Latest watch news · Page 38

This week on The Business of Watches, a breaking news story, of sorts. Our friends at Worn & Wound have acquired Lorier Watches. It's a story of success for the New York-based boutique brand that started way back in 2017 with a mission to make vintage-inspired watches, designed to be worn every day, at an approachable price. In a way, it's a tale of too much success. Lorier co-founders, the husband and wife team Lauren Ortega and Lorenzo Ortega, struggled with the rapid growth of the small company, and the inability to meet demand for their products took a toll on the two-person operation. They considered winding up the brand, as it were, but a talk with Blake Malin, the co-founder of the well-established content, retail, and watch event company Worn & Wound, also based in New York, set them on a different path. Lorier founders Lorenzo Ortega (right) and Lauren Ortega (left). Worn & Wound co-founder and CEO Blake Malin. The acquisition of Lorier is the first time Worn & Wound has acquired a watch brand. Malin and Lorenzo Ortega join us to talk about how the deal came about and what's next for both Lorier and Worn & Wound. Though Ortega spent his formative years in Geneva until he was about 18, it's a decidedly American business story in the watch industry. There's plenty of watch business and strategy to discuss, and we hope you enjoy the conversation. Be sure to leave any thoughts or questions in the comments section, and we'll do our best to respond. Want to subscribe so...

Breitling continues its march to pay tributes to great motor cars of the past with this renewed collaboration release the Aston Martin DB5.

Haim Watch Company, a Chicago-based microbrand, marked its fifth anniversary in 2025 by introducing an intriguing new timepiece called the Annum. I first saw the watch last fall at the WindUp Watch Fair in New York City, where the brand's founder, M. Zakir Miah, brought along a prototype that immediately caught my attention. Visitors at the event received a sneak peek of the Annum alongside previous creations like the Viajero worldtimer, a model I reviewed last year. Since that initial preview, the Annum has undergone a bit of an evolution, including a subtly redesigned case and a few small tweaks to the dial. In its final iteration, the Annum offers a compelling complete calendar watch that punches well above its weight and continues what Haim Watch Company has achieved with its Viajero: creative, supremely wearable takes on complications that stand out the price point. The Annum comes in three dial variations. "Dark Cobalt" and "Stone White" are solid-colored dials with a sunken-in CNC guilloché center section and applied hour markers on the grained outer dial ring. But when it was time to pick which variant I'd spend some time with for this hands-on, it was the semi-transparent "Fumée" dial that I wanted to see, and it wasn't even close. From afar, the Fumée iteration reminds me of the dials of great skeletonized perpetual calendars of old, thanks to the display of the module underneath the smoked PVC (plastic) dial. On this dial, the subdial rings and minutes track ...

Hamilton, once one of the largest American watchmakers, has a long tradition of accessible, robust field watches and military-inspired timepieces, a style that’s been crucial for the brand with its Khaki Field Collection. While most of the models are modelled after the mid-20th-century Hamilton Hacked watches, some editions took the brief at face value, while some, […]

Confession time: I hardly ever play golf anymore. With my busy schedule, tennis has completely taken over. But when a dedicated golf watch landed on my desk, it was a great reminder that I should play more. The Vaer G2 Fairway GMT is a clever golf watch with a bezel that lets you keep track […] Visit Get Out On The Green With The New Vaer G2 Fairway GMT to read the full article.

Put an IWC Mark XV next to a Rolex Explorer ref. 114270 on a table, and you might wonder why anyone would bother comparing them. One is a Schaffhausen pilot’s watch built around a military lineage. The other is Rolex’s purest expression of the no-nonsense sports watch, worn by mountaineers and geologists long before it […] Visit We Had It So Good: The IWC Mark XV And The Rolex Explorer Ref. 114270 to read the full article.

Over the past year, Seiko has refined its Prospex 1968 Heritage Diver’s GMT with several editions, including the 60th Anniversary SPB509 and the SPB534 Seashadow. Following the white-dialled SPB519, the latest additions, the non-limited references HBC001 and HBC002 in classic black or green colourways, offer the familiar design of the 1968 Heritage Diver’s GMT with […]

Just like an actual bumblebee, Tudor’s new Black Bay Chrono 39 appeared out of nowhere at the beginning of June. We hadn’t even had a chance to recover properly from Watches and Wonders yet. Tudor, on the other hand, was ready to go again with one of the most exciting releases of the year. Following […] Visit Hands-On With The Daring And Downsized Tudor Black Bay Chrono 39 “Bumblebee” to read the full article.

