Welcome to This Week in Watches, a weekly column where we will summarize the most interesting happenings in the watch world.
“Don’t Call it a Comeback” — LL Cool J
Leading up to Watches and Wonders, we got our first taste of new releases this week. MB&F led off with a gorgeous version of their Legacy Machine Perpetual in steel with a gold dial. The main trend was brands reissuing early pieces. We wish we could term this “reimagining,” but the reality is closer to simply producing long discontinued watches again. De Bethune, Daniel Roth, and URWERK all followed this path, bringing us beautiful objects, but from a premise we don’t love and will expound on in a paid-subscribers-only post.
“Power to the People” — John Lennon
The age of social media has seen collectors rise as influencers, both driving purchase decisions and design ideas. This week saw a cool project release from a newer independent called Montres Lecomte who launched an entirely new watch designed in conjunction with a group of Instagram collectors.
Of course this alone is nothing new. In the early 2000’s, creating special pieces for the collectors forums was common. Even in the early days of Hodinkee, their special pieces felt “designed by collectors” in a way. What’s different now is the lack of a central organization for promotion. This piece was shown through a series of teasers on each of the collectors Instagram pages, using each as a promotional hub. This isn’t unprecedented, but it does feel like something we will see more and more of in the future. Watch brands stubbornly insist on often working without proper designers, eschewing an entire discipline that in our opinion would benefit most. The next best thing is letting the most detail oriented collectors create what it is they want.
“Now I’m somethin’ like a phenomenon” — De La Soul
This week also saw another Instagram driven phenomenon as Insta-Collector nycwatchguy took delivery of his Akrivia AK-06. Akrivia and the Rexhepi bros have become the heir-apparents to the Indy Watch throne so it was cool to see one actually make its way into the wild. The most interesting angle, however, is that the selling retailer used the delivery to make a promotional video unboxing. Watchbox has also done things like this . Dealers using customers in PR is a great idea that we’ll be keeping an eye on in the future.
That’s it for this week. Let’s see what Watches and Wonders has to offer…