watches for life. If you’re buying for £25k, you are not a saver making a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. You are already up to your waist, at least, in the waters of watch collecting, and the kind of guidance you need is very different. You may not think you need any, and I respect that. This is simply my attempt to find value in a somewhat neglected market segment.

Maybe that also sounds odd. Watches are getting stupidly expensive, we all know that, so surely there are hundreds of ways to blow 25 grand? Indeed there are, and we’ll look at a few. At the risk of sounding like a YouTuber, there is one type of watch I would almost never recommend, and this price bracket is riddled with them.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I realised that this is an arid desert of value compared to spending almost any other amount of money. Something interesting is going on with mainstream brands in particular and I’ve given a little time to thinking about why that might be.

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A little bit of housekeeping: when I do these fantasy shopping challenges, I assume everything is available at retail price. Some watches mentioned below definitely aren’t, but others could be had with a discount, or found in the secondary market as-new for a chunky markdown. This keeps it fair, albeit theoretical, and lets us talk about where brands think they are placing their watches rather than where they actually end up. I will look at some pre-owned and vintage watches at the end, as well.

Other criteria: I always shop as close to the total budget as I can, but I allow for the fact that you might well let temptation run away with you in the moment, which means an actual window of £22,000 to £27,000, roughly ten per cent above and below.

So, shall we begin?

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In this week’s issue, as hinted at last week, I have decided to look closely at the names brands choose. I have no idea if it’s the kind of thing Walt Odets would have concerned himself with, but I had a lot of fun writing it and as always, if you have as much fun reading it I will consider that a good day’s work.

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The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Say my name, say my name

The recent boom in independent watchmaking and staggering influx of new brands has been analysed from practically every perspective by now, but I think I am the first to ask if it has been accompanied by a deterioration in the standards of brand names themselves. We can probably all think of a recent brand launch that left us thinking ‘really? You’re calling it that?’

Now, a great deal of time in this newsletter is going to be spent talking about ‘good names’ and ‘bad names’ so I may as well get my caveats in early. Strictly speaking, the appeal of a name is as subjective as any other non-technical part of a watch; for some people, words like Fleux, Detrash, Bōken and ArtyA slip into your ear like purest honey while for others, they might have an effect similar to Vogon poetry2. I speak British English and have a passing familiarity with a few European languages, so certain names will land more comfortably than others - that’s my cultural bias, if you like - and I accept that if you come from France, or Thailand, or Saudi Arabia or wherever else on the planet, you will have a very different barometer for what sounds cool, aspirational or sophisticated. Nevertheless I do have the good fortune to speak the primary lingua franca3 of the world right now, so judging brands’ names from an English-speaking perspective does feel moderately acceptable4.

You might reasonably question whether there is such a thing as a ‘good name’ at all; a common attitude is that if a product or service is good enough, the name becomes irrelevant. Equally, names that can be abbreviated to acronyms or initialisms take on an almost symbolic nature; when was the last time you perused the pages of ‘Gentleman’s Quarterly’ magazine, for example?5 But there is definitely such a thing as a bad name, and even if we would have to take a pretty extreme example to find one we all agreed was terrible, logically the existence of bad names requires the existence of good names.

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It’s a complicated business, though, because the name is rarely analysed in isolation. It will come as little surprise that the impetus for this week’s newsletter was the launch of N3W5 by Francois-Henry Bennahmias’ The Honorable Merchant’s Group; one benefit of a new brand launch (to my purposes today, at least) is that the name is more or less all we have to go on. That and the typography, the social media content, and the founder’s statements, all of which do add context - but you understand my point. Once the name is represented by a product, and combined with a story - an undervalued element of any naming strategy, as we will see - it becomes something different. Now it is halfway to becoming a brand which is something much more than a name - even if the name is the vessel that carries the brand within it, if you like.

It might be considered unfair to judge N3W5 by its name alone. I’m sure Francois-Henry Bennahmias would think so. But I disagree. Firstly I am quite obviously not judging the entire company, its products, ethos, narrative and so on - because half of that is still a mystery. However, the name of any company will have such a profound subliminal effect on its potential customer base that I think it is fair to ask whether it helps or hinders, and what it has done in terms of setting expectations for the forthcoming watches. Lastly on a purely linguistic level I just enjoy talking about words, even words with numbers in, and how they make us feel.

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The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

And he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer

Last week I was asked what watchmaking problems are still out there to solve. The question comes from NorcalWatch on Instagram and I think you will all agree that even a few minutes’ contemplation is enough to know that this deserves a longer answer.

First, let’s make sure the question is completely clear. Note it does not say ‘mechanical watchmaking’, so we can consider any kind of wrist-based or, I suppose, portable timekeeping. Then there’s the part about problems. It would be easy to ask “what has not yet been done in the field of watchmaking?” - the answer could include some intractable conundrums but might just as reasonably include all kinds of irrelevant suggestions. No-one, to my knowledge, has ever created a minute repeater dive watch, and there are some pretty obvious reasons for that. Even if you could address the obstacles to its water-resistance, it would be a pretty pointless exercise2 - although as we all know, the watch industry is fond of pointless exercises.

So, while there is obviously an infinite range of things that haven’t happened, our question is about problems that need solving, or at least, could be solved. Let’s further assume that we’re looking for problems whose solution would have some kind of practical benefit or that would fill a logical gap in the abilities of a watch. I still think we have a very broad remit, so I’m going to try and break the problems down thematically.

Resistance: how can watches better cope with the world around them.

Chronometry: Daily accuracy, but also efficiency of energy transfer.

Ergonomics: can the watch be better integrated into our lives (while still being considered ‘a watch’)?

Complications: what can a watch still not do? Here I think we must restrict ourselves to mechanical watches, because a smartwatch with an internet connection can in theory display any information known to man, and if we start asking ‘what can modern technology not yet do’ we are writing a very different article.

After that, I’m going to talk about refinement, because there is a big difference between achieving a specific goal and making a watch that is wearable, practical, and commercially viable.

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Resistance

It’s not futile. On the contrary, today’s watchmakers have done a pretty outstanding job of combatting the natural threats and forces that will ruin a watch’s day if left unchecked.

Magnetism is to all intents a closed case. METAS certification warrants your watch will withstand any magnetic field3 you are likely to encounter. Obviously that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved upon, but it falls into the category of ‘you’d have bigger problems than looking after your watch’.

Water resistance, likewise, has been addressed: Omega’s Planet Ocean Ultra Deep Professional, as worn by Victor Vescovo to the deepest point on the planet, is pressure-tested to withstand even greater depths. When a watch can survive ocean depths that don’t even exist, the battle is won. At an everyday level, watches with more than adequate water resistance are available at reasonable budgets and in wearable forms. You could ask about complicated watches, as mentioned above, but the idea of creating a perpetual calendar that you could adjust under water is creating a problem simply to be able to solve it, if you ask me.

Shock. This is a bit more promising. IWC’s Shock Absorber concept watch notwithstanding, most watches have a relatively low threshold of shock resistance. I’ve had a modern tool watch completely conk out after a ~70cm fall onto an office carpet, so I’d welcome a higher standard of shock resistance in our everyday watches. The “1m fall onto a hard surface” is the quoted industry standard for a robust watch, but anecdotal evidence suggests it really is all about how the watch lands. Certina introduced a shock resistance system that went almost completely unnoticed a year or two ago. It claims to be able to withstand forces of up to 10,000G and is commercially available for a fraction of the price of the IWC. But, out of necessity, it is a pretty chunky dive watch: as we’ll see, in general, the question is so often not just about ‘can you solve the problem’ but ‘can you solve the problem and meet a number of other criteria’. Whether Certina’s system, which includes a thin plate between the movement and the dial, an external housing ring for the movement, and reinforced sapphire crystal, could be evolved to work in smaller watches, I have no idea. I’m chalking this one up as ‘technically solved but there’s definitely work still to be done’.

