Show Notes
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Click here for podcast show notes Welcome to Unpolished’s year-in-review newsletter. It won’t be the last issue of 2025, but highlights some of the most popular and interesting stories of the year, while also giving an update on Unpolished. Many of you are paying subscribers and thus stakeholders in this newsletter, so you deserve it! You can also listen above or in your podcast app. To see all the numbers and enter the holiday giveaway (more below), upgrade now: Btw, I received a press release this morning that Kari Voutilainen is stepping back as co-CEO of Urban Jürgensen, but will join its board. Alex Rosenfeld, the other co-CEO, becomes CEO.
At its best, the internet can be amazing. Unpolished launched with a few thousand people on an email list built up over 5+ years, and 12 months later, it’s a sustainable, very small business that’s replaced my previous income. But the internet is also frustrating. It engages us, enrages us, and hijacks our attention. Today, social media, especially Instagram, is the home of the watch “community,” while YouTube is its library of reviews and opinions. One of the common questions I get—it showed up again in last week’s Q&A—is what other watch “content” (a gross word) I consume. But I’ve found this question is really asking something more like: How do I stop scrolling and consume stuff that actually feels worthwhile? It applies to watches, but not only watches. I was at a dinner with a few collectors in New York earlier this month, and one of them (hi!) said to me that his favorite coverage helps him better understand and appreciate watches—even without any intention of buying them. Whether that’s understanding the innovation, craft, or culture that’s imbued in any particular object. Because that’s the reality, isn’t it? Whether it’s a $17m Patek Philippe perpetual calendar chronograph or a new $4,000 watch from Tudor, we’ll never own most of these watches. And that’s just fine. But they’re still ours to appreciate. What we’re really talking about isn’t ownership—it’s attention. In a world of frictionless consumption, there’s growing value in things that reward patience, permanence, and earned understanding. There’s something uniquely human about our ability to create abstract, symbolic tools and build on them over time. Mechanical watches are a perfect example: centuries-old instruments designed to measure an idea—time—that we defined in the first place. As I’ve mentioned, “craft” was one of the main themes of 2025, and it gets at a feeling bigger than watches. Technology, whether it’s social media or AI or software updates to your car, has encroached on anything real. Watches can provide a small respite. They can urge us to slow down, to appreciate what goes into making an object with hundreds of parts and centuries of history. Like anything that sticks around long enough, watches have transformed from technology to tradition. Wrapped up in that is also all the problems that come with any tool that becomes a status symbol or luxury. This idea, craft, has been wrought to the point of cliché, but the reality remains: People appreciate craft, whether it’s Larry Bird making 99 free throws in a row after practice or F.P. Journe harnessing the phenomenon of resonance. Which is what’s exciting for watches. These objects can be beautiful displays of a variety of crafts, whether feats of the human hand or human engineering. The bad news: I’m not sure the larger watch industry is really adapting to this. Some corners of the high-end and independent scene have leaned into craft, but anxiety about luxury defined the broader conversation in 2025. That tension showed up in what people actually read, at least in this newsletter. As we’ll see below, the most-viewed articles this year were (1) about how “watch prices are insane,” and (2) expressing my complicated feelings about luxury. These weren’t celeb
More from Unpolished Watches
