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Oliver Ebstein came to watchmaking from banking and pharma, bought a company in trouble, and rebuilt it. Staying private, for him, is a strategy, not a sentiment.

The weekend the United States set its tariff on Swiss goods at 39 per cent, Chronoswiss spent it packing watches. The rate applied on the date of shipment, not arrival, so the company rushed as…

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In May, the Chapter 7 Skeleton arrived in anthracite PVD, a coating engineered to swallow light. This month it arrives with the coating gone. The steel beneath is what you now see. Everything else holds — the 40mm case, the Soprod P024, the thirty-eight hours, the faceted bezel, the crown pushed to four o’clock. A single process has been subtracted, and…

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The blue arrives before anything else. At the center a skeletal tourbillon turns beneath the domed crystal, the HYT monogram floating in its cage; around it the colour organises into rings — a pale cyan track hugging the mechanism, then a deeper cobalt arc that climbs the left flank and stops, the fluid caught mid-retrograde. It is the most saturated th…

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The brand that made its name by taking things away has made a watch about showing everything.

For a decade, H. Moser & Cie. built its reputation on subtraction. Logo-free dials. Fumé gradients that said nothing and meant it. A watch cased in real Swiss cheese to mock the “Swiss Made” label; a mechanical answer to the Apple Watch, delivered deadpan, that …

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AMIDA has spent two years selling a future that never arrived, and it has become very good at it.

The Digitrend OSII Black — limited to 150 pieces, embargoed to June 23 — is the third act in the brand’s revival of a 1976 curiosity: a dial-less driver’s watch that tells the time sideways, through a prism, on the flank of a wedge-shaped case. The original …

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I occupy the highest ground. On the Instrument de Mesures I am the telemeter, the outermost ring, set at the periphery of a dial built in three dimensions — a domed centre, a raised edge, and a sloping middle section between them — so that I look down on everything below me. The dial was not printed. It was laser-cut into the material itself, the markin…

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One Millimetre

U-Boat has redrawn its most familiar watch and announced the news in a sentence that doubles back on itself. The icon resizes; its character remains unchanged. The case loses a millimetre—forty-seven becomes forty-six—and the company that has sold scale for a quarter of a century would like us to read the reduction as a refinement rather t…

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Among the more elegantly deployed sentences in the press release for the new Hautlence Kubera Series 1, one stands out for the patient labour it performs on the reader’s behalf. “The jumping hours and peripheral minutes module,” the brand explains, “developed by Agenhor in collaboration with HAUTLENCE, completes this mechanical architecture and turns th…

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I am Pantone 395 C. You may call me electric yellow, as the literature does, though I prefer the number; the number is in-house. I am applied in accents across the dial, spun into the textured rubber strap, and laid as Super-LumiNova across the ruthenium-plated bridges, which means that when the lights go down I am the last thing in the room still worki…

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I am the part that works.

This needs saying at the outset, because a great deal happens in this watch, and most of it does not work in any sense physics would recognise. The purple does not work. The alligator does not work. I work. I am the Harmonious Oscillator, patented, and I keep the time.

P…

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On December 3, 2025, the Corriere della Sera published a short piece about a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva. The occasion was A Celebration of Breguet’s 250th Anniversary — seventy-three lots, hammer prices that climbed to 1.88 million Swiss francs for a gold tourbillon pocket watch made by Abraham-Louis Breguet himself in 1804. Gregory Kissling, speaking …

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The press release for the TYPE 11 hits the pitch such announcements are now expected to occupy: the language of milestone, the cadence of ascent, the practiced honorifics of first and in-house. Antwerp has built a movement. Antwerp is COSC-compliant. The Werk RW-01 has forty jewels, sixty-seven gears, eighteen ball bearings, twin barrels, a sixty-hour r…

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There is something almost confessional about the Lunar Chronograph Aurora. Chronoswiss, a brand that helped rescue mechanical watchmaking from oblivion in the 1980s, now finds itself in need of its own rescue. Not from extinction. From irrelevance. The Aurora arrives as an argument, wrapped in iridescent dial coating, that heritage can still flicker wit…

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Fifty years. Not nothing. Not quite patrimony either.

Raymond Weil was born in 1976, during the quartz crisis, when Swiss mechanical watchmaking looked less like an industry than a hospice. That it arrives at this anniversary as one of the last independent, family-owned Geneva maisons—still standing, still privately held, still stubbornly refusing the ac…

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There is a particular species of luxury object that exists less to be worn than to be understood. The Chopard Zagato Lab One Concept belongs to this category—a 42mm exercise in structured restraint that weighs 43.2 grams with the strap and arrives freighted with enough conceptual apparatus to supply a design biennale. It is, we are told, the lightest ti…

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The watch arrives at a moment when the industry’s emotional temperature has changed. After the speculative excess of the early 2020s, the market has settled into something more sober. Trade coverage over the past two years—across Chrono24 market reports, Bloomberg watch indexes, and commentary in specialist titles—has converged on a single observation: …

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