The Collector's Guide to Microbrands WATCHES: 100 Brands You Need Know

There have never been more watch companies. Almost nobody can name thirty of them. In fifteen years the barriers that kept watchmaking inside a handful of Swiss valleys came down. Case machining got cheap, movement supply opened up, and anyone with a design and a website could reach a buyer directly. The result is a market of extraordinary richness and almost no signposting. This book is the signposting. Watchmaker and collector Kim Jang examines 106 independent watch brands across nine chapters - from author-watchmakers charging twenty thousand euros to a veteran in Virginia making one model and the strap it comes on. Every entry tells you what you are actually buying: the price, the wait, the object. Every entry ends in a verdict, signed, that you can agree or disagree with. Inside: the brands that became institutions; which watches are engineered against a specification and which are merely styled to look that way; what "vintage" actually means, and the nine different commercial acts hiding behind one word; why the affordable end of this market has converged, and the shared factory that explains it; how to buy from companies selling in drops, queues and crowdfunding campaigns; and five questions that will still work on brands that did not exist when this was printed. This is not a catalogue. Some companies here receive two thousand words and some receive six hundred, because they are not all equally interesting. No brand in this book paid for its entry or saw its page before publication. Somebody has to do the checking. That is what this is.