Since its debut, Horloger Ming, the brand led by Ming Thein, has built its collections on light, transparency, and layered dial constructions. From early minimalist pieces to more technical watches like the 29.01 Worldtimer, Ming has explored how a dial can interact with its environment. Recently, the brand went even more expressive, resulting in the […]
Held on the mountainous slope of Vancouver's North Shore, the Vancouver Timepiece Show offered its second-ever installment this past April. The event offers a true enthusiast-driven platform for a variety of value-driven brands and is part of a now three-show-strong portfolio for Canada's Timepiece Shows, spanning Vancouver, Toronto, and, later this month, Montreal for the first-ever appearance. Less than a week after the big show in Geneva ended, I hopped on a plane and flew to Vancouver for
What We KnowWant to see a magic trick? No, not the kind the Joker pulls in "The Dark Knight," but instead something pretty cool that Ming has cooked up with their new 29.06 "Peep Show." The watches below look markedly different, but the only thing that's changed is the direction the hands point. When Ming Thein showed me this watch last fall, I immediately got what was going on as he turned the crown. If you were doing the same, you'd see that the guilloché dial with a multiphase color-shiftin
How do you capture 100 years of the Oyster? That's the question at the center of Rolex's new 23-minute film celebrating the anniversary of one of the most important watches ever made.The film opens with incredible archival footage of Mercedes Gleitze swimming across the English Channel, then moves on to archival footage of many defining moments tied to the Oyster's history—speed records, Everest expeditions, deep-sea exploration, and much more. Most will know these stories, but seeing them pre
Urwerk, the indie brand founded by Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner in 1997, is renowned for its futuristic, aerodynamic vessels with kinetic satellite hour displays. In 2025, Urwerk released the UR-10 SpaceMeter, a watch that initially stumped fans with its round dial and conventional hour and minute hands. However, closer inspection revealed Urwerk’s fascination with […]
Rado’s foray into the world of dive watches in 1962 resulted in the Captain Cook, a somewhat quirky watch that didn’t emulate the rugged tool watches populating the underwater scene. Defined by its less utilitarian character, the Captain Cook had a compact 35mm case, an inward-sloping bezel, a domed acrylic crystal, a pivoting anchor at […]
Timex and affordable quartz watches are synonymous and have been since the brand ceased mechanical watch production in 1982, following the Quartz Crisis. Few brands have found as much success as Timex with quartz, and innovations like Indiglo (bright, uniform dial electroluminescence introduced in 1992) have kept them on top for decades. Only a few […]
Swatch is planning a collaboration with Audemars Piguet, expected to be one of the most significant and talked-about watch releases of the year. Swatch began teasing the tie-up last week with social media posts featuring the distinctive font associated with AP's iconic Royal Oak model and the words 'Royal' and 'Pop.' That led to hordes of speculation online that the brand was preparing a collaboration with AP. And then, over the weekend, the two marques confirmed that indeed they would be rele
Collaborations are an established part of the modern watch cycle: a new model is introduced, colors follow, maybe a complication is added, and eventually a collaboration enters the mix, often positioned as a moment of creative divergence within an otherwise predictable trajectory. With the Citizen Tsuyosa seconde/seconde/, the brand hits that phase in a way that feels both familiar and slightly off-script.Collaborations are also never entirely expected, yet the best ones have such a natural fi
Less well known than the brand’s popular dive and pilot watches, Oris has a dressier, more formal watch line, some powered by the brand’s in-house calibres, such as the refreshed Artelier Complication we covered a few weeks ago. The Artelier Date, a classic time-and-date model, has also been selected for a design makeover. Keen to […]
Among top-level, mainstream Swiss-made watch brands, few can match Cartier's performance over the last half-decade. The Paris-based jewelry marque has vaulted ever higher to become the second biggest watch brand by sales, according to analyst estimates from both Vontobel and Morgan Stanley. While the jewelry unit of Cartier remains its primary driver, analysts say estimated sales from the watch division grew about 10% in 2025 to exceed CHF 3 billion, up from less than CHF 2 billion in 2019. Wh
The BR-03 collection by Bell & Ross has been around for nearly two decades, and by now, its square case with a round dial is one of the most recognisable designs out there. Originally launched in 2006 as a 42mm alternative to the larger 46mm BR-01, the collection was updated in 2023 with a slightly slimmer […]
Although the vast majority of mechanical watches are still made in steel, there are plenty of alternative materials, of course. One of the oldest and most widespread ones is gold, followed by titanium and perhaps platinum. On the more uncommon end of the spectrum, we find watches made in other types of metals, cutting-edge composite […]
In our recent ABCs of Time article, The Top Five Countries Where Watchmaking Reigns Supreme, England didn’t quite make the cut (and some of you took issue with that), so let’s take a look at the history of English watchmaking and give the country its due. After all, several of the most important inventions actually […]
It wasn’t too long ago that we brought you the story of the brilliantly cool Auto Union Type 52 Schnellsportwagen. This was a car that, before this coachbuilt creation, existed on paper only, as Auto Union had the plans ready but never got around to actually building it for various reasons. Along the same concept, […]
There’s always been something slightly paradoxical, if not vague, about the Rolex Yacht-Master II. In the brand‘s catalogue, year after year defined by a slow-paced evolution (quite unpredictable recently, though, as we have learned from experience) and exceptional commercial clarity, this watch has consistently stood apart. A large, complex and highly specific model, it is […]
Some of the best creations often result from the least expected encounters… However, when two radically different creative minds start to work together, nothing says that the alchemy will develop. More often than not, the connection doesn’t come to fruition. At first, there was seemingly no reason for entities like Baltic and SpaceOne to collaborate. […]
The watches of A. Lange & Söhne very rarely gets a chance to step out of the stoically traditional design language the brand has established since its relaunch in 1994, but one collection from the brand offers a unique respite from it all. Lange's Lumen series is now in its 16th year since the introduction of the Zeitwerk "Luminous" back in 2010, with its inaugural display of smoked sapphire, blacked-out details, and, of course, luminous numerals for the hour and minute discs. But while th
William Stafford wrote, "I'd just as soon be pushed by events to where I belong." While I wouldn't claim it is great or wise to have a single line from a single poem weigh too heavily on anyone's life, those dozen words have exerted a monumental pull in my own existence. I'm not by nature much of a planner, and the line offered itself as a little sophisticated rejoinder I could tell myself when confronting my chaotic life, but I also think the wisdom the line offers is useful.And you're sittin
Louis Moinet (1768-1853) wanted an accurate instrument to track celestial motions and built the Compteur de Tierces in 1815-1816. Endowed with a start, stop and reset function and a balance wheel beating at an impressive high frequency of 30Hz, his novel stopwatch could time events to the 60th of a second. Considered one of the precursors […]