Horolonomics

Anarchy is a society without laws. AI generated image of a law rendered void. I sometimes wonder if watch collecting is a near-anarchic niche given the number of laws and regulations which are normally reliable but often weakly enforced when it comes to watch collecting. Take, for example, theft of a $20,000 car. According to the Insurance Information Institute, 85% of stolen cars are recovered. You have decent odds of retrieving a stolen car. Or, if your insurance company disburses cash to compensate the victim of car theft, then the insurance company has a very good chance of getting stolen cars back, selling them, and maintaining lower premiums as a result. I don't know for certain, but I strongly suspect that a stolen Rolex Daytona ref 116250 worth $20,000 is recovered far less than 85% of the time. For example, The Watch Register claims to have over 100,000 stolen watch serial numbers in its database. Over a decade, it also claims to have seen the recovery of 4,500 watc...

Of late it appears that the Kering group is steadly withdrawing resources from watchmaking. Gucci's watchmaking office in Switzerland. Source: Google Earth. Kering owns Gucci and a number of other brands. In January of 2022, word broke that Kering had jettisoned Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux . Management acquired ownership and has been operating the brands since then (unless there was another, subsequent, private party sale of ownership stakes). The most recent step on the path to a reduction in Kering's watchmaking footprint appears to involve Gucci Watchmaking. News broke last week that Gucci's watchmaking office in Cortaillod, Switzerland has notified the trade union for watchmaking that the brand would like to dismiss 25 employees. The brand and the union have started negotiations regarding the possible layoffs. Such steps are usually the last that a business will take, typically only under the most challenging and fraught financial circumstances. As I wr...

A number of principles are foundational to the watch industry and watch collecting. Screenshot of a Timex advertisement from the 1950s. One of these is, no doubt, the preservation and perpetuation of heritage. Brands with a longer legacy often maintain archives overseen by someone with a title like "Heritage Director." Some open museums in order to share heritage with the public. Vintage collectors connect with these archives and museums, which further perpetuates interest in and enjoyment of collecting. The list goes on. It was with this context in mind that I learned that the United States, and Connecticut in particular, has an import watchmaking heritage property which may soon disappear, never to return. That property is the Timex World Headquarters in Middlebury, CT. Ground level view of the Timex World HQ. Source: Bellapart. I first wrote about this property in 2023 when I learned from local news that Timex had sold it off to a local developer. This wasn'...

Watches and Wonders, the annual industry trade show in Geneva, is now squarely in the rearview mirror. AI Generated image. As is so often the case in the modern era, though, it leaves behind a lot of digital "breadcrumbs," such as Google Local Guide Benjamin Spiegel's relatively glowing review of the convention space. One particular trail of Watches and Wonders breadcrumbs serves as a barometer of enthusiasm for watches and watch collecting. That's what this post is all about. Through its Trends service, Google provides a window into search activity on its platform. I've used Google Trends data as applied to the watch industry for a few articles in the past (on this blog and for a piece in Time and Tide, for example). Out of curiosity, I pulled the data on "Watches and Wonders - Topic" from Google Trends and I think there are some interesting patterns in the data. Let's begin with the raw data. The first Watches and Wonders took place in 2...

We're certainly not suffering from a shortage of coverage when it comes to Rolex's recent launch of an entirely new product line: the Land-Dweller reference 127334 (steel, there are also precious metal versions). I've read much of this coverage and I will do my best not to repeat it here. Instead, I hope to share a few takes that you may not have seen elsewhere, including evidence that the watch's design heritage extends in directions that are overlooked. So let's get into it. To begin, the Land-Dweller is undoubtedly attributable to the leadership of CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour, who took the reigns of the brand in the summer of 2015. According to an expose by Bloomberg (more on that later), development of the Land-Dweller began roughly five years ago, a handful of years after Dufour took over. There have been many, equally significant releases by Rolex of late. For example, 2023's "emoji" Day-Date was arguably a bigger "mic drop" than the Lan...

Today, I received a dispatch direct from Le Brassus, aka global headquarters for Audemars Piguet. The email cautions collectors that fraudsters are targeting clients of AP and other brands with potentially bad consequences. In the interest of collector protection, and as a bit of "public service," I'm copying the main body of the AP email below. Be careful out there, always check email headers and double-check with your known contacts at any brands before wiring money, for example: "Cybercriminals are trying to scam customers in every industry and watchmaking makes no exception. At Audemars Piguet we want to be sure that our trusted community is well protected against cyber- criminal exploits. Recently, threat actors have been using spoofing techniques to send fraudulent emails pretending to come from trusted brands, such as ours, in an attempt to deceive individuals into disclosing sensitive information, making payment to illegitimate accounts or engaging in fra...