On February 25, 2026 this Substack was four days old. I hadn’t developed the framework, the rubric, or the philosophy for what belongs in a collection and what doesn’t. What I had was a release day and a dial that made me stop.

I bought the Citizen TSUYOSA x seconde/seconde collaboration on the day it dropped. I was very early in my watch collection and I didn’t understand that “limited edition” didn’t have the same weight in watches as it does in other items. This was limited to 3,600 pieces, it was a collaboration with a name that was recognizable in certain circles, and I thought it would appreciate in value. I thought people who knew watches would recognize it on my wrist. I was four days into writing about collecting, and I didn’t yet know the difference between following the market and trusting an instinct.

Romaric André had been doing this for years. The seconde/seconde collaborations weren’t new. The artist had a body of work across multiple brands before the TSUYOSA collab existed. I thought I was getting in on something at the beginning. I was actually walking into the middle of something already well established. I just hadn’t found it yet. Six months later, I understand what I actually bought.

The Man Behind the Hand

Romaric André is a 41-year-old Parisian who studied business, spent time in financial auditing, and in the mid-2000s found himself part of a venture that put a tourbillon mechanism inside a mobile phone. The project had serious backing — Edouard Meylan of H. Moser & Cie and Richard Mille himself were on the board. When the smartphone boom arrived, the company went bankrupt. The market had no room for a luxury phone with a watch complication inside it.

He could have gone back to auditing. Instead, starting in 2019, he began buying vintage watches. Rolexes, Omegas, and others, pieces he could find for a few thousand euros, and started asking what would happen if he swapped the seconds hand for something unexpected. A Millennium Falcon. A bee. An 8-bit sword. He called the project seconde/seconde, after the part of the watch that interested him most. The only thing on the dial in constant motion. The name itself translates from French as “second/second”, playing on both the unit of time (the seconds hand) and a secondary or altered perspective.

His first customer was William Massena, founder of Massena LAB and one of the most respected collectors in the watch world. That’s the level the work was operating at before most people heard of it.

By the time brands started coming to him, he had developed a clear philosophy. He never works against the original product. Whatever he removes, he stores, so the watch can always be restored to stock configuration. He’s playing with the DNA of a piece, not breaking it. H. Moser & Cie collaborated with him. Louis Erard. Zenith. Bamford. Nivada. Christopher Ward. Nine collaborations in, Time+Tide called him the watch world’s answer to Banksy. His response: he’s married, he has two kids — ‘can you be a rebel like that? That’s a sweet and smiley rebellion.’ He doesn’t call himself an artist. Creative is the word he uses. When asked what his favorite work is, the answer is always the same: the next one.

The Watch

The TSUYOSA is a well-regarded Japanese automatic. 40mm, Citizen Caliber 8210, sapphire crystal, integrated President-style bracelet, 50 meters of water resistance. It wears closer to a Tissot PRX on the wrist than anything with significant presence, which is not a criticism. Citizen builds them honestly and prices them the same way. The base model without André’s hand would still be a capable daily automatic worth owning.

What André did to it is the point. Tsuyosa is Japanese for strength. He went looking for a symbol of traditional Japanese strength and landed on the katana, then built an entire logic around it rather than simply placing a sword on the dial. The minute hand is a pixelated katana, rendered in 8-bit video game language, scaled to the dial and set in permanent motion. The indices aren’t clean batons waiting for the sword to pass. They appear already sliced, offset, scattered across the deep blue sunray field as if the damage has been accumulating for a long time.

On the caseback: “Being smaller has never stopped Minutes from slicing Hours into pieces.” The clasp carries subtle sword-slash engravings across the brand logos. A motif that continues throughout all aspects of the watch, fully inclusive. He plays with the DNA and doesn’t break it. The TSUYOSA is proof of what that discipline looks like when it works.

Limited to 3,600 pieces. The number isn’t arbitrary — 3,600 is the number of seconds in an hour. André doesn’t miss details. Everything connects.

What the Hype Got Right

The first time I wore this watch in public was the day I went to pick up my Moonswatch. The sales associate noticed it and another customer said something too. That’s not a common experience with a $495 Citizen. I had bought it to produce exactly that moment.

