The new Luminor presented by Panerai at SIHH in January 2018 is good news for two reasons. It has a new hand-wound calibre with a 3-day power reserve, replacing the ETA 6497 used up until now. Panerai now doesn’t make any watches with ETA movements. This is good performance for the brand, whose first in-house…
Once upon a time a fine gun was part of a gentleman’s armoury. Thankfully today this is no longer the case, but there are still the intriguing connections between gunmaking and watchmaking – which share terms like “barrel” and “calibre” – and this watch by F.P. Journe has a very close relationship with the ancient…
The L.U.C XP demonstrates the breadth of Chopard‘s watchmaking capacity, and its ability to read the market. The L.U.C XP incorporates all of the brand’s in-house capacity, with a slim movement powering a watch that is modern and trendy. It has a couple of interesting design decisions – no date display, no seconds hand –…
Romain Jerome is a brand not based on watchmaking, but on story telling. Each of their pieces has a very powerful identity generated by design, colour, and the materials and texture used for case and bezel. This style was developed initially by Yvan Arpa, from 2006 to 2009, and then by Manuel Emch, CEO of…
Romain Jerome have perfected a very efficient formula that enables them to sell watches in non-precious cases (though complex with a lot of attention to finish), with movements purchased from third-party suppliers, at premium prices. They achieve this by means of agreements with companies licensing instantly recognisable subjects, and small editions that satisfy customers’ desire…
The RJ X Donkey Kong is a tribute to the like-named arcade game, and it is a limited edition of 81 watches in reference to the year in which the game was first released, 1981. Gaming arcades weren’t my scene and so I have to rely on what Romain Jerome tells us: before starring in…
Romain Jerome first launched its Eyjafjallajökull-DNA watch in 2010, celebrating the eruption of the like-named volcano that for some days caused havoc in air traffic. It has already sold out two collections and so this year the brand is offering another piece, a limited edition of 99. The whole watch expresses rough, spiky lava, from…
It’s as if some brands had giant ghosts drifting through the corridors of their Manufactures, the ghosts of dead watchmakers calling the people there, saying “remember us, your glorious past!” They are ghosts that make it difficult to design watches that belong to the future. For a brand like Girard-Perregaux, the ghost is very big,…
How does a watch brand react to tough times? The last two years have been tough, and Baume & Mercier have reacted by introducing a sub-collection to the existing Classima collection that speaks to a new, wider range of customers. People who are attracted to a luxury Swiss watch brand but who don’t want to…
The Reverso story began in winter 1930-31, when Swiss businessman César de Trey was travelling in India. He traded in watches and other items, and the colonies were an excellent market for him. On that particular occasion, he was watching a polo match played by British army officers. One of them was wearing his watch…
The Corum Golden Bridge Round is the brand’s latest version of its famous baguette movement. For the first time, it has a round case, in which the space on either side of the linear movement is filled by a lattice structure directly inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It is made in…
Watch companies have different approaches to re-editions. IWC, for example, prefers to redesign its historic pieces so that there is at least something new and you can easily tell the difference between the old and the new watch. Longines, whose new watches are predominantly classical pieces inspired by products from its past, prefers to retain…
This 39mm piece by Parmigiani Fleurier is dominated by the poppy-red dial in aventurine, with rose gold case and bracelet, diamond-set bezel and lugs (in total 112 diamonds, 1 carat), and a single ruby cabochon set into the crown. Creating a dial from a stone such as aventurine is not simple: it has to be…
This watch illustrates why Panerai is a world apart from most other brands. It is pure simplicity, just hours and minutes, four numerals in the graceful Panerai style, eight straight hour markers, and that’s it. No date window, and that is something fantastic and courageous. The Panerai Luminor 1950 3 Days Acciaio 47 mm PAM00663…
Panerai tells some great stories (read the top ten Panerai stories here). The Radiomir 1940 PAM00622 looks like a simple two-hand watch with a chocolate brown dial matching a vintage-look leather strap, with a lovely hand-wound 3 Hertz movement visible through the sapphire caseback. And that’s what it is, but it is also a tribute…
Is Tetris educational? At first sight, the game seems to encourage spatial ability as it calls for the visualization of geometrical shapes and their rotation. But in actual fact, according to a scientific study, experienced Tetris players just become good at Tetris and this spatial expertise doesn’t transfer to other areas of cognitive ability. Nonetheless…
Hamilton, according to CEO Sylvain Dolla, is going great guns, in particular on its top three markets the USA, Japan and Italy, but also in many other countries, with Thailand and Turkey enjoying notable growth. Every ten years, Hamilton produces a gold watch aimed particularly at collectors, at a price well beyond the brand’s normal…
Nothing displays the passage of the years better than this tribute to an electronic game that looks so incredibly dated, with its 8-bit pixelated graphics. According to psychological studies, the use of nostalgia to sell products is most effective when the thing remembered was something that we were doing in late adolescence, so when we…