This week’s guests are Adam Golden of Menta Watches and Chris Gary, the producer and director behind Chasing Time, a documentary about watch collecting premiering at the Austin Film Festival at the end of October. We start with a market update from Adam: whether the indie boom is sustainable, the institutional money driving the market, and why a headline auction result doesn’t make your watch worth the same. Plus the obsidian-versus-onyx debate that runs through the documentary, and how to deal with the court of public opinion. Chris was an enthusiast and collector for a dozen years before he spent 2023–2024 following Adam to Geneva, Tokyo, New York, and Miami. We talk about what that access changed for him, the independents he sat down with–Sylvain Berneron, Naoya Hida, Xhevdet Rexhepi—and why the most interesting young watchmakers are looking at 1940s design and Breguet for inspiration instead of Rolex. I sat down for an interview for the documentary in 2024, so we chat about the process of making the documentary, which follows Adam’s day-to-day life as a dealer, with appearances from Ben Clymer, Davide Parmigiani, Daryn Schnipper, John Goldberger, Wes Lang, and more. Chasing Time screenings are being planned for Miami, Atlanta, LA, Chicago, Geneva, London, and New York, with a wider release expected in early 2027. * Podcast episodes are published on Fridays. Subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS. * Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors. Join for free or become a paid subscriber for $8/mo or $80/year: unpolishedwatches.com Show Notes * Chasing Time, official website * Chasing Time on Instagram * Menta Watches; Menta on Instagram * Chris Gary talking about collecting in 2020 with Grey and Patina Unpolished Store: shop.unpolishedwatches.com to shop our collection of Canvas and leather straps. Everything has been restocked for the fall. * Pick up a 3 Canvas Strap Bundle for $169, a 10% off the single-strap price ($157 member price!) * Shop the new Textured Taupe, made of high-quality Epsom leather. Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors and a top-20 Fashion Substack. Join for free or become a paid member for $8/mo:
Zach Kazan is the managing editor of Worn & Wound, and he’s covered microbrands as closely as anyone for the last decade. In two weeks, Worn & Wound puts on its Windup Watch Fair in New York (Oct 16–18) with 160+ brands under one roof. I’ll be there, along with some of you, so I wanted to get Zach on to talk about the state of the microbrand. We talk about whether “microbrand” still means anything, and why some brands hate the word (while others embrace it); the boom of a decade ago and the more experimental one happening now; Ming, and the point where a brand stops being micro; pre-orders as interest-free loans; why Zach keeps coming back to watches made by people he knows; the founders who still answer their own DMs and Reddit threads; how Serica and Anoma collect feedback before a launch; Halios, and the case for staying small; the AP x Swatch, the Bulgari x Vianney Halter, and other watches built to be loud for a week; Moser’s move into the main hall at Watches and Wonders, the Streamliner 34, and the $4,900 ana-digi Off-Grid; whether a shakeout is coming; why the Apple Watch isn’t the cool thing to have anymore, and which brand should be saying so; the Gallet relaunch. I also ask which watches from Geneva Watch Days he’s still thinking about, a few weeks later. “It’s all gone from my brain, Tony,” Zach says. * Podcast episodes are published on Fridays. Listen here, and subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS. * Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors. Join for free or become a paid subscriber for $8/mo or $80/year: unpolishedwatches.com
Austin Rogers is a New Yorker by way of Ohio, and goes by @rehaut on Instagram. He’s also scuba certified and an aspiring mountaineer—he’s tried to summit Mount Baker three times but has encountered some truly terrible luck. Each time, he’s had a Rolex Explorer on his wrist. The first video of Austin’s I saw had him tossing a few Doxas into a hazy lake to find out whether orange really is the most visible color underwater. Austin describes himself as “maybe the most credulous watch buyer”—as a diver and climber, he uses his watches, and he’s got lots of opinions on them. We talk about grade 2 vs. grade 5 titanium, and whether choosing grade 2 is cutting a corner; the watches he’d titaniumize (Submariner, Explorer II, a shrunken Sky-Dweller, the Laurent Ferrier Classic Origin) and the ones he wouldn’t; why the “Omega’s catalog is too bloated” critique doesn’t land for him; the baby Ultra Deep he’d build if he got the keys to the factory; which Tudors from the 2013-onward rebirth era could be collectible in 20 years— North Flag, smiley dials, early FXDs, the double-signed stuff; the Submarinerization of the Longines HydroConquest and whether Longines had any option; his Grand Seiko problem; the Ulysse Nardin Diver [AIR] he regularly thinks about selling everything else for; boomerang watches; and why he keeps buying the nicest new-old-stock neo-vintage on the market and then eating an enormous loss on it. “I like to think of it as a service that I’m offering,” Austin says. * Podcast episodes are published on Fridays. Listen here, and subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS. * Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors. Join for free or become a paid subscriber for $8/mo or $80/year: unpolishedwatches.com Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors and a top-20 Fashion Substack. Join for free or become a paid subscriber for $8/mo ($80/year):