The secondary market confirmed the rest. BNIB sets now move consistently between $800 and $950, with some listings touching $1,400. That’s a 65 to 90 percent premium on a watch that retailed for $495 and sold out at authorized dealers without coming back. The hype was right. Following it, in this case, paid off.

What Six Months Teaches You

The lesson of following the hype isn’t generally how you are supposed to build a collection. Many collectors see this as a watch industry trap. Most of the time the market is telling you what it wants you to want, and those are different things. But in this case, following the hype led me to an artist I didn’t know existed, who had been doing serious, considered, clever work for years before I found him.

Since February I’ve acquired six more seconde/seconde pieces across four other brands. I knew I was creating a collection within the collection after the second watch. Each one since has arrived because of the same collector’s philosophy I described in “All In”. Find the niche and run with it.

The other thing six months teaches you is self-knowledge. I’m not the kind of guy who wears fun watches, at least not often. That’s not a complaint about the watches. It’s an honest accounting of who I am as a collector. The TSUYOSA is fun and beautiful, probably the best seconde/seconde collaboration to date, and it doesn’t earn significant wrist time. What it earns is its place in a sub-collection built around an artist’s body of work. That’s a different kind of value, and it took owning several of these pieces to understand it. I treat these more like pieces of art than watches.

The sub-collection has its own logic now. Most of these watches exist because of what André did to the dial, not because of what the watch does on the wrist. I’m considering giving them their own dedicated storage, a separate winder and box for the seconde/seconde pieces alone. Museum pieces deserve a proper room.

In the end, if I knew then what I know now, would I buy this watch again? Yes, but for different reasons. Not because of the secondary market. Not because it launched a series. Because the watch is genuinely good, the artist is genuinely serious, and clever has a permanent place in this collection regardless of where it sits in the rotation. It isn’t high horology. It doesn’t belong at a Michelin-starred table. It’s casual by nature and honest about it, which is its own kind of integrity.

I bought it for the wrong reasons at the time. But time revealed the instinct underneath those reasons that turned out to be right. That’s probably the most useful thing collecting has taught me so far, as the hype fades, what you actually responded to shines through.

The Numbers

The TSUYOSA x seconde/seconde/ scores 58 out of 100 on the B&B rubric. The 3,600-piece numbered limitation and André's fully executed sword concept push it up. The standard Citizen case, commodity movement architecture, and the honest fact that this was a pre-framework impulse purchase hold it down. SPR is Over — $529.65 paid in taxes and shipping on a $495 MSRP puts it just above retail, but the score relative to its tier makes the acquisition defensible. FMV at 58 points works out to $490, meaning I paid $39.65 above fair value on release day. The secondary market has since moved to $800–$950 for BNIB sets. Both the original price and the FMV are well below what it costs to acquire this watch today.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Chrissy and I ran a 5k that morning at Keel Farms. Five kilometers of Florida August at 9am, which is its own kind of suffering. 55 minutes of mud and sweat, followed by warm beer. By evening the legs had forgiven us. The appetite had not.

The Supper Club was born at Rocca Tampa. Michelin star, tableside mozzarella, a server named Jayden who recited the restaurant’s origin story like it was scripture. Eight were invited. Six sat down. Two bailed. The man who originated the entire idea fell asleep. Bill: $806. We left already planning round two.

Round two was The Pearl at Water Street. The same Michelin-recognized orbit, but more casual atmosphere. It’s described as a gastropub, a class of restaurants that has gained popularity for its simplicity and familiarity but also fresh and quality food offering. Restaurant, tavern, oyster room, three identities on one marquee, all lit in bulb lights on Water Street like a jazz club that time forgot. The room is genuinely beautiful. Someone spent serious money on the dark wood and warm light and then someone else decided to run the NFL on six screens and pipe in Chris Brown. It gave the room a bit of an identity crisis, but certainly not

The Pearl at Water Street is a Cameron Mitchell restaurant. The same operator as Ocean Prime. In fact, the Executive Chef, Olivia Geisler was Sous Chef at Ocean Prime Tampa before moving up.

I had specifically invited Chad and Dena this time. We know each other through taekwondo. Their daughter Trinity trained with us for years, went off to college, and the connection could have dissolved the way those things do. I sent the invitation anyway. Deliberate. The Supper Club, I had decided, was partly about choosing who stays in your life once nothing is obligating either of you to stay.