The Piaget Polo 79 Sodalite adds five panels of blue semi-precious stone to the brand’s flagship bracelet watch. It is a worthwhile extension of the collection that draws on an authentic Piaget speciality and gives the revived Polo 79 a stronger identity of its own. Initial thoughts Stone dials are now widespread, to the point that any new watch with a mineral dial feels a bit like an exercise in jumping on the bandwagon. But Piaget has been making watches with semiprecious stone dials since the 1960s, and helped establish the category altogether. As a result, the Polo 79 feels authentically Piaget, even though stone dials are now commonplace enough to seem generic. The case dimensions and build quality are unchanged — at 38 mm wide and 7.45 mm high, the Polo 79 remains compact and elegant, while the full white gold case and bracelet give it a heavy, dignified feel. The alternating brushed surfaces and polished gadroons are naturally finished to a high standard, and the rhodium plating will ensure the colour of the 18k white gold stays cool and bright indefinitely, even if it makes later refinishing a little more complicated. The watch is powered by the latest in a long lineage of Piaget micro-rotor calibres that reaches back more than 60 years. It’s still one of the thinnest automatic movements in the world, though it comes up a little short on power reserve by today’s standards, at 44 hours. Otherwise identical to the white gold Polo 79, the sodalite dial adds ab...

Parmigiani Fleurier (PF) continues its exploration of “mysterious complications” with the Tonda PF Chronographe Mystérieux, a fully functional and surprisingly legible chronograph that is indistinguishable from a normal three-hand watch — until it isn’t. Pressing the conveniently placed chronograph monopusher summons a chronograph on demand, fully equipped with central minutes and hour totalisers, which disappears just as easily. Despite being one of the most ambitious chronographs on the market, it is priced relatively accessibly, at least in steel. Initial thoughts At first glance, the Chronographe Mystérieux is nearly indistinguishable from a normal three-hand watch, unless you spot the pair of rose gold hands secreted under the mean time hands. Depressing the chronograph button at eight o’clock causes these, along with the sweep seconds hand, to fly back to zero and being timing intervals up to 12 hours. The concept is not unlike that of the Maurice Lacroix Memoire 1, little-known halo piece that debuted in 2007 for EUR300,000. The Chronographe Mystérieux would work the same way without its hour and minutes hands, but their presence ensures the user can still read the time when the chronograph is running. The result is a highly legible dial, enhanced with an almost excessively fine grain d’orge guilloché that, like the undersized 18k gold hour markers, gets out of the way of the hands. At launch, PF offers two variants of the Chronographe Mystérieux ...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in the watch industry, it’s that you never know when you’ll have the opportunity to do something unique, and that saying “yes” to something without having all of the details might result in a rare, or even once in a lifetime experience. With that in mind, let me set the stage for how I found myself 1,000 feet above Manhattan in a 1958 DC-6B, piloted by The Flying Bulls. Early this month, I received a rather vague invitation to a ”Red Bull Flying Bulls thing with Tudor” immediately after returning from our Chicago Windup Watch Fair, and that it “involves a very early morning flight on a very old plane”. While I’d usually ask a million questions and try to get every detail that I could before committing to something, in the interest of being just a touch more spontaneous, I couldn’t respond “I’m intrigued, count me in” fast enough.  As we got closer to the event, I’d come to learn that the “old plane” in question was a beautifully restored 1958 DC-6B and the “very early morning” meant arriving at the Meatpacking Tudor Boutique at 7 AM. Once everyone arrived, our small crew began heading up to White Plains FBO, which I later learned was named Million Air. Not long into the ride, we were presented with a briefcase of loaner watches, ranging from the Tudor Ranger in 36mm “Dune” and 39mm “Black”, or the Black Bay 58 GMT on either the new five link bracelet or classic rubber strap. While...

Breitling introduces a limited-edition trio of Top Time 41's dedicated to Aston Martin's most iconic car of all time, the DB5.

Introduced in 1996 with the reference 5035, Patek Philippe’s Annual Calendar was neither a simplified perpetual calendar nor an upgraded complete calendar, but an entirely new mechanism protected by a patent; we explained the full story of its creation and evolution in this article here. By automatically distinguishing between months with 30 and 31 days, […]

Two months ago, I spent a Friday lunch eating a sandwich called the Crazy Poulet at Notos Bar Restaurant in Le Sentier with Mark Schmid, who is a sort of jack-of-all-trades in the marketing and communications department at Audemars Piguet. Schmid has quickly become someone I'd consider a friend, whom I appreciate for our candid conversations, his willingness (and frequency) to correct my confusion between l'accent aigu and l'accent grave in articles, and, more recently, his gastronomic suggestions. I'm sure this story will require a few more corrections from Mark, for which I apologize (mostly to him) in advance, but I wanted to share a recent experience that illustrates why I love Switzerland's Vallée de Joux, past and present. Le Sentier, pictured back in 2022 on the author's first trip to Switzerland. The town, now home to the headquarters of Jaeger-LeCoultre, was the hometown of Samuel-Olivier Meylan, the first watchmaker in the valley who began crafting timepieces around 1743 and set the stage for what is arguably the most important geographic location in watchmaking. "People ask me what I'd want to do if I didn't work at Hodinkee," I said. "Sometimes I say that I wish I could be the head of the tourism bureau for the Vallée de Joux." "Well, maybe you could be our advocate in New York," he said. "But if you came back here on a Thursday night at 4 o'clock, this place would be full. You'd hear watchmakers talking about all the things they were up to at AP, JLC, Blancp...

