MICRO MONDAYS: Introducing Marnaut, the sub-$1k 300m dive watch with the sea urchin dot-pattern dial
Mario Jutronic’s marine-themed microbrand Marnaut is a breath of fresh ocean air. It was beginning to seem impossible that a retro-flavoured dive watch could bring anything new to the table, but one glimpse at a Marnaut dial and you must admit they’ve found a way. Having spent a large portion of his youth snorkelling around the Adriatic Sea, Croatian entrepreneur and watch collector Mario Jutronic decided that his own brand needed to break away from the endlessly recycled designs in the diving world. His solution? Evoking the strikingly symmetrical holes in a Sea Urchin’s exoskeleton by arranging no less than 43 Super-LumiNova filled steel indexes on the dial. Mario describes the watch’s inspiration, the Sea Urchin, as a mesmerising object. And that’s the right word to describe the dial, too. The glinting indexes beneath the gently doming sapphire of the Dark Surge draw the eye, and train it to the centre; it is in fact hard to believe something so symmetrical and perfectly designed comes from an organic being. The downside is the lack of numbers on the timing bezel. With not a minute marker to be seen, it loses a lot of traditional diving functionality. That is part of…
The post MICRO MONDAYS: Introducing Marnaut, the sub-$1k 300m dive watch with the sea urchin dot-pattern dial appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.
Is collecting mechanical watches meaningful? I’ve thought about this existential question quite a bit. Recently I was fortunate to spend some time chatting with Leonid Khankin, President and Creative Director for the brand Ernst Benz. Leonid has a deep understanding of the watch industry. Our discussion is worthy of a separate article. But at one point he made a statement that, coincidentally, resonated with some of my recent thinking. Leonid said that the pursuits of the watch community are honourable. This was the first time I’d heard this word applied to horology. We’ve all had the question enter our minds at one point or another: are watches, in the end, a frivolous luxury? Is it indulgent to spend our precious time debating topics like the position of a date window? Would we be better off figuring out the number of angels that can dance on the head of pin (a question for which you’d no doubt need a loupe, but I digress)? After giving it some more thought, three clear arguments emerged for why we should feel good about collecting watches, even during a global crisis. The watch industry is generous and quick to act in a crisis It’s been…
At SIHH in 2019, Cartier released something very special, and oddly, it was powered by stock standard quartz. The Cartier Santos-Dumont was met with a standing ovation, not just because it was remarkably faithful to some of the earliest watch designs from Cartier, but it was also slim and relatively affordable thanks to that humble quartz movement. The real boldness of the piece was in its diminutive size and thinness. It was something of a redefined version of masculine style. And it was a bullseye. Perhaps the only thing it lacked, for the watch journalists who care deeply about such things at least, was some more moving parts. Cartier has answered those prayers with the release of the Cartier Santos-Dumont XL with a manual winding movement. The new movement will be available in steel, two-tone and rose gold. Looking past the movement just briefly, let’s talk about that XL new case. It’s not as significant as you might think. The case measures a still very wearable 46.6mm by 33.9mm and is genuinely slimline at only 7.5mm thick. This is only 0.2mm thicker than the quartz references from 2019, which is an impressive concession considering how the slimness of the 2019 reference caused…
For anyone reading this in April 2020, you’ll agree that it’s a strange time to be alive. Somehow, we have already seen three months of 2020, a point that has felt both incredibly fast and agonisingly slow to pass. As the interconnected health and economic crises continue to unfold around the world, the news cycle is dominated by Coronavirus as its impact is felt everywhere. Including the watch industry, with perhaps the peak announcement this last week that yet more pivotal brands would desert Baselworld after a farcical fallout from the first COVID-related cancellation. While some brands have halted production, and even halted the release of new watches in 2020, we have still seen evidence of the show going on, especially over the last few business days, when we actually had some releases. This new crop has certainly been thin, but it’s not without its genuinely exciting highlights. I wanted to wrap up my five favourites from the handful of watches that have been released so far, in what will hopefully be the beginning of an interesting (if quiet) year of watch releases. Grand Seiko SBGW258 in yellow gold (or SBGW257 in platinum) I know this isn’t one watch, but,…
The turn of the century gave us Y2K hysteria, the first use of the Euro as currency and the Spring Drive movement. That’s right, in 1999 we saw one of the most remarkable innovations in watchmaking of the last half-century, with the release of the first-ever Spring Drive powered watch, the Seiko SBWA001. This is the story of a reader by the name of Zach’s pursuit of one of these fairly rare watches that marked a new beginning for the Japanese manufacturer. In June last year I was fortunate enough to attend the spectacular HSNY (Horological Society of New York) lectures in honour of the 20th anniversary of the proprietary Spring Drive movement. As an owner of an SBGA211 “Snowflake” and big fan of the Grand Seiko brand, I was excited at the prospect of really digging into the history of the engine of one of my favourite timepieces. For a complete overview of Spring Drive if you are not familiar already, it is best to hear from the experts themselves and I feel obligated to direct you to the lecture itself by Joseph Kirk, Brand Curator and National Trainer for Grand Seiko Corporation of America. I caution any sceptics…