They drove to Water Street and couldn’t find a parking spot. Monster Jam was at the arena that night. They turned around and went home. We were all disappointed but it was very chaotic. Roads were blocked off and police were directing cars by hand on almost every street. A lesson was learned that night.

The Supper Club has now shed people across two consecutive dinners without losing a single one to the food or the company. Ritchie, who invented this whole thing, has attended zero of the two. I keep setting the table. The core six keep showing up.

That core: Janet and Joe, Chris and Julia, Chrissy and me. Same six as Rocca. We ordered the shellfish tower without deliberating. Two tiers, a dozen oysters on the bottom ring in crushed ice, gulf shrimp on the level above, twin lobster tails anchoring the top. Cocktail sauce. Mignonette. Lemon. When it landed the table went quiet, briefly, the way it does when something arrives that is genuinely worth looking at.

Our server was Jeff. At Rocca, Jayden performed. Origin stories, building history, tableside narrative woven into the meal itself. Jeff did the opposite. Recommendations when asked, invisible otherwise. There when the table needed him, gone when it did not. That is a specific, underrated skill. He earned his tip in both directions.

The food was excellent for what it was. Braised short rib. Great Lakes fish and chips. Nothing that rewrote any definitions. The short rib appears on roughly half the menus in Tampa right now and The Pearl’s version is good without being the reason you make the drive. Someone at the table ordered the fish and chips, knew exactly what they wanted, and had zero interest in performing otherwise. Right call. Reviews say the roasted chicken and sea scallops are excellent. In fact, the scallops were Jeff’s favorite item on the menu.

The most famous item on the menu is the burger. Ground fresh daily, Cambozola cheese, tomato jam. I find that genuinely interesting. A Cameron Mitchell property with a Michelin mention, an oyster room, a shellfish tower at market price, and the signature is a pub burger. That is not a criticism. It is a tell. The Pearl built its menu for the person who actually walks through the door, the rest is atmosphere.

I ordered the Bourbon. Bacon. Boozy. Twenty dollars. Fat-washed Maker’s Mark, brown sugar, Peychaud’s Bitters, candied bacon. Fat-washing is a real technique: the bacon fat gets frozen and skimmed, leaves smoke and salt in the spirit without the grease, and the Peychaud’s keeps the whole thing from going heavy. It had a mild bacon flavor but was very pleasing.

On my wrist, the Tissot PRX Chronograph. Blue dial, two-tone gold and steel integrated bracelet. It sat on the reclaimed wood next to that glass of bacon bourbon and looked like it belonged there, which is the only thing you can ask of a watch. Not to impress the room. Just to fit inside the evening without demanding to be noticed.

$604 for six. We took the photo outside under the marquee, all of us plus a couple of strangers who wandered into the frame without knowing they were being inducted into the Supper Club canon. The night was warm. Water Street was moving. Two blocks away, somewhere in the dark, trucks were catching air.

Chad and Dena, I’ll get you to the table. The Supper Club is not going anywhere.

— Jaime.

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

A stranger on TikTok typed a brand name and kept scrolling. That was it. No recommendation, no review, no context. Just a name dropped in a comment on someone else’s video — Escudo — and then gone. I followed the thread to their page, found a post showing the Silver Rose, and left one comment.

Is this still available?

Unfortunately, the Silver Rose was discontinued. But they offered to build me something close — a custom watch using the Silver Inox case with the Silver Rose dial, a bronze crown substituting for the rose gold coin-edge they could no longer produce because they’d sold out of the bronze cases the original required. I looked at the renders. They were genuinely beautiful but not the same.

What came out of the five days of email that followed was something better than what I originally asked for. One of the last ex-demonstration Silver Roses they had — the watch that had traveled to events, that had sat in a display case and let strangers admire it and put it back. Professionally valeted. Brand new bracelet. Full four-year warranty. Offered to me because I asked the right question at the right time. I had to say yes.

The name Escudo comes from two places. The shield on the Portuguese coat of arms. And the Portuguese currency before the Euro. Founded in 2020 by Simon Correia and Richard Johnson — two watch collectors who wanted to build something worthy of that name — their first watches reached the market in 2022. The Silver Rose launched in 2023. Two years later, it was gone.