Other damage. All material choices sit on a spectrum of affordability, practicality and ability. Steel is so commonly used because it’s strong enough and we put up with the scratches in return for a reasonable price. For all that watch companies have experimented with case materials in the last 20 years - Magic Gold, Quartz-TPT, Cermet and more - we are still broadly satisfied with the same metals that have been around for a century. I saw the question posed recently of whether titanium is on track to eventually overtake steel as the dominant tool watch material and while I’d never considered it, I guess it’s possible - but the answer will have more to do with marketing, fashion and price than material resilience. I think some of the substances that are now pretty common in mid-to-high end watches are getting us pretty close to a practical maximum level of resistance to scratches, chips and so on. At the more expensive end, Richard Mille has some pretty impressive results, and in the mainstream luxury market I think Cermet/Ceratanium and other metal-ceramic hybrids are about as good as things can get without chasing down diminishing returns at an extortionate cost.

Chronometry

We are going to continue butting up against the laws of physics, here. Without writing an exhaustive technical treatise or an entire history book, this is really the core quest of mechanical watchmaking. How well can you keep time, and for how long?

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In the meantime, please enjoy this, the 21st AMA. We’ve got questions on F.P. Journe market trends, a bold new mechanical movement that could be game-changing but… might not be, the three ways a brand can break out of its price bracket, executive bullshitting and the fast-changing world of watch journalism. Enjoy!

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Ask Me Anything

A wonderful crop of questions this week - thank you very much to everyone who sent one in.

One question stood out above the others, and after about five minutes’ consideration, I decided it deserved a whole newsletter in response. NorcalWatch on Instagram asked “What watchmaking “problems” are still out there to solve? and you will be able to read my answer to that, in full, next week. We’ll talk about accuracy, complications, materials, levels of resistance, wearability and probably a whole lot of far-fetched hypotheticals. It’ll be worth the wait I promise!

What are your thoughts on the Ming X J.N. Shapiro collab? - BigWatchGuy

I liked it a lot. Saw it in person at London Watch Week and it did not disappoint. It’s pretty loud, certainly not something everyone would be comfortable with and a lot flashier than my daily diet of green and orange dive watches. But I thought it was really well executed.

Explain the Journe hype (Loaded question as I will attempt this too..!) - KingFlum

This feels like a trap; you’re bound to give this more space than I have time to, but let’s try a five-minute version. I also feel like I’m being asked to explain Journe to a Journe expert so please, be kind.

• Herd mentality/critical mass. I’m not sure exactly when - probably mid-Pandemic when a Chronometre Bleu became sheer unobtanium - but at some point FPJ passed a tipping point and became a status symbol, detaching considerations of rarity and intrinsic quality from desirability. Once that happened, it wasn’t surprising that prices kept rising, and that momentum becomes self-perpetuating; even now, people must be assuming the market is going to continue to rise. Their confidence fuels it all anew, and on we go.

• Meets the basic criteria in terms of market dynamics. There is just enough supply in the market to keep it active and draw in new buyers, but it’s rare enough not to be at risk of dilution. On that point; brand management of individual references has maintained scarcity within the collection.

• Then there’s brand positioning and design - it’s conservative/traditional enough to have wide appeal, while doing just enough mad stuff (FFC; Gino’s Dream) to maintain indie brand credibility. The aesthetic was set early on and hasn’t been muddled since. It’s well-finished but not extraordinarily so (see point about volumes) and FPJ’s choice of particular challenges to address (Resonance; Centigraphe; Vertical Tourbillon etc etc) are by luck or judgement not things others have tried.

• Trend-setters. How many people does it really take to move, or make, a market? We’ve all heard about WatchBox, now 1916 Company, allegedly hoarding stock; add a few Ben Clymer-level personalities who love the brand and you wield a lot of influence. This isn’t judgement2, just statement: the opinions and actions of a few can have a huge impact.

• Patek & Rolex fatigue. For years the auction market had two bankable commodities, and eventually people got bored of selling the same Daytona or 2499 backwards and forwards to each other. There was a gap for something new.

• A big part of examining this is to ask ‘could it have happened to another brand?’ I think in theory, yes, but Journe occupies a real sweet spot. Others have the aesthetic, the quality, the longevity (Voutilainen, for instance) but not the volumes (although worth noting that Voutilainens are flying). Some have the volumes but are too polarising (De Bethune) or not sufficiently exciting (Laurent Ferrier). The answer to ‘why isn’t it happening to other brands’ is, I think, that there isn’t space in the market for another Journe yet. It has proven it is possible but in doing so it has occupied that slot; another indie brand looking for the same success must compete not only with PP and Rolex but with FPJ, a brand with which it will inevitably have much in common but probably seem inferior to in at least one or two ways.

• I’ll wrap up by asking myself what could bring the Journe train to a halt. Some people out there are talking about ‘proximity to the artist’, i.e. a rush to buy Journe while FPJ himself is still running the show. Who knows how long that will be for? Journe declined to be interviewed when I wrote about succession planning eighteen months ago. Wishing him a long and happy life, we’ve probably got ~10 years with him in charge - he’s currently 69 - but if this rush lasts a decade it will be quite the phenomenon. If his Chanel investment is in any way similar to MB&Fs, the long-term future of the company is probably pretty safe3, but any drop-off in supply would I expect lead to a short term spike followed by a decline in interest. A drop-off in quality or relevance is plausible - it might feel very unlikely right now, but the unforeseen always is. More likely, if the market is behaving as I outlined in point one, anyone who has been buying out of a sense of status-driven acquisition (consciously or otherwise) will inevitably move on, and demand will cool. A ‘true’ collector (gatekeeping alert!) will stick by the brand no matter what; the multi-million-dollar question, I suppose, is whether there are enough of them to keep outbidding each other.

  What did I miss?

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What’s the best way you’ve seen a brand overcome a price psychological barrier? - Kler Watches

This turned out to be a really interesting - and difficult - one. The idea of a ‘price psychological barrier’ is more specific than just asking ‘who has been able to raise prices with the least pushback’. The answer to that would just be Rolex, because brand equity/resale value/demand continue to far outstrip supply, and it has taken a frog-boiling, gradual but relentless approach to prices rather than the kind of clumsy jumps seen elsewhere.

No, the idea of a psychological barrier has two parts, if you like: it’s “I won’t pay more than X for Y.” That could be “I won’t pay more than £3,000 for anything with a Sellita movement”, “I won’t pay more than £10,000 for a dive watch, no matter what it’s made from,” or “I won’t pay more than £50,000 for a watch that isn’t even substantially hand-finished.” One of the biggest problems we’ve seen lately is that real prices have been changing much quicker than we can re-frame our personal psychological benchmarks - and one of the most stubborn psychological barriers is the one we construct around brands.

I really struggled with good examples for this. In general, I think it is very hard for a brand to operate outside its comfort zone for any length of time - or to move market segments altogether. That brings another caveat (I will answer the question, I promise), which is that limited editions and very specific excursions outside a brand’s normal parameters can be forgiven, with varying degrees of ease depending on how convincing the product and the story.

Furlan Marri teaming up with Dominique Renaud (collaborations - another caveat!) to make a perpetual calendar for Only Watch (RIP), is one example of it working well. Bremont making tourbillons is something I consider less successful - but it must be pointed out that the brand always says its high-end pieces sell out. There are other measures of success, but I feel that should be included for balance.

My mind goes back to Nomos making its gold-cased Lux and Lambda references, more than a decade ago now. They represented a big jump in price from Nomos’s typical watch, and aren’t officially limited editions - they remain in the catalogue, although production is very low. They worked because a) Nomos had worked hard to generate a lot of goodwill among press and customers, b) they looked good, were clearly better made than a two grand Tangente, and c) Nomos communicated very clearly what its intentions were, so nobody got the wrong idea about the brand changing its approach.

