Trade Secrets: Honest Watchmaking Observations for 2025

What you are gazing upon is a specialist digital magazine. It is (partially) all about watches, from digital cover to cover, all of the time. If you are a regular reader, you probably noticed that and it is probably why you stayed regular. It is certainly why I read specialist titles. WOW is also about the watch industry, broadly speaking, which means some might call it a trade title. Well, in our last gasp at
real talk before the new watches of 2025 blow our minds, I wanted to get some things off my chest, the first of which has to do with the above claim on specialist versus trade. This is really a matter of semantics and I hope you will agree that it is irrelevant. I am simply glad that we still have an audience, whatever proportion of tradespeople and collectors it might be.

Luckily, people are still interested in what we have to say about watches and, believe it or not, it continues to surprise me that this interest extends beyond professional meetings.

This lightweight confession aside, this column is really about honest, well, asides. Originally, it was my editor’s note because this kind of story is hard to illustrate and the editor’s note does not need pictures. See, more facts and truth, all wrapped up in the concept of trade secrets! Well, I busted the word count for that note so that plan went south faster than the Harris-Walz ticket on election night. Of course, I had a lot of words that I had written and needed to use, and there were these four free pages…

Fortunately, I did have an opening point that I could actually illustrate easily, as you can see. As last year ended and a friend told me about his Bruce Wayne and Batman ideal, it occurred to me that I let the entire year slip by without typing Bruce Wayne for a story in the magazine. Oh, we did cover the new Oyster Perpetual GMT-Master II after Watches and Wonders Geneva (WWG) but not simply as a highlight of the year…in our Highlights section. Well, consider this a correction, and yes the Batman/Bruce Wayne idea relates to having two GMT-Master II pieces – a sort of duality of dualities and so on.

Anyway, we do agree with our peers at Monochrome that the 2024 Bruce Wayne is a worthy successor to the all-black bezel GMT-Master II that was discontinued in 2019. The subtlety here makes the difference and for those who can see it, Bruce Wayne is a winner. At USD 15,800 on the Oyster bracelet, the watch packs all the important positives of the GMT- Master II. This talk of price leads me into my next confession, which is a bit of an oversight on my part in the Festive issue.

In our Highlights coverage of the IWC Ingenieur 40 with blue dial, we cited the US dollar price, but were not clear on it. I regret the confusion there as we typically use only the local dollar price but the original destination for the story was for Luxuo, hence the decision. For the record, then, the IWC Ingenieur Automatic 40 costs USD 16,600, as do all versions of this watch in steel. Now, as a rule, we would never engage in such a long explanation because it does not help anyone. In this case, it is actually a segue to address a point raised by a YouTube channel we like, This Watch, That Watch.

The video itself was about the pros and cons of social media commentary on the hobby of watch collecting. We really do appreciate the host and presumably owner, Mike-from-Denmark, for using the word hobby repeatedly because this is something Ruckdee and I have been doing for some years now (and we hope to drag Daniel down to our level too). In any case, the video zigged and zagged on the issue of transparency about pricing, even if just listing the price of any given watch publicly and then commenting on it. This is close to our hearts here because WOW was amongst the first traditional media to regularly list prices, long before brands did so on their websites.

Now, Mike missed a truth here that we would like to take up, and that is, useless comparisons between watches. These have exploded on social media, particularly video commentary on YouTube. It is a bit of a trade secret that watch brands certainly do not like it when you list all watches in the same notional price bracket, just because it can lead to weird groupings. For example, this story includes an IWC and a Rolex that would never travel together, and yet the prices of both are listed and comparable. The difference, as we hope is obvious, is that we are not making any comparisons, beyond noting that a comparison would be silly. And boy, have there been silly comparisons made, publicly by the very social media influencers that Mike was addressing, so perhaps some trade preferences should be given a measure of respect.

Price might be the most difficult fact to navigate in the world of watches but sometimes content can also have its dangers too. Here, I turn the lens of scrutiny on traditional media and ourselves specifically. Bylines tell an interesting story all by themselves in quite a few titles, including our own. These can serve to delineate advertorials and editorials. The function is purely mechanical because writers only get credited on editorials, but never on advertorials. By inference, dear reader, you can easily know what has been guided by the brands and what has not.

Oddly, it is a bit freeing when you do not have your name to something, which probably explains why people are so brave online. It can honestly be nerve-wracking to write parts of The Conversation, where we are our most honest selves. You might think it mad but we really do write it all together, over a few hours, with only the barest notion of a plan. It often all goes the way of improv theatre when one of us rides off the reservation to pursue some glorious thought or other. The rest have to scramble, most likely ditching prepared lines of thought, to both catch up and get things back on track.

And thus, having run out of space, I leave off, and prepare to address you all more directly from WWG.

This story was first seen on WOW #76 Spring 2025 Issue

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