The brand draws its identity from the early Portuguese and British explorers who mapped the world with nothing but primitive navigation tools, mathematics, and instinct. The Ocean Seacrest wears that heritage quietly. Arrow-form hour markers at the cardinal points — compass geometry translated into a dial layout, nautical without being loud about it.

The heart of the watch is Swiss — a Sellita SW200-1 base — assembled in Winchester, England. Escudo modifies and regulates it to the Calibre 1488. A borrowed heart, honestly claimed, in a case built to honor the navigators who trusted their lives to precision.

The outer box arrived wrapped in a map of the Atlantic. Silk ribbon. A wax seal in deep red — the kind you break slowly because breaking it is the point. Inside, a smaller box. Inside that, a printed card. Simon and Richard welcoming every Escudo buyer to the family, asking them to share their observations. A consideration from a small brand that thought carefully about the moment of opening. That’s worth something.

Turning the watch over reveals a two-piece caseback. The outer ring rotates independently so the engraving always sits perfectly aligned — north-south, every time, regardless of how the watch sits on the wrist. Nobody needed to engineer that. It solves a problem most collectors never consciously register. Escudo did it anyway. That’s what attention to detail actually looks like — not announced, just present, waiting for whoever notices.

There’s a category collectors call the desk diver. A watch rated for the deep end that never gets there. The Silver Rose is the most exquisite example of one I’ve ever held. Better suited for the yacht club than the depths below.

Thirty-nine millimeters. 316L stainless steel, 12.8mm thick. Two hundred meters of water resistance. Running at 28,800 vph with a 38-hour power reserve. Sapphire crystal with triple AR coating concealing a holographic logo that only reveals itself when you breathe on it — a hidden detail built into every watch they make.

The bezel is the thing. Mirror-polished stainless steel that shifts between silver, black, and white depending on the angle of light. Oracle Time’s reviewer said it was nearly impossible to photograph because the camera kept reflecting back at itself. I understand that now. The bezel is the kind of surface that makes you tilt your wrist in the middle of a conversation — not to check the time, just to watch the light move across it.

No rotating timing bezel. No massive coin-edge crown. No lume pips stacked around the chapter ring like depth charges. Rose gold hands and applied indexes, matte silver dial, a case that could slip under a dress shirt cuff without announcing itself. Escudo could have built the Silver Rose to wear its depth rating on its face. Instead they built a watch too exquisite for the depths it’s rated for.

I’ll never take this watch diving in the ocean. Not because it isn’t capable. Because it’s too beautiful.

Now the honest part. Over the last few months, I have developed a rubric to help me decide which watches are helping me to curate a collection rather than a collection of pieces. The rubric scores every watch on a 100-point scale across 20 questions covering brand architecture and individual watch merit. Each question is worth 1-5 points. I ran the rubric after the watch arrived. Fifty-eight out of a hundred. The brand block is where it falls — a post-2015 direct-to-consumer microbrand with no service network, no manufacture depth beyond a named Sellita, and a recent founding history. The Score-to-Price Ratio compares the rubric result against the price paid relative to tier expectations. A score of 58 at the Basic Luxury tier ($1,500–$3,000) produces an Unacceptable SPR — meaning the score doesn’t justify the price paid at that tier. The Score-to-Price Ratio came back Unacceptable. The rubric put fair value somewhere between $750 and $1,100. I paid $1,895 for the watch plus $90 for a Silver Rose-specific leather strap. Total: $1,985.

I would still make the same decision again. Sometimes a number in a spreadsheet can’t tell the whole story.

I want to be careful about how I say that, because there’s an easy version that turns this into a regret, and that’s not what it is. The watch is genuinely one of the most beautiful objects I own. The mirror bezel works in ways photographs can’t capture. The two-piece caseback is the kind of detail that makes you trust the people who built it. The provenance — one of the last ex-demos, closed window, five days of correspondence with the directors directly — is real and not reproducible.

But the rubric scored the brand on what it can prove, and what Escudo can prove in 2026 is limited. They’ve been building watches for four years. The Sellita base is honest and serviceable and completely correct for a brand at this stage. None of that changes the number. A 58 on the rubric, against an $1,895 price tag, produces the result it did. The framework caught what the story almost talked me past.