Another more recent example would be the Christopher Ward Bel Canto. The first edition launched in the UK for £2,995 on a leather strap and £3,550 on a titanium bracelet. That wasn’t actually the brand’s most expensive watch at the time - it had released the C60 Concept limited edition the year before for £3,495 - but that was a 210-piece limited run, and the Bel Canto went on to sell, and sell, and sell. CW managed to get past ‘three grand for a Christopher Ward?!’ by making the conversation all about ‘only three grand for a chiming watch’. I’m not saying it was a triumph of marketing over substance; the substance was there and it marketed itself.

I have one more example from a slightly different playbook. I’m sure plenty of you will remember Richard Mille’s first sapphire-cased watch, the RM 056 from 2012. It cost $1.65m and only five were made. When Richard Mille launched as a brand, eleven years earlier, the RM 001 cost something like $150,000 - which was in itself audacious, and probably constitutes a good example in its own right - but within just over a decade it had produced a watch costing ten times as much. I’m sure there will be examples, probably heavily gem-set ones, but I don’t remember anything really costing more than a million dollars at retail back then. The most expensive watch I’d handled prior to that was, I think, a platinum Vacheron Constantin for around £500,000. RM had made watches in the same ballpark, even nudging $800,000-$900,000 for split-seconds chronograph tourbillons. But breaking that psychological seven-figure barrier, not by a little bit but blowing past it to $1.65m… that stayed with me. And it worked; of course, people said it was insane, but they had come to expect the insane from RM. Which is of course the moral of the story: if a high price is expected, perhaps even demanded, then it becomes part of the product’s appeal rather than a barrier. The fact that is such a high barrier for 99.99 per cent of us is entirely the point.

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So there you have it: three strategies for successfully operating beyond your normal price bracket. You can be careful, conscientious and considered, relying on communication and the knowledge that it isn’t going to go to your head.

You can be naive, brave and plucky - and work really, really hard. You can only do this so many times, though.

Or you can be outrageous, but for this to work you have to be outrageous from day one and sustain it. While also making sure the underlying product is still well made.

Good luck!

Name the five brands most likely to pounce on the new Ronda silicon escapement movement - Hamza Masood

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The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Back To Basel?

News landed quite abruptly this week of a new trade fair for the watch and jewellery industries, to take place in Basel in April 2027. The exact dates are TBC, as the event is intending to run consecutively after the trade-focussed first week of Watches & Wonders / Geneva Watch Week, as the main event and its fringe fairs have become collectively known.

Basilia, as it will be called1, is set to take place in Hall 2 of Messeplatz, an exhibition and conference centre best known in this parish as the former home of Baselworld, the watch industry trade fair that dates back in some form or other to 1917 (although the Swiss only started inviting exhibitors from other countries in 19722) and came to an ignominious end in 2019 as the global pandemic finished what a massive exhibitor exodus had already started.

The event is being jointly organised by MCH Group, the body behind Baselworld (and that still hosts, rather more successfully, Art Basel and other events) and Informa Markets, a subdivision of Informa that runs hundreds of trade fairs around the world from the luxurious (Monaco Yacht Show; Dubai Air Show) to the practical (World of Concrete; the Farm Progress Show). In this context, Informa Markets is leaning on its experience in jewellery events, including Jewellery and Gem World Hong Kong. The partnership, and by extension the event as a whole, is being billed as ‘Europe meets Asia’ with obvious implications - one might even say synergies3 - for the world of watches.

For many of us, it will be impossible to frame this as anything other than ‘Baselworld is back’ - the same organiser, the same venue, the same time of year… I can hear the music playing on repeat in the Messeplatz already. Smell the cigarettes and sausages, avoid the trams, jostle for a Feldschlossen in one of the worst and most expensive pubs I have ever known4.

But let us not be tempted by nostalgia. Baselworld has been gone just long enough for us to start to forget if not actively forgive its worst sins, and at Watches & Wonders this year ‘bring back Basel’ was a pretty popular refrain. This has been prompted by the algae-like expansion of Watches & Wonders and its peripheral pirates, and I was among many who bemoaned the fact that one person simply cannot cover enough ground. However, Baselworld was still worse. Appointments every half an hour without a break, unless you took the radical action of scheduling yourself a bathroom visit in advance, miles upon miles of warm dark exhibition hall, and when you went outside you’d either be run over by WatchAnish’s Lambo, deafened by an oompah band or catch lung cancer from the sales execs (and Thierry Stern, who was reliably stationed by a side door whenever he could get out) gasping down full strength nicotine. You paid a few thousand francs to some students to rent their crappy apartment, proximity to the fair your primary search criteria on AirBnb (presumably the students took themselves off for a week in the Maldives or the like). The food was practically non-existent - most of us survived on chocolates, sugar-free breath mints, espresso and champagne.

Say any of this to a fellow survivor, however, and their eyes will light up. “Yes,” they’ll say. “Wasn’t it great!” My first job was for a magazine editor who was universally hated and despised by his staff, apart from the art director, who flirted with him just enough to convince him he might have a chance but really despised him just like the rest of us. I was there for five years, and I have never experienced the camaraderie like it anywhere since; we found a sense of resilience and kinship in working for such a minor despot. Baselworld is a bit like that; if you spent years there, you are proud that you got through it, adapted to its idiotic quirks and got your job done in spite of the absence of such niceties as functional wi-fi, plentiful drinking water or chairs. There is a totally undeserved machismo about the whole thing, a blue-suited Stockholm syndrome. By any measurable metric the press, in particular, have it so much better at Watches & Wonders, and all we do is moan. It is true that the business of covering a trade fair as a journalist has changed significantly, and not necessarily for the better, but that’s another story.

All of which is to say that I am skeptical of a Baselworld revival. Extremely so. But I am prepared to admit that the status quo is not perfect, and the organisers say they are expecting to have 400+ exhibitors, so whether I like it or not this is clearly happening. So let’s try and give it an objective assessment, positives as well as negatives.

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But this is not that day. Today, we take a look at at a watch in the inner circle of a genre that has sprawled beyond all expectations, a family of watches that have gone from being a niche concern for aesthetes to a commodified totem of modern luxury. What can the Girard-Perregaux Laureato Fifty tell us about the integrated bracelet watch in 2026? It’s very easy on the eye, but does it flatter to deceive? Let’s find out.

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Review: Girard-Perregaux Laureato Fifty 39mm

“Which one would you like?” Never a bad question when the answer will see you walk away with a brand new watch for a few days. I had the option to review either of the two new 39mm Girard-Perregaux Laureato models, and it may be a disappointment to some of you that I didn’t choose the blue-dialled, no-date version. Fear not, though, I have handled both and will explain myself as we go.

What is it?

One of four new Girard-Perregaux Laureato models that just launched: alongside one other 39mm model with a blue dial, there is also a 36mm reference with the same rose-gold tone dial and a 36mm model with a silver tone dial and diamond-set bezel. I first saw it under embargo in Geneva in April, have just spent a few days with it, and it is available to buy now.

It follows in the footsteps of last year’s commemorative 50th anniversary edition, which was only released in two-tone steel and gold, and effectively replaces the Laureato 38mm which is being discontinued.

What’s new: Design and Movement

It’s bigger! By a millimetre. Shall I go on? The size difference is not the most important thing, but I think 39mm is more of a sweet spot size for more people. I’m surprised it has taken Girard-Perregaux this long to get there with the modern Laureato; brought back a decade ago at 41mm, the 38mm version followed the next year and I think I’m right in saying the 42mm version launched in 2022. This kind of messing around isn’t totally unheard of - in fact it’s pretty common - but taking the long view it kind of tells me you’re either just not sure where your design belongs or are being too reactive, or both.

Also more important than just one measurement is the overall package of design tweaks. I don’t have a Laureato 38mm here with me, but I’ve worn it before, and poring over pictures I think the new case is ever so slightly less curved in its flanks (I could also just be convincing myself to see a difference that’s not there because I want it to be; certainly if it is different, it’s subtle as hell). What’s not up for debate is that the bevelling on the case and bracelet edge is thicker, and I like that.

