Zach Kazan

I'm not quite sure that it would be correct to say that pocket watches are “having a moment,” but I've certainly thought and written about pocket watches more in 2026 than in any year I can remember. Mostly that's due to an approximately two week stretch earlier this year when the entire watch community was focused like a laser beam on the

Fears made some news this week not only with a new release, but also the announcement that one of their signature watches is being retired. The new Brunswick 40.5 Jump Hour ‘Ultimus' is, somewhat surprisingly, the last version of the Brunswick 40.5 Jump Hour. Now, it stands to reason that Fears will not completely abandon the Jump Hour format. This platform has been incredibly popular for the brand, and seems to be a fount of creative opportunity for their design team and collaborators. Still, the appropriately named Ultimus is the end of a chapter, and it seems like a good opportunity to reflect on a watch that I've personally come to enjoy quite a bit in my own collection.

Bernhardt's Captain collection is a new range of dress watches that I think loosely falls in the Calatrave-esque trend that has been emerging, most notably through a variety of Japanese indies and micros, over the last few years. As interest in chunky divers and sports watches appears to wane a bit, enthusiasts are (finally) willing to look at watches in other genres, and brands are delivering with a variety of takes on the dress watch format.

When this one came across my inbox earlier this week, it honestly took me by surprise. How is it, I thought to myself, that Seiko hadn't already made a bonsai themed watch at one point or another?

If you've attended a recent Windup Watch Fair in Chicago, there's a very good chance you've run into Doug LaViolette. Doug is the founder of the Brian LaViolette Scholarship Foundation, a Wisconsin based watch enthusiast, and honestly one of the nicer people you'll encounter in this hobby. For years, the scholarship foundation named for his late son has raised money for over 1,200 scholarships for students across the United States and abroad, and now a new watch from Sheffield, a limited edition of just 95 pieces, will help in the cause.

Jacques Bianchi, the Marseille based brand specializing in dive watches, has released the first watch in what is expected to be an ongoing partnership with Olympique de Marseille, the city's historic football club. This has been a big summer for soccer, of course, with the World Cup being held in North America right in the middle of summer, and if your individual case of football fever hasn't exactly been cured yet, the new diver based on the brand's popular JB200 platform might be of interest. And even if it's not, it's an interesting diversion from Jacques Bianchi that might point to some broader ambition from the brand as it relates to artistic craft, and chronometry.

Don't look now, but Longines is having an uncommonly strong year. The release of the reworked HydroConquest dive watch in March remains one of the most discussed new releases of the year from a major brand, and their quiet but smart update of the Master Collection in June was also well received. Last month, they launched a new version of one of the more curious watches to be plucked from their archives in recent years, and while it's certainly more of a niche product than the diver or the classically styled pieces in the Master Collection, it shows that the brand is still considering the enthusiast in spite of what is clearly a larger, big tent approach focusing on core models.

Just ahead of Geneva Watch Days, we see the debut of a new haute horlogerie brand, brought to us in part by Wei Koh, founder of Revolution and the Rake, an

You know, I actually wasn't going to write about this watch. An $18,000 vintage inspired dive watch from a brand that doesn't hold a ton of personal relevance to me was just not super high on my list of priorities as Geneva Watch Days prep is now in full swing (this time next week, I will be surviving on CHF 10 Coke Zeros). But, over the weekend the collective watch internet kind of lost its mind over the new Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe 70th Anniversary Limited Edition, so I shifted my to-do list around a bit and, well, here we are.

It's somewhat hard to believe (well, hard for me to believe, anyway) but 2026 marks the ninth year of Ming. If you had told me in the earliest days of the brand in 2017 that less than a decade later they'd factor in as one of the more important independent watch brands of their era, I'm not sure how I'd have reacted. For me, the early days were a tough sell. Ming had trouble meeting demand for their watches in those first years, which can be a good problem to have of course, but can also lead to all kinds of issues with would-be customers as the expectations game gets played out in public. They've solved for that largely with smart planning, and a release strategy that sees a mix of accessible pieces with more