Subscribe: https://unpolishedwatches.com/ In December 2025, a surprising watch went viral. It wasn’t from Switzerland, Japan, or any of the traditional watchmaking hubs. It was from India and cost about $42. The brand did no marketing, and it sold out more than 5,000 pieces in just 2 minutes. Maybe you’ve seen the Delhi Watch Company Terra. It’s a unique take on a field watch: monobloc titanium case, a case design inspired by a climbing carabiner, and with a parachute-style strap. Released for DWC’s 5th anniversary, it surprised everyone, and I wanted to get the story behind the Terra. So I reached out to Delhi Watch Company’s founder Anish Dandwani and designer Ishaan Vajpai, the duo behind the Terra. We talk about the Terra, but also a lot more—what’s it like to go viral, how watchmaking is developing in India, what makes it different, and what’s next. This episode is also on YouTube here—the guys share their screen a couple of times to show renders of what they’re working on, so check it out there if you want the full look. Unpolished is a collector-supported newsletter about watches. Join for free or support with a paid subscription. Subscribers get 2 newsletters/week, a 10% discount on all orders from the Unpolished store, $50 off a watch service, community perks, and much more. * Podcast episodes are published on Fridays. Listen here, and subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS * Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors. Join for free or become a paid subscriber for $8/mo or $80/year: unpolishedwatches.com Show Notes * Delhi Watch Company * DWC Terra * Ishaah Vajpai on Instagram * Vincent’s early hands-on review of the Terra, Mainspring Magazine * Inside Titan Watches, Hodinkee * Sebastian Watch Co., artisanal dials made in India * Quest Precision on Instagram shop.unpolishedwatches.com: Shop Unpolished straps, including the new Textured Taupe, made of durable, versatile Epsom leather. Available in 18-20mm:
Jeff Stein is a collector, researcher, scholar, retired lawyer from Atlanta, and the proprietor of On the Dash, the resource for all things Heuer. Since 2003, he’s meticulously documented nearly 600 watches there. In 2016, he was featured in a Talking Watches episode on Hodinkee. Ten years later, he still owns slightly more than half of the 50 or 60 Heuers that were on his kitchen table while filming that episode. Jeff registered on eBay in 1998 and he’s been collecting watches ever since. We talk about his “checklist era” of collecting and upgrading his collection; the personal Heuer grails he’s chasing that no one else is; why community grails like Chronomatics and Seafarers are strong while so many other vintage tool watches have gone soft; an assessment of Heuer collecting over the last few years; what he’d buy if he had $5,000 or $10,000; the TAG Heuer divers that kept the company alive; the $500 S/eL his daughter wears; the Breguet, Audemars Piguet, Piaget, Sinn, and other watches that Jeff also enjoys. We close with some advice: Know when to sell your watches. “The only way I could have never sold a watch might be if I’d never made a mistake in buying a watch,” Jeff says. Thanks to Jeff for joining the Unpolished Watches Podcast. * Podcast episodes are published on Fridays. Listen here, and subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS. * Unpolished is the newsletter for collectors. Join for free or become a paid subscriber for $8/mo or $80/year: unpolishedwatches.com Show Notes * OntheDash.com; Jeff on Instagram * Jeff Stein’s Talking Watches from 2016 * Absolutely Everything About the Heuer Autavia “Viceroy” Chronograph, On the Dash * Guide to TAG Heuer Dive Watches, On the Dash * Berneron Mirage at LoupeThis * New TAG Heuer Monza Flyback, On the Dash * Sinn EZM1, Unpolished Unpolished Store: shop.unpolishedwatches.com to shop our collection of Canvas and leather straps. Everything has been restocked for the fall. * Pick up a 3 Canvas Strap Bundle for $169, a 10% off the single-strap price ($157 member price!) * Shop the new Textured Taupe, made of high-quality Epsom leather.