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The crown is different; now we have an octagonal crown with flat sides, rather than the grooved circular crown. The other aesthetic differences are on the dial: gone is the GP logo at 12 o’clock, and with it the “Laureato Automatic” text at six. The arrowhead bridge logo and brand name are now printed in black on gold (rather than white, as they were on the slightly darker copper-orange dialled 38mm model). The date window appears to have a thicker bevelled edge, and the hands now have a slight facet to them rather than being flat, stamped, simple things.

The Clous de Paris dial - wherein lies a disproportionate percentage of the watch’s appeal and certainly it’s personality - is still, to the best of my knowledge, stamped rather than machined with a pantograph like a Royal Oak1. It looks very crisp though, and aside from understanding where a more laborious process has taken place, I have a hard time seeing how it could be improved - but then, that’s the whole ball game, isn’t it? The means matter at least as much as the end.

What else… the lume is pretty decent for the size of the appliqués and hands; the water resistance at 150m is totally fine, the bracelet now has a micro-adjustment facility - truly, 2026 is the year of the micro-adjust - and then we come to the movement. This is without a doubt the biggest change and normally the one you would lead with: the Girard-Perregaux Calibre 03300 in the outgoing Laureato was introduced in 1998 and based on the 3000 family of movements that were developed in 1993-4, so it has had a good run and no mistake.

The new Laureato runs on Calibre 4800, which was introduced last year, and while it is undoubtedly news that a company like GP has replaced such a well-known and respected movement (it, or movements derived from the same base, has been used by Vacheron Constantin, Daniel Roth, MB&F and others), the important question is what exactly has changed.

Others have written in-depth articles just on the 4800 calibre alone so I will not rehash the entire thing, but it runs at 4Hz, like the old movement, and achieves a roughly 25% improvement on its power reserve, up from 46 hours to 55. That isn’t much to shout about; on the other hand, I have been saying for a while now that power reserves, particularly on automatic watches, have become a number that the industry has realised it can quite easily optimise for, i.e. an easy way to sound ‘better’ in a Top Trumps kind of way. Is 55 hours impressive? No. Is it adequate? Probably. But nobody apart from Rolls-Royce ever sold anything on the basis of words like ‘adequate’, so this does feel like an odd miss from GP. Especially as it isn’t compensated for by any particular achievement in another area - at 4.28mm thick and 25.6mm wide it’s no monster, but it’s not ultra-thin either, and it makes no specific claims about accuracy or magnetic resistance, to name just two criteria. The baseplate says ‘silicium escapement’, which is true, but the hairspring isn’t silicon, only the escape wheel and pallet fork.

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s new version of Calibre 899, by contrast, measures 26mm x 3.3mm, runs at 4Hz with a single barrel and delivers 70 hours of power, is COSC certified (and meets the brand’s own HPG standard) and looks at least eight tenths as nice to my eye.

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In the meantime, and for everybody on a different continent, elsewhere in the UK or simply otherwise engaged, I would like to talk about a clock that, yes, is being exhibited at London Watch Week but which deserves to be appreciated far wider and for far longer. A clock whose inspiration had not only horological and mathematical significance but geopolitical and historical impact as well. Enjoy!

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Moments in history

I have never really thought about it until now, but in my fifteen years writing about this industry I dare say I have seen the debut of fewer than twenty watches, clocks or other horological creations that have cast a spell of true awe upon me. Of course, I have the misfortune of covering this industry in a time when a great deal has already been invented and most novelties, even impressive ones, stand on the shoulders of earlier work, but still some things stand out. Sometimes awe isn’t quite the right word - who else remembers Richard Hoptroff’s attempts to build an atomic wristwatch? - but certainly admiration at the single-mindedness and determination of the creator.

Seeing the Pragnell Bray Origins Clock this week felt awe-inspiring. That might sound strange once you learn that it is fundamentally a copy of something else, but sometimes it is as much about the journey as the destination, especially when you realise that for much of it the travellers have been navigating without a map.

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Let me explain, for those of you who haven’t the first clue what this is all about. You will probably have heard of John Harrison, the eighteenth-century English clockmaker who solved ‘the longitude problem’ by inventing the marine chronometer, enabling ships to pinpoint their East-West location through accurate timekeeping, resistant to the shocks and other disruptions of life at sea. It was an invention that changed the world, as my headline implies - we’ll come back to that - and it began with a clock named the H1. The British government advertised for solutions to the problem in 1714; Harrison presented his ideas to the Board of Longitude in 1730 and first tested the H1 at sea in 1736. It was the breakthrough that proved he was on the right lines, but it was only the beginning of a life’s work; he iterated, improved and miniaturised the concept with H2 (1741) and H3 (1760) before the triumphant creation of the H4 clock in 1762 that proved beyond all doubt that his work had solved a problem once thought intractable. He would have to fight tooth and nail for recognition, however, finally receiving most of the cash reward promised back in 1714 at the age of 80, in 1773.

Nobody, until now, has ever made a completely successful full-scale recreation of Harrison’s H1. Bray himself has made scaled-down recreations, and has been doing so for the last 25 years, but to quote the booklet produced alongside today’s clock, “they were made how Harrison would have made the clock if he had access to today’s tools and simplified many of the fiendishly difficult technological developments that Harrison attempted.”

Enter Charlie Pragnell, the sixth-generation independent retailer whose flagship on Mayfair’s Mount Street is one of the country’s leading high-end watch destinations and in recent years one of the few remaining in London to actually offer bricks and mortar space for top indie brands (it also stocks Rolex, Patek, and the majority of Richemont and LVMH brands). Pragnell shares Bray’s fascination with Harrison and had a long-held desire to put the spotlight on Britain’s historical contributions to the world of watchmaking. In March 2022 the two men decided to take on the challenge of recreating the H1. The result was the Pragnell Bray Origins Clock, named in honour of Harrison’s foundational contribution to modern timekeeping. It took six years to finish and even if you know absolutely nothing of watches or clocks whatsoever, one look at it is enough to tell you that you are in the presence of something impressive.

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I did some journalism, too, to try and buttress my keyboard-warrior qualities with, you know, facts, or at the very least, original1 comment from the brand in question. I know it’s not the norm, but to spare most of you I have at least done the decent thing and hidden the more professional content behind the paywall. Enjoy!

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Come and see me at London Watch Week next week!

Before we get to the Barrelhand stuff, I need to tell you: together with my podcast co-host Tim Barber, I have been putting together a few talks for London Watch Week. They’ll be taking place next Friday and Saturday (June 5th & 6th). If you’re around please come and say hi (and stay for the talks…!)

On Friday, I’ll be sitting down with Bremont CEO Davide Cerrato to ask him how that’s all going, and on Saturday I’m going to be bringing together some of the indie brands exhibiting to hear about the reality of their lives right now. Then later on I think Tim and I are going to sit down and have a bit of a debate with a few of our more outspoken friends in the media. It should all be good fun, and we’re going to record it all so if you miss it, we’ll have it in podcast form later in the summer.

You can find out all about London Watch Week here.

At that price, it should include a trip to the moon!

I did something yesterday I very rarely do; I got involved in the comments below an article. Specifically, Hodinkee’s write-up of the Barrelhand Monolith, which officially launched yesterday but has been around for a little while under the radar. For reasons of space2 I’m not going to go over the watch’s basic details, but it is worth familiarising yourself with them, either there or on the brand’s website.

I’ve spoken to Barrelhand co-founder Karel Bachand a few times, for articles that have already come out and for one that you’ll read in Esquire later this year. I like what he’s doing but I have no other vested interest; I’ve never done any work for Barrelhand or taken any money from them for any reason. I’m coming out to bat for them purely because I believe in what they’re trying to do.