What the provenance argument actually holds is that this watch can no longer be bought from Escudo at any price. The window was open for five days in July 2026. The ex-demo was either going home with me or going back into storage until someone else asked the right question. The rubric doesn’t have a line item for that. Neither does the SPR. The premium I paid was partly for the object and partly for the closing door, and I went in knowing that even if I didn’t say it in those words.

All of these things are true at once, and I’d rather have it in writing than let the beautiful object quietly eat the honest number.

A stranger typed a name and kept scrolling. I followed it to here.

THE NUMBERS

The rubric scored the Escudo Ocean Seacrest Silver Rose 58 out of 100 — the brand block pulls the number down, a post-2015 DTC micro still proving itself with a Sellita base and no established service network. The Score-to-Price Ratio came back Unacceptable, meaning a 58 doesn’t justify the Basic Luxury tier ($1,500–$3,000) where the $1,895 price tag lands. FMV for a 58-scoring watch sits between $750 and $1,100. I paid $1,985 all in. The gap between what the framework says it’s worth and what it cost is real — and so is the watch on my wrist, the window that closed five days after I found it, and the reason none of that gap changes my answer.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Several weeks ago I started thinking about selling some of the watches in my collection.

Watches that taught me a lesson, but were a constant reminder of mistakes made. Ones that will sit in a box and remind me, every time I open the lid, that I bought them for the wrong reasons at the wrong moment without the right framework to know better. I think about those watches more than I should.

The thought has been gaining traction in my mind for a couple of months now it just didn’t have physical form yet. I realized a few weeks ago that the floor of my collection has been set and the tide is rising. Many of these watches are going to drown in the flood. A flood of better watches that come in to take all the wrist time and box spots.

I found myself wondering, if I could go back to the beginning, what would I tell myself.

Slow down, Jaime. This is the one that costs the most to learn and the hardest to teach. Discernment is the ability to judge well, to see what is hidden, to separate what actually matters from what just feels urgent right now. But discernment needs room to work, and urgency destroys that room. Every time I rushed a decision, I paid for it. Not always in money. Sometimes in regret. Sometimes in a watch that looked exactly right on a screen and felt completely wrong the first time it hit my wrist. Patience slows down the mind so discernment can see clearly. If I couldn’t feel it, I should not have bought it.

The prices I was afraid to pay were never the real problem. I told myself price was a constraint. It wasn’t. It was an excuse dressed up as responsibility. My most expensive watches are the ones I reach for first, and that is not a coincidence. Quality has gravity. The pieces I compromised on to save money are the ones collecting dust, figuratively. The pieces I bought at full value, after real deliberation, are the ones on the wrist more often than not. Cheap rationalization turned out to be more expensive than the watches I was afraid to buy.

I followed the hype and I paid attention to the wrong signals. I own a Moonswatch. I own a TSUYOSA Seconde/Seconde/ collab. Both appreciated in value. Both are fine watches. Neither would survive the filter I use today. The hype watch is engineered to feel urgent. That urgency is the signal to stop, not to buy. When the entire conversation online is about a single piece, that is the algorithm talking. My collection has nothing to do with the algorithm.

I gave limited edition more credit than it deserved. A four-hundred-piece run from a brand that is two years old is not scarcity. It is a marketing decision with a low unit ceiling. Real scarcity is a maker who produces twelve pieces a year because that is the physical limit of what one person can finish by hand. I should have known the difference sooner. I do now.

I did the research. What I didn’t always do was trust what the research was telling me. When something seemed too good to be true at a given price point, it always was. Every single time. Movement matters. Brand depth matters. History matters. But I also let research become a reason to hesitate on things I already knew were right, and a permission slip to rush into things I should have walked away from. The research is the foundation. The gut is the final approval. They work together or they don’t work at all.

A watch I bought recently cost me more than it was worth. I know that now in a way I didn’t know it when I bought it. It is also one of the most beautiful pieces I own, a genuine conversation piece, and something I will wear on an upcoming cruise without a single reservation. I don’t regret the watch. I regret what I paid. That distinction matters. The lesson wasn’t to stop buying things I love. The lesson was to build a framework rigorous enough that love and value arrive at the same address. The scoring system, the SPR calculation, the Eisenhower matrix. None of that existed when I bought it. It exists now because of purchases like it.

