Many legacy watchmaking brands attempt to make a comeback, but few manage to pull it off. Czapek has become one of the most resounding success stories of recent years. How did they do it? When a brand is first launched, predicting how long it will last is always an uncertain business, and Czapek was no...

The vast majority of watches are round—quite simply because that’s the shape of their main component, the wheel. In addition to this practical consideration, habit and fashion have made life difficult for other case shapes, be they rectangular, square, or barrel-shaped. Only the latter has managed to carve out a niche. One of the great...

How did a company that was unknown just twenty years ago find itself rubbing shoulders with brands whose value runs into six or seven figures? We’ll probably look back on it as one of watchmaking’s most meteoric success stories from the turn of the millennium. Two decades ago, it took an awful lot of chutzpah...

Guilloché is perhaps the most immediately visible of the many decorative watchmaking arts, and while there’s been considerable progress in micro-techniques, the craft itself has actually changed very little. Enter the secret world of guilloché engraving. What’s the difference between the original guilloché engraving of the sixteenth century and that of today? The answer is...

Abraham-Louis Breguet established most of the fundamentals of modern watchmaking – not just in terms of technical and aesthetic principles, but also in how to design and sell watches.  They are few in number; their names are Lépine, Breguet, Wilsdorf, Patek, Audemars, and Vacheron. Brands, you say? No; in this instance the list is of...

Yellow gold was a classic from the 1960s to the 80s, after which it was considered old-fashioned, garish, and outmoded. By 2020, 80s-inspired trends were on the rise—cheap quartz watches, Day-Glo colors, Chanel’s Electro aesthetic, bold styling (seen in Tissot’s PRS and the new BR-05), and yellow gold. Today, two markets exist: yellow gold collector’s...