This is also something of a pent-up frustration on my part, and comments below the Hodinkee article were the straw that broke the camel’s back. I know better, but sometimes you have to take the bait. Specifically, we’re talking about the number of comments that go along very similar lines under so, so many new watch releases:

“How much for a Sellita movement?”3

There is a saying: a little learning is a dangerous thing. In many ways, the internet and social media have transformed watch collecting and enthusiasm for the better, but they have also been a live demonstration of the veracity of this phrase. It is great that so many more people know about watches, but having some clue4 about the unit cost of a Sellita SW300-1 is not even close to being all the ammunition you need before you are prepared for a conversation about what constitutes value in a watch.

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I expect some reactions to this piece along the lines that I too have somehow been duped by a persuasive brand, taken in by a romantic story or am somehow in the pocket of the manufacturer. This is partly why I have chosen this particular time to take a stab at this response, because there could hardly be a less likely brand to be paying off journalists. Yes, there is a romance to it, as I’ve already admitted, but I really am clear-eyed about what’s going on here.

I am not, necessarily, coming out and saying that $9,750 is a bargain price for this watch. It is more than I’ve ever spent on a watch, and if that was my budget today I’d be very tempted by a lot of mainstream offerings. What I am here to achieve, if nothing else, is an end to the knee-jerk, unthinking response that the Monolith and so many other watches receive. I accept I might be preaching to the choir, but the advantage of having one’s own platform is that I can write this instead of ranting and raving in the comments section. I trust you will all link to it every time you see this kind of remark in future.

The waters are made murkier by the fact that there are absolutely brands out there using Sellita movements, doing relatively little to them and charging a generous mark-up. Mainstream watchmakers invested millions in marketing the concept of in-house movements, demonising perfectly reasonable alternatives that are tried and tested, reliable, serviceable and so on. This gave enthusiasts a misplaced sense of snobbery towards third-party movements, which is doubly hypocritical as so many big brands use ETA or Sellita clones anyway. But I digress; the point is that in a lot of cases, the movement really isn’t the story; value can be found in many other places.

You don’t have to take my word for it. I rang up Karel to ask him directly how this price makes sense. Let’s see what he had to say.

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I would love to know your thoughts on Blancpain. This isn’t the first time I’ve ventured my opinions and it won’t be the last, but I am starting to come round. Tim Barber and I talked about Blancpain on The Watch Enquiry last year, too.

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Is Blancpain On The Up?

This week, Subdial is hosting a curated exhibition of neo-vintage Blancpain at its clubhouse in London. Sounds about right, doesn’t it - but this is in partnership with Blancpain itself, which makes one hell of a difference.

This doesn’t really need to be a post about the mistakes and missed opportunities that got us to this point. We are all aware of the status quo, which is that Blancpain does not operate at anything like the right level commercially and culturally given the underlying quality. We know that the brand has an almost uniquely bipolar personality, with the Fifty Fathoms and Villeret collections appealing to very different demographics, drawing on very different eras of history and requiring very different retail and marketing strategies.

It is also nothing new to observe that Blancpain’s watches of the 1980s and 1990s are as under-appreciated and undervalued today as they were impressive and brave in their time. Neo-vintage Blancpain is more fashionable than it used to be, but has not exactly taken the auction scene by storm in the way it would need to for perceptions to really change, or for prices to really take off.

What I’m asking is whether things might be changing. That is a lot to put on one small pop-up exhibition, I realise. There has been no drastic overhaul to the current product line-up, no re-brand, no interviews with CEO Marc Hayek that would indicate a new strategy at work or even a willingness to discuss any of the above and consider a new strategy. So you might well think me crazy. But everything starts somewhere; last year’s Grande Double Sonnerie is generally cited as evidence Blancpain is on its way back, but in isolation a highly complicated watch, even one as impressive as that, isn’t doing the job unless the brand around it starts to behave differently. That might sound churlish - really it is a great watch - but there you have it.

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I went along to the Subdial exhibition before it opened to the public, and sat down with Blancpain’s historian Jeffrey Kingston. Having had the advantage of already reading Esquire’s interview with him, I was prepared for (and received) some of the same anecdotes, but I won’t repeat them all for you. What I did have is a conversation that finally, after all these years, changed my perception of Blancpain from 1983-1993. I think the exhibition, and the thinking behind it, can communicate that same perception to a wider audience. The billion dollar question, I suppose, is whether it can transform the fortunes of Blancpain today.

Below the paywall I also get into questions of historical accuracy and offer my advice to the brand, should it be interested in hearing it.

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Q: What has eight sides and went pop this week?

A: The resale value of this MAD Paris x Browns Royal Oak

Doesn’t really work, does it? But still. I’m surprised no-one has brought these up, actually, at least not specifically. If you’ve got one, do write in. I’ll give you £350 for it.

We are of course talking about the the Royal Pop - which I have to say, puts me in mind of King Charles III as much as it summons connotations of pop art or the Pop Swatch. Maybe if they send him one he’ll wear it on his next state visit. He is at least someone who could credibly wear a pocket watch, although I’m not sure he’s in his Labubu era. On which note (pocket watches, not Labubus), someone sent me this recently. I’m sure it’s been doing the rounds, but I’ve been educated. I think I’m a “single Albert with drop” kind of chap. You?

Below the paywall you will find my full thoughts on the matter, or as I should call it, the top talking shop for the Royal Pop drop, no slop, to mop up before you cop. (That’s right, my debut album of horological rap, Bet Geneva Saw That Coming, is out later this year). Then, because we need something else to talk about, I have a palette cleanser of positivity in the form of eight great things I saw just in the last few days. Enjoy!

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Pop Goes The Royal Oak

What makes my head spin is that watch brands like Audemars Piguet have spent years insisting on their own seriousness. The Royal Oak is to be treated reverentially at all times. And now this. Nevertheless, I want to approach it on its merits, and my thoughts on it continue to evolve. This is my current take, maybe my best take and in all honesty hopefully my last take.

The Royal Oak and the Speedmaster are totally different things, and not just in the ways that are obvious. They don’t play the same role in their partnerships with Swatch.

The MoonSwatch borrowed a lot of Speedmaster DNA, but because it used quartz chronograph movements, it has a significant point of difference. Also the Speedmaster has never been produced in bright block colours. The Royal Pop takes the exact proportions, textures and details of a Royal Oak - the only missing element is the integrated bracelet. You can argue that the bracelet is the sine qua non of a Royal Oak but for me, AP has given away a bit too much.

That also matters because the Speedmaster’s identity is about more than its looks. It’s mechanically interesting and has a place in tool watch history that turned it into an icon. It’s a good piece of design but not objectively better than others of its era; if the Longines-Wittnauer, thought to be a ref. 235T, had been selected by NASA, it would enjoy the same status today1. But the Royal Oak is an icon by design. The choice of stainless steel was bold, but its real strength, its essence, is its looks. AP has proven you can do a lot to that design identity without breaking it, but I still think it’s more dangerous to loan it out. I guess what I’m trying to say is that something that looks like a Royal Oak is a lot closer to a real one than something that looks a bit like a Speedmaster.

I’m not trashing the RO: it’s an enormously important watch, a real moment in design history. I’m also not saying the movement, or the case/bracelet finishing, or all the other points of build quality don’t matter. Just that they don’t matter as much as the look of the thing. made another good point in saying that the Royal Oak’s appeal lies in its exclusivity - and building on his post about ‘aura’, which is well worth a read including the continued debates in the comments, I feel like the Royal Pop is a signifier without its sign, or however Roland Barthes would have put it; the visual impression of a thing but separated from the substance, cultural currency and so on. (I did not really get on with structuralism at university; I could see that Adorno and Althusser and all the rest of them were onto something but found it terminologically extremely dense. These days I feel it comes up a whole lot more often than Shakespeare’s sonnets or Beowulf, though.)

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In no particular order, here are my other thoughts on the collaboration.