When it comes to more modestly sized watches, Nomos has long been ahead of the current trend of smaller models. The brand is built on clean, conservatively proportioned designs across its collections. The Tetra – Nomos’ square offering – was part of the inaugural lineup introduced back in 1992 alongside the Tangente, Ludwig, and Orion. The model has always been offered in 27mm and 29mm and later, a larger 33mm was added with the Tetra Neomatik. Now, the smaller 27mm size gets two new additions: the Tetra 27 white and Tetra 27 duo. With the Tetra 27 white, we get the most classic expression of the model – pared down 27.5mm by 27.5mm square proportions with only 6.1mm of thickness making up a polished stainless steel case framing a crisp white dial. Here, we have central hours and minutes with a subtle touch of color thanks to blue steel hands and a mix of stick and Arabic numerals. Tucked at 6 o’clock, you’ll find a flat small seconds register as opposed to the recessed one seen in other models with its own micro hashmarks and tiny blue steel hand. No frills, no fuss, just an ultra-classic dress watch design with a nod to Art Deco styling, which extends from the square case to the double-stepped lugs. Alternatively, the Tetra 27 duo offers a bit more interest with a two-tone type of dial featuring concentric squares thanks to a soft grey inlay at the center and the same gray creating a frame across the minute track adding just a bit of contrast to the stark whit...

Quick take with hands on and live photograps of the Montblanc 1858 Geosphere 0 Oxygen Mount Elbrouz, the highest mountain in Russia and Europe.

Travel has always been at the heart of Louis Vuitton, and the Escales Autour du Monde collection, like all Escale watches, has a great poetic sound to it. The name, which translates as “Stopovers Around the World,” recalls Francisca Mattéoli’s celebrated book documenting Gaston-Louis Vuitton’s remarkable collection of hotel labels gathered during his travels; there’s […]

Earlier today, we reported the increase in sales indicated by the Swatch Group (+8.5% at constant rate), which follows almost identical signs reported by Richemont about a week ago (+8% for Specialist Watchmakers and +20% in total, with a growth mostly driven by Jewellery brands). Now, it’s time for the Federation of the Swiss Watch […]

Following two difficult consecutive years, with sales down 12% in 2024 and 7% in 2025, the Swatch Group, the Swiss watchmaking giant owner of brands such as Omega, Breguet, Longines, and Tissot, is now back to growth. Indeed, as indicated by its half-year 2026 report, Swatch Group recorded “a strong increase in sales, up +8.5% […]

The Bulova Military VWI Special Edition supports the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative, with 10% of the sales proceeds donated to the VWI.

Raymond Weil’s first integrated-bracelet sports watch blends 1970s inspiration with compact proportions and accessible contemporary luxury. What We Love A design inspired by 1970s integrated-bracelet watches Strong variety of colours and finishes Excellent integrated-bracelet option for the price What We Don’t No bracelet micro-adjustment Dial finishing could have more character Movement could offer greater autonomy Overall Rating: 8.4/10 Value for Money: 8.5/10 Wearability: 8.5/10 Design: 8/10 Build Quality: 8.5/10 Raymond Weil has gone through quite a resurgence over the last couple of years, bringing the brand back into the spotlight and creating watches with genuine substance behind them. The Millésime collection, for example, helped reposition Raymond Weil when it was introduced in 2023, combining vintage-inspired styling with thoughtful design. It also won the Challenge Watch Prize at the 2023 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, showing just how well received the collection was. Raymond Weil Millésime Tri-Compax Review – The Best Colourway Yet? Since then, the brand has continued building on the collection, introducing various complications and aesthetic interpretations to keep it evolving. In fact, I loved the 2025 Millésime Tri-Compax Chronograph so much (see the review above!) that after having it in my hands for just 30 minutes, I placed an order for one! However, Raymond Weil’s resurgence cannot be built on the Millésime collection alone. This ...

Chopard, the Official Timekeeper and World Sponsor of the famous Italian endurance rally since 1988, has released countless chronographs inspired by the Mille Miglia race, its drivers and its iconic route. The Raticosa Pass has already been honoured once before, with a limited-edition series in 2021, and this 2026 Mille Miglia Classic Chronograph Raticosa pays […]