In Watches: What's Been Good? Bad? Downright Ugly?

Three of the four participants were editors with a collective 80 years' experience covering the watch trade: Roger Ruegger, editor in chief of WatchTime, a publication and website for enthusiasts, who splits his time between Zurich and New York; Nick Sullivan, the New York-based fashion director of Esquire; and the New Jersey-based freelance watch journalist Roberta Naas The fourth participant was James Lamdin, founder of the vintage watch dealer Analog/Shift and founding partner of the RedBar Group, a watch collector community "There are more people interested in mechanical watches than at any point in history, which is unbelievable given that the industry almost died 40 years ago, and moreover, none of us need these things with the digital technology we all carry around in our pockets"But educating consumers - through mainstream media, through trade media, through tastemakers who have really made mechanical watchmaking cool - has resulted in huge numbers of new consumers for an industry that doesn't really know how to operate in a modern way," he said.

He's a great, interesting guy and absolutely the antithesis of the normal stars you'd expect to be associated with a watch brand MS NAAS It's one of the biggest questions I get: Why do I have to wait six months for my watch to come back to me? Why do I have to pay so much money for my in-perfectly-good-shape watch to be serviced? MR.

RUEGGER Looking back at S.I.H.H., Richard Mille's Bonbon Collection is maybe the first time the watch industry thought like the fashion industry: "This is a collection People who had never worn a watch before were given or acquired a smartwatch and got accustomed to wearing something on their wrist, Googled the thing to learn about it and all of a sudden, they're wearing mechanical watches. . Source