• Audemars Piguet has done enough ceramic Royal Oaks already that if it had launched these eight designs itself, our reaction would not have been substantially different. I mean, the same people who are angry about the Royal Pop would still be mad, but look at them. Swap bioceramic for real ceramic, Sistem 51 calibres for AP movements: can you really tell me that’s such a crazy idea? I will concede that some of the colour combinations are a bit much, but that’s haggling over the details. I have also seen first-hand how AP is developing its capacity for multi-coloured ceramics; there could be much poppier waters ahead.

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What I have found time for, because how could I not, is the now-confirmed but as yet unseen collaboration between Audemars Piguet and Swatch. Well done all who’ve seen it for not leaking - although as I mention on the episode, in the age of generative AI it almost doesn’t matter.

I have a few thoughts, predictions and laments on this subject; I suspect next week I’ll have to talk about it again but after that maybe we will move on. There is a tenuous parallel with the Baltic x SpaceOne, which has been unfortunately overshadowed by a watch that hasn’t even been seen yet, but you’ll have to listen to find out where I’m going with this particular thought.

Elsewhere I feel compelled to give the briefest of mentions to Ming’s ‘Peep Show’, and have an oh-so-predictable update on the Swatch Group AGM which took place today.

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Links discussed in today’s episode:

• AP x Swatch is confirmed

• Baltic x SpaceOne is terrific

• Ming is hitting the mark again

• Swatch Group’s board is entirely predictable

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Thanks for listening. I’ll see you back here next time for more.

Chris

Listen to the podcast anyway, if you haven’t already - there’s some stuff that hasn’t gone out of date yet, from La Joux-Perret’s production increases to Swatch Group boardroom drama and my less than fawning take on Naoya Hida’s new chronograph.

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Is this supposed to be funny?

When it gets to Wednesday afternoon and I still don’t know what this newsletter is going to be about, I start to get the jitters. There is still time, as I write this, for fate to provide eleventh-hour inspiration - maybe LVMH will buy a brand, or another young genius will emerge, hermit-like, from his atelier with a five-dimensional tourbillon. Failing that, one of my esteemed peers in the fourth estate might do me the courtesy of writing something daft, that I might disagree with it at length. Still time for that, too, but lately I’ve found that far too many writers seem to have their heads properly screwed on, or that I’ve read, and disagreed with, all the bad takes before.

So if you are reading this, you know that hasn’t happened. Or worst of all, it happened too late - many has been the Thursday evening when, 3,000 words down, I’ve flipped Instagram open to see with dismay the entire watch universe obsessing over an incredible launch or juicy breaking news.

I keep hardly any ‘break glass in case of emergency’ draft stories on hand, and the last few weeks have been too busy for me to research something meticulous, interview anyone extraordinary or travel anywhere diverting. My apologies.

I’m going to fall back on talking about The Fourth Wheel itself, at least to start with. I used to describe this newsletter as a publication that liked to gently mock, or tease, the watch industry, because for almost as long as I have been writing about watches, I have been aware that it is simultaneously one of the most ridiculous and the most deathly serious environments in which to operate. Leaden earnestness, Jack Forster called it only a few days ago.

I know that a lot of you enjoy the sarcastic asides, the silliness, the bad puns and the dad jokes at least as much as any semblance of serious journalism. I am also acutely aware that they have dwindled drastically over the last year, maybe two. Consider this an apology, but as I mused on an explanation, I began to wonder whether it’s entirely my fault.

Certainly you might think that The World At Large makes it hard to be funny, but I don’t think that’s it. Watch enthusiasm is still a bubble, even when war and tariffs intrude, and the luxury industry could teach the Titanic’s string quartet a thing or two about carrying on regardless.

I should say, by the way, that I also know the danger of describing yourself as funny. It’s worryingly vain territory at the best of times, and I would never presume to label myself as anything other than a straight-down-the-line journalist. But sometimes, I might dare to suggest, I have my moments.

Partly, I have felt The Fourth Wheel growing up. What began as an unfiltered stream of reactions to the events of the past week has become something a bit more polished - or at least, something a bit more varied. I don’t think I could have sustained that for ever; you would find yourself inhabiting a persona, forced to constantly rail against everything, and that’s both exhausting and insincere. As a result, I’ve had to let a few tempting takes pass me by, and that’s probably been to everyone’s ultimate benefit.

But mostly, the problem lies with the target material. It’s not me, it’s you, watch world.

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I begin, however, with a few minutes on the Met Gala, but don’t let that put you off. It dominates the horological media sphere for about 24 hours, and since that coincided with the hours in which I was recording, I decided to give it just a few minutes of my time. Don’t worry, I haven’t descended into ‘who wore what’ - but I also don’t think that ignoring it, and similar phenomena, is going to get us anywhere either. It’s here to stay and it provides insight into the thinking of the people running our favourite brands. Plus we have some fun talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing quest for a personality.

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The lead item this week is Swatch’s next collab, which is being heavily teased and may, or may not, leak at any time. So I wanted to get a prediction out there just in case, even though I know it will be hilariously wide of the mark. At parent company Swatch Group, those pesky investors just won’t keep quiet, and with the group’s AGM next Tuesday there has been a flurry of stories in the business press about reform at board level. As well as relaying the bare facts of the news, I spend a few minutes analysing what this might mean for the brands, i.e. for people like us who care most of all about the watches they produce.

In terms of new watches, it’s a tale of two halves as I confess myself perfectly pleased by Baltic and Tudor, both of which brought out motoring-related watches, and find deal-breaking gripes in the new launches from Naoya Hida (one of them, anyway) and Moritz Grossmann’s new Tefnut.

Last but not least, did you know that La Joux-Perret is on track to grow its movement production by 50 per cent in the next two years? Better still, by the time its new factory is online, it will be making a colossal 40 times as many calibres as it was in 2019. Recent investment from LVMH is, it would seem, having an immediate result.

Links discussed in today’s episode:

• Mark Zuckerberg at the Met Gala

• Ethos Foundation urges change at Swatch Group…

• …as does ISS (no, not the International Space Station)

• My coverage of Steven Wood vs Swatch Group in TFW

• Swatch’s Social Teasers

• Naoya Hida’s new releases

• The new Moritz Grossmann Tefnut

• Baltic x Tour Auto 2026

• Tudor’s Black Bay Chrono Carbon 2026

• La Joux-Perret’s new factory plans

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Thanks for listening. I’ll see you back here next time for more.

Chris

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Close but no cigar

It is inevitable, after such a torrential downpour of new releases1, that just two weeks hence, as we are still wringing out our clothes, some of the best stuff has not received the credit it deserves. It is also totally understandable; it is a question of bandwidth, both on the part of media outlets and those trying to keep up in their spare time - but it is also a question of algorithimic filtering. The platforms that now make up the primary means of discovery for just about anything in our lives are designed to focus in on anything that looks popular; if you’ve seen and liked a few videos of the Parmigiani Chronograph Mysterieux, you’ll be served more, at the exclusion of other things.

Your experience may vary, therefore, but to me it felt like - as usual - a handful of watches and brands dominated the conversation at Watches & Wonders. Naturally, those were Rolex, Patek Philippe, Tudor and Cartier, with Parmigiani the year’s breakout star and honourable mentions for Vacheron Constantin and probably Zenith. Within that list, a few models dominated even further: the Nautilus, Daytona, Monarch, the aforementioned chronograph and the Overseas Cardinal Points.

Now, most journalists will have earmarked a number of watches as worthy of revisiting once they have time - so my yardstick of appreciation after just two weeks is not to say we, or they, are all lunkheads for overlooking such interesting creations.

It also dawns on me that there are two types of under-appreciated watch. One group, which is what I really want to look at today, is the watches that could very easily have been stars of the show, but for one reason or another were pipped to the post. The other group is those watches that represent solid value or do something commendable but aren’t necessarily headliners. Often they simply aren’t made by brands with enough marketing firepower to break through the noise.

