Watch Ho & Co. and Hong Kong microbrand Selten are at it again. This is their third collaboration, and they've called it the Yum Cha, written 飲茶 in Chinese. If you're not familiar with the term, yum cha literally means "drink tea," but it describes the whole experience of gathering at a tea house with family, ordering dim sum, and spending a few slow hours together. It's a deeply cultural ritual in Hong Kong, and that's exactly the spirit Jackie Ho and Selten are bottling here.
The last time these two teamed up, the result was the Jui, a watch with a Tahitian mother-of-pearl dial featuring hand-guilloché work inspired by Hong Kong's Bauhinia flower. That watch went briefly viral on watch Instagram, and for good reason. The Yum Cha has even bigger ambitions. The dial is a hand-engraved grand feu enamel piece, finished in a warm amber tone that's meant to evoke steam rising off a bamboo dim sum basket. It's a genuinely unusual color for a watch dial, and in person it looks rich rather than gaudy.
This is the third anniversary club watch from Watch Ho & Co(mmunity), the collector community Jackie Ho has built in Hong Kong. Each piece has been a collaboration with Selten, and each has pushed the craft dial work a little further. With grand feu enamel, they're now operating in genuinely rarefied territory for a watch at this price point and production scale.
What's Actually New Here
The jump from guilloché mother-of-pearl to hand-engraved grand feu enamel is a significant one. Grand feu enamel requires firing powdered glass at extremely high temperatures, and even tiny imperfections can crack the whole dial. Adding hand engraving on top of that raises the difficulty level considerably. The engraving on the Yum Cha dial depicts imagery tied to the tea house tradition, and the amber coloring ties it all together thematically. It's not just decoration for decoration's sake.
Under the dial, the watch runs on a Sellita SW210-1, a manually wound movement. That's a deliberate choice. A hand-wound movement suits a watch meant to evoke ritual and intention. Winding your watch each morning before heading out for dim sum has a certain poetry to it.
Grand feu enamel at this scale, from a microbrand collaboration, is rare. Most brands at this tier stick to printed or lacquered dials. The Yum Cha is genuinely trying something harder, and that matters.
Who This Watch Is For
You need to understand what Watch Ho & Co. actually is to appreciate this watch properly. It's not a traditional brand with a retail presence and a marketing budget. It's a community, built around Jackie Ho's genuine enthusiasm for watches and Hong Kong culture. The people buying this watch are, for the most part, members of that community. They know the story. They were probably at one of the community events where the concept was first discussed.
That said, the Yum Cha absolutely has appeal beyond the inner circle. If you're drawn to craft dials, to watches with a specific cultural story behind them, or to Hong Kong's independent watch scene, this one deserves your attention. The Jui found buyers well outside Watch Ho's immediate community, and the Yum Cha will too.
This is not a watch for the person who wants a tool watch or a versatile everyday piece. The amber enamel dial is expressive and specific. It makes a statement, and that statement is rooted in a very particular time and place.
How It Compares
Craft dial watches from established brands, think Jaquet Droz or certain Cartier pieces, will cost you many times more than the Yum Cha. Within the independent and microbrand space, very few are attempting grand feu enamel at all. That's partly because it's expensive and technically demanding, and partly because the risk of dial failure during firing is real. Selten is taking that risk, and that puts the Yum Cha in a fairly uncrowded category.
The Sellita SW210-1 movement is honest and reliable without being exciting. That's fine. The dial is the point here, not the movement. Compare it to something like an entry-level Nomos in terms of movement pedigree, but understand that no entry-level Nomos has a dial that looks remotely like this.
- Dial: Hand-engraved grand feu enamel in amber, evoking steam and tea house warmth
- Movement: Sellita SW210-1, manually wound
- Context: Third anniversary collaboration between Watch Ho & Co. and Selten
- Cultural hook: Yum cha, the Hong Kong tea house tradition, expressed through both color and engraving
- Precedent: Follows the Jui, which used hand-guilloché Tahitian mother-of-pearl and gained significant attention online
The Bigger Picture
What Jackie Ho and Selten are doing is genuinely interesting from a watch culture standpoint. They're making limited edition watches that are tied to a specific community and a specific place, and they're not cutting corners on the craft to do it. The Yum Cha is the most technically demanding thing they've attempted together, and the concept behind it is one of the warmest. If you've ever sat around a table at a Hong Kong tea house with people you care about, passing baskets back and forth and losing track of time, you already understand what this watch is about.
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