Virata, the little watch company from Ohio, just sent me a prototype of their latest piece and I have to say I’m impressed. When I first wrote about the pieces I had just spoken to their creator, a dude named Patrick Wacks from Canton, Ohio. Wacks was inspired by Formula 1 racers and decided to test his engineering mettle by becoming a watchmaker. He succeeded.
As you might imagine, we here at WWR are truly spoiled for choice when it comes to what we are going to cover. While a lot of it comes from relationships we’ve established with brands, some true surprises come out of a cold contact from a brand that we’ve not heard of. One of these recently came in from Hong Kong, in the form of the Greyhours Essential collection.
We have reviewed watches from all variety of brands, and it is interesting to see the differences when you compare watches that come out of the same family (of brands). Take, for instance, Ballast, who would count Earnshaw and AVI-8 as stablemates. Looking across the lines at a high level, there is no sense of “badge engineering” going on. No, the watches are different, and each brand has their own style. Then you get to something like the Ballast Trafalgar, and you really do have something different.
WT Author is one of those brands that I’ve been pleasantly surprised to run across. They have been creating watches unlike what we had seen prior (at least in the modern era of watches), and they have an overarching plan (and timeline) for how their total collection will play out. We saw it start off with the WT Author 1905 (link), then move on to the 1914 (link), and most recently, the 1929 (link). While we had been able to provide hands-on impressions of the latter two models, that first had been limited to just the pictures we had seen, and viewing it through the lens of the design cues that carried forward onto the subsequent models. As fortune would have it, we were able to work with WT Author to have a WT Author 1905 sent over, so let’s travel back in time and have a look at what it offers.
Another day, another Kickstarter watch from Canada. This time we meet Valachio, a slim three-handed watch that…
What’s that? You say you’re trying to create a watch via crowdfunding, and you arrived at this idea because nothing else out there met your idea of a perfect watch? While this may ring true for many creators, it’s a line that has been trotted out time and again, and it simply does not get our engines turning over. No, for that, you have to offer up something that is particularly different from what has come before, and that is where watches like the Mansfield Time Automatica One jump ahead of the pack.
There seems to be a run on watch brands looking for input from their customers. It is a benefit of this new watch economy that allows the smaller indie brands to reach out directly to the consumer. We saw it before with both Prometheus LINK and Janis Trading LINK, and now we’re seeing it from Uhuru Watches. There was an update that came out earlier this week on their new Ukhozi Pilot watch that also served as a method for asking for that input. Before we get to that, let’s see what the
Earlier this week, we caught word of some input that Janis Trading (formerly known as Lew &…
Hastings and Company’s Heritage Edition Automatic
As Hemingway once said, “Tell time drunk, wind your watch sober.” Thanks to Vintage Soda you can…