In that category I’d like to tip my hat to Grand Seiko, whose SBGY043 above is just lovely in a low-key way (as, perhaps, all the best GS watches are). And, in fairness to me, quite a few of my top picks fall in this bracket too: Frederique Constant’s world timer, Raymond Weil’s anniversary chronograph - basically anything affordable. I’d also like to mention Parmigiani’s anniversary-edition update to the Toric Perpetual Calendar, which isn’t really on the same wavelength as these others, but it fixed something that I singled out in my review last year as one of the only drawbacks to the Toric2: the finishing. With a new clous de Paris surface treatment, it is to my eye significantly improved. Given everything else going on at Parmigiani this year, it’s no wonder that has been largely unnoticed, but it registered with me.

Today, though, is all about the other group. Watches with a strong claim to be headliners that had to settle for a lower billing. I’ve got three candidates.

TAG Heuer Monaco “Evergraph”

This seems as good a place as any to start. The Evergraph arrived with no shortage of hyperbole, and while that alone hardly marks it out from the crowd in any given year, it seemed deserving of at least a reasonable amount of hype.

Most brands circulate press releases and launch details ahead of time, but some keep their biggest releases under wraps. Not so with TAG Heuer: we knew this was coming and I for one was excited. I’m a chronograph geek, I’d like to think I have a reasonable understanding of the mechanics involved, and the work TAG Heuer has been doing recently on a technical front - regardless of your opinions of their designs or pricing strategy - has been solid. Rolling out a new family of calibres for the 60th anniversary of the Carrera in 2023 - the TH20 base - was the beginning, and since then it has got the carbon hairspring into a production watch, added some fun sidelines like the Porsche Chronosprint, and launched its first split-seconds wristwatches. That some of these accolades came about with the help of outsiders like Vaucher is not, in this context, a problem: my point is that it has been great to see TAG Heuer making interesting and ambitious watches that do actually work. I have fond memories of the Mikrogirder era, but I don’t think anyone who had to try and produce the thing would say the same. The brand has also been totally upfront about Vaucher’s role, which to my mind lends greater credibility when it talks about the work it has done in-house.

The Evergraph comes billed as a chronograph revolution. It debuts a pair of ‘bistable’ components that replace most of the lever and hammer elements, as well as the column wheel control system, from a comparable conventional chronograph. I’m not going to give you a thousand words on how it does what it does: I’ll give you a very brief version and recommend Mark Kauzlarich’s and David Ichim’s write ups respectively.

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In this week’s episode I touch on Anoma’s A1 core collection, i.e. the news that the brand is moving away from drop-based launches to maintaining something close to a permanent stock (if they don’t all sell out like a drop, that is). I explain how the House of Brands1 (that’s what we’re calling Breitling, Universal Geneve and Gallet, if that wasn’t on your radar) is going to be run, and address a little tiny room-based elephant when it comes to UG.

I also discuss the news that Timothee Chalamet has invested in Urban Jurgensen and what that might mean, and wax lyrical over the bright, preppy, Marc Newson-designed travel clock for Jaeger-LeCoultre. I think we have just about reached the point where the words ‘travel clock’ don’t summon cruel memes, and this is one I would love to own.

I also forgot (post-W&W, you see…) to touch on the latest FHS export statistics, the real standout - and potentially troubling, with the caveat that this is just one month’s worth of data - fact from which was that watches in the highest price bracket the FH tracks were down 0.5 per cent. Yes, that’s basically flat, but flat is not good news. On a side note, the FH could really do with adding a segment for watches at CHF 10,000 and above, since that’s where all the profit is coming from anyway. But I digress. See you back here next week for more news, and see you on Friday for this week’s newsletter.

I’ll be giving a little time to some of the overlooked watches from W&W, because (to really torture the metaphor) at any buffet, there are always dishes that might not appeal at first sight yet prove both delicious and nutritious. Ok, I’ll stop. Take care out there.

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Links discussed in today’s episode:

• Anoma A1 Core Collection

• Timothee Chalamet invests in Urban Jurgensen - it even made Yahoo News!

• Universal Geneve’s boutique-in-waiting

• Jaeger-LeCoultre x Marc Newson

• FHS Stats for March (not actually discussed in the episode, as mentioned!)

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Thanks for listening. I’ll see you back here next time for more.

Chris

If you missed this week’s podcast, it was a good one, modesty be damned, and is also the only place I’ll be detailing my favourite releases from the fair. And yes, it’s video too.

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

Subscribe now

Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Ask Me Anything

I have a couple of questions… Amateur Hour Watches

1. At watches and wonders brands have four potential audiences - retailers, media, high value clients, public day punters. In general how would you assess the importance the brands put on each of these? Does it vary by brand? How has this balance changed?

In simple terms, the hierarchy goes: clients, retailers, media, public. And judging by the posts from the weekend (I’d left by then, naturally) there’s quite a big gap between media and public. Those first three are privileged groups, with varying degrees of VIP access, while the public has to queue up and pay for everything. Sorry to be so blunt but we do know how good we’ve got it in the press corps.

Obviously, some brands have different levels of retail activity; if you do most of your business direct, you aren’t reserving your 9am appointment on day one for Brian Duffy, CEO of Watches of Switzerland. But as a rule, money talks, and if you represent potential sales, you’ll find yourself behind the velvet rope.

This leads to some interesting little sub-dramas within that hierarchy. I can only really speak to the media side of things, but things do vary brand by brand in terms of their approach to different elements of the media. Only today I’ve seen complaining on Instagram that some brands wouldn’t allow him onto the stand on account of being an influencer. By contrast, there are a few brands that gave some influencers - Adrian Barker, Justin Hast1 - advance access to watches so that they had video content ready to launch on day one. That’s the kind of prestige treatment that used to be reserved only for the top specialist media, or big-name titles like Vanity Fair or the New York Times. YouTubers (or Instagram/TikTok personalities) didn’t used to get invited on the press list, like I and my peers who came up writing for newspapers and magazines, but now a few do. The issue is partly brands being slow to adapt, wary of change and sceptical of platforms they don’t fully understand, and partly an erosion of the definitions on all sides.

For example, most retailers are now creating content for their own online channels. The Subdial guys were out there creating content like press, and even turning up in some press presentations - which was cool! Also, a lot of influencer content is nakedly pay-to-play, which changes your relationship with a brand. I met one Instagram content creator who was totally unabashed about the number of free watches they received for their coverage, and for the first time in my life, one indie brand said quite matter-of-factly that we should discuss media rates, i.e. how much they would pay me to feature their products. For the record, as if you guys and girls don’t already know it, that’s a non-starter with me.

2. Thoughts on the Universal Geneve launch?

Oh, so many thoughts.

• The biggest question mark over the whole thing wasn’t how good the watches are but how clearly the brand positioning and identity was communicated. Breitling, sorry - House of Brands - had three years to prepare the landing site, so nobody should be surprised at the price bracket. The “Couturier de la Montre” tagline - which translates literally as “dressmaker of the watch” is relatively new messaging and this is the element that I think will take time to sink in, although they laboured the point pretty hard; the watch offering is structured under headings like “pret a porter”, “capsule” and “couture”. I get the basic idea: you’re stylish, European and sophisticated. It might be my ignorance but I don’t remember ever hearing the phrase in relation to UG when discussing its heyday; one problem I can foresee is that even among wealthy audiences, not everyone is familiar and comfortable with the language of high fashion. Anyone who’s been to a watch meet-up knows that the most jaw-dropping pieces can often be found on the wrists of guys who dress very conservatively. It’s good to have a confident sense of personality but this feels like an identity that could alienate people. On the other hand, it positions a new luxury watch brand as adjacent to companies like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, which is smarter than positioning yourself next to struggling giants like Blancpain and Girard-Perregaux. Given that UG’s core collections are descended from down-to-earth tool watches like the Compax and Polerouter, we’ll have to wait and see if the language feels forced, or if it’s toned down a bit now that the big reveal is out of the way.

