With Patek Philippe’s Calatrava turning 90 in 2022, the time is ripe to look back on an icon of classic Fine Watchmaking that’s been almost a century in the making.  The Calatrava is a gateway to the world of Patek Philippe. The strength of this essential timepiece, with its minimalist style and timeless elegance, is...

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...