• If you strip away the language of fashion, the UG offering follows fundamentally the same template that Georges Kern outlined when he took over Breitling: that is to say, a number of product verticals each with a distinct offering at a certain price/quality category. It’s effective for mainstream volume brands but I wonder whether it’s a one-size fits all strategy.

• The phrase “show, don’t tell” should be circulated in 50pt font throughout the House of Brands. The launch was a masterclass in hammering the message home. Whether the message is right or wrong is irrelevant (to this point) - there was just too much message.

• As I have already mentioned on Instagram and in the TFW chat, the presentation of the watches was poor. Potentially good or even great products were dirty, dusty, and badly lit. Security concerns (understandably) meant attendees couldn’t handle the watches, which meant it wasn’t possible to see the movements that the UG team was so proud of, or demonstrate the Cabriolet’s revolving case. I had to persuade one of the senior team to show me the Polerouter calibre. There were so many ways to fix these issues and put on a launch that would have left us all seriously impressed, but if you were there to assess the watches it was very hard to come away with a firm answer. All the money and time had gone into the set-dressing for the keynote speech(es) and presenting the actual watches felt like an afterthought.

• Georges Kern working the room before and after was appreciated. It’s nice to see CEOs who are approachable, and not afraid to answer questions on the spot from journalists, even going back and forth on fine details without becoming defensive.
  
  

  

• I personally liked the Polerouter in steel with a hard stone dial, above, the Compax in its simplest form, and the Disco Maxi and Dioramic, albeit not for myself. The Cabriolet was the most intriguing model in the main collection; I think the idea of including it was a good one, but the typography is going to date too quickly.

• So many people are hung up on the comparison between vintage UG and modern. I can’t emphasise enough that even though the rebirth has had a team of midwifes from the collector community, the target market is not vintage UG collectors, and nobody is going to be weighing up an old Polerouter against a new one. It’s just not the same customer.

• An unfortunate consequence of Gerald Genta’s prolific career and post-2016 beatification is that these days, his legacy feels somewhat commodified. I mean no disrespect to his original work, but we need to find a way to honour it without it becoming exhausting. I’m all for giving him the credit he deserves, and didn’t get at the time, but over the last few years we’ve tipped too far the other way and now there’s a slightly embarrassing level of adulation whenever one of his creations is mentioned. It would certainly help if there were any other designers to venerate, but compare the way Patek Philippe handled the anniversary of the Nautilus, or the fact that it is possible to talk about the VW Golf without opening a new shrine to Giorgetto Giugiaro every time you do so (who I just learned also designed a new shape of pasta. Now that’s cool.)

3. I think we get the discussion of what a watch “should” cost all wrong. Since a watch’s price is generally set before its designed, it is based on its expected positioning and this then drives the design. Therefore I think we should stop saying ‘this watch should cost X’ and start saying ‘for this price the watch is missing Y’. Thoughts?

I think what you describe is accurate for most mainstream brands; a lot of low-volume indies price their watches slightly differently. I think when reviewers - at least, when I review watches I do this - compare new products to their rivals, this is close to what you’re asking for. But the problem you have, whichever way you frame the statement, is that a lot of what governs a watch’s retail price is either intangible, i.e. it’s brand-related, or it’s structural, i.e. they have to consider whether they’re giving a margin to a retailer, distributor or not. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say “for five grand, I expect to be buying this from a multi-brand department store, not direct from you,” but those are the economics behind the scenes.

If a brand is doing its job properly, it should at least be able to defend its pricing with recourse to hard facts: you may well say “for fifty grand, the Omega Constellation is missing a seconds hand”, but Omega can say “find me another METAS-certified solid gold dress watch on a bracelet,” and of course, you can’t. You can decide that Omega’s opinion of how much those attributes are worth is grossly inflated, but that’s your prerogative, and if they haven’t convinced you, that’s a problem with their marketing. That’s an extreme example chosen for a laugh, but what I’ve found is that brands are actually very careful not to make watches that are identically specced to a competitor - which means the ‘it’s missing Y’ construction can always be rebuffed with ‘ah, but it’s not the same’ - and all we can do is decide where that response sits on a spectrum of ‘total bullshit’ to ‘credible justification’. TL;DR - positioning is more fiddly than it first appears.

Chris, the highest-end indies / small producers have been a guaranteed profit game for the last couple years. Seeing Ferdinand Berthoud and the new Lange Lumen come out at €383K and €550K respectively, are the manufacturers catching up to that game and trying to capture secondary market profit for themselves, or is this just where the market is and those two watches will actually trade above retail in secondary market too? - Jith

The question of ‘leaving money on the table’ is one that has come up time and time again since the pandemic turned independent watchmaking from a niche folly to a fast-track for flippers. (I exaggerate, but not by much). It’s a delicate one.

Anecdotally I’ve heard collector gripes concerning the likes of Roger Smith, whose prices are said to have risen dramatically in recent years2 . And I expect we have all heard stories about prices going up while you’re on the waiting list - that seems to have been a Lange thing, among others.

I can see the various pressures on makers; it’s not just about capturing profit, but keeping up with the competition. If others are doing it, you’ll be forced to follow suit, lest your products slip into a different price category altogether. Of course, some brands opt to keep prices under control and pitch their customers on value for money, but if you say you make some of the best watches in the world, you are also going to want to be sure that you’re priced accordingly.

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It’s also an increasingly expensive business, and the lower your volumes and more inflexible your overheads, the more aggressively you’ll be squeezed by recent economic shifts. But let’s not pretend for one minute that there isn’t a healthy margin built in - top-line Lange models are now regularly more than half a million; last year’s Saxonia Minute Repeater was €750,000! I suspect that the top end of the market is displaying the same behaviour as the market overall, just in a more exaggerated way: making more and more of its profit from fewer and fewer customers3.

As for whether these kind of watches will still trade above retail, let’s look at some data, shall we?

Data on Ferdinand Berthoud is scarce, as the volumes are so low, but the models that have come to auction at major houses have consistently surpassed their estimates by significant margins since 2022. But that’s only a handful, and auction are notoriously unreliable indicators. Marteau sold an FB2 RE.1 in its first sale last year for $301,053 according to Everywatch, which I bring up purely because Marteau’s model is relevant when we talk about ‘leaving money on the table’ in that it returns a percentage of the hammer price to the original maker. That’s a watch that retailed for around $230,000 in 2020.

Grand Lange 1 “Lumen” models seem to have hovered around the $100,000-125,000 mark at auction for the last few years (either reference 117.035 or 139.035) and Datograph “Lumen” models (405.034) have hammered for between $160,000 and $250,000 in the last four years. The Lange 1 Lumens retailed for around $75,000-$80,0004 at launch, while the Datograph Up/Down Lumen in platinum cost approximately $110,000 new in 20185 so in six years, that has seen a significant increase. Again, those figures are courtesy of Everywatch’s auction tracker. Looking at dealer listings, the spread on Datograph Lumens in the last six months has ranged from $215,000 to $294,000.

A Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold “Lumen” - aka just about the most desirable combination in the Lange universe - retailed for approximately €620,000 at launch in 2024. That’s roughly a sixfold increase on the 2018 Datograph Up/Down Lumen’s launch price, just six years later, but it’s a different beast entirely, adding a perpetual calendar and tourbillon; it was also four times as limited (50pcs vs 200pcs). One has come to auction so far, in 2024, and it sold for $635,000, or basically exactly retail price, when presumably demand would have been at its highest and waiting lists at their longest.

That’s just one single sale, though, and obviously each individual reference is so limited in number it’s hard to find apples-to-apples comparisons. There is one listing for last year’s minute repeater on Chrono24 but it’s POA and uses a stock image, so I doubt it’s real. We need more time to see how these mega-budget models are going to depreciate or appreciate.

But maybe there are some other metrics that could help. One question I wondered about was: how many A. Lange & Sohne watches have ever changed hands for more than half a million dollars (that we know about)?

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