Going to the counter changed how I buy. I spent years ordering online, blade through the tape, tissue paper on the floor, dopamine on demand. That feeling is real and I am not dismissing it. But it is a categorically different experience from spending three hours at a proper counter, trying on thirty watches, and walking out with the one that spoke to me in person. Thirty seconds on the wrist confirms everything I thought I felt about a watch, or it kills the idea completely. I have talked myself into pieces online that died on contact with my wrist. I should have gone to the counter sooner. For the serious piece, always go to the counter.

Social media is not real life. I bought my way into conversations I didn’t need to be in, chasing a version of the collection that looked right in a feed rather than one that felt right in real life. The algorithm will always surface someone with a better watch. That is its entire purpose. My purpose is to know why I own what I own. A collection assembled chasing approval is a ledger of other people’s taste with my money attached to it. I built some of that ledger. I am editing it now.

I made a decision early that I have never walked back. I don’t ever want to be in the cheap seats. Not because the price of the ticket is the point, but because the cheap seat is a state of mind. It is buying proximity to someone else’s taste and calling it a collection. It is letting a coupon code do the work that a value system should be doing. I watched it happen in real time on every platform, the same watch moving through the same crowd, the same ten percent off passed hand to hand like it meant something. I didn’t want that. I want to know exactly why every watch on my winder is there, and the answer can never be because someone I follow online made it feel urgent on a Tuesday.

The watches I am thinking about selling are not failures. They are tuition receipts. Every one of them taught me something I needed to know to build what comes next. The collection is slowing down not because the hobby lost me, but because I finally caught up to it. There is no finish line or prize for the most pieces or the fastest acquisition pace. There is only the question of whether what is on the winder is worth being there.

Most of it is. The rest is getting an honest look.

-Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

The Glycine Airman Vintage GMT Quartz is listed on Jomashop for $171 after a coupon code GLY100. Retail on that watch was $995. Most people will see that as a great deal. I see it as a distress signal.

The Airman line earned its reputation in real time. Glycine built the 24-hour dial in 1953 specifically for Pan American Airways crew who needed to read the sky without confusing AM and PM at thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic. Not as a fashion statement, but a tool with a specific job for specific people. The Combat Sub did the same thing underwater. Neither watch was cheap or flashy, and neither needed to be. The identity lived in the function.

Then Invicta bought them in 2016, and that is where this story actually starts.

Invicta’s playbook is not subtle. Acquire a brand with real heritage, drain the equity, flood every channel with units until the price floor collapses, and keep using the name until the name stops pulling revenue. They have run this playbook before, and the hallmarks are starting to appear. The brands that come out the other side are not really brands anymore, they are labels, which is a different thing entirely.

A Glycine Airpilot GMT in rose gold tone, sold by a third-party called Compeve on TikTok Shop, filed under “Fashion Men’s Watches”, priced at $299.99 with zero units sold, is not an accident or an outlier; it’s the final destination for Glycine.

My hypothesis on the quartz models flooding the grey market right now is simple. The cases, proportions, dial layout, and crown placement are all consistent with the mechanical references that built the brand’s credibility. The movements are wrong. A company sitting on a warehouse of tooled and finished cases, mechanical supply chain gone or cut, does not scrap the inventory. They drop a quartz module in, price it to move, push it through every channel that will take it. Case cost is already sunk. A basic quartz module runs a few dollars. At $149 or $171 or $299 you are not selling a Glycine. You are liquidating tooling under a brand name. These cases look like the watches I have studied for years, but the movements are wrong, and the economics of the hypothesis are clean.

The Combat Sub runs the same story from the other direction. Glycine’s own website has it at $515 right now, down from $1,530. Sixty-six percent off their flagship mechanical diver, on their own storefront, not a grey market account trying to unload inventory they bought cheap. The brand itself decided the Combat Sub 42 is a $515 watch. That is not a promotional event. A brand does not put 66 percent off on its hero reference because business is good. It does that because the alternative is not selling it at all.

Most people reading this do not know what S. Coifman Watches were. That gap in the record is precisely the point. Simon Coifman started in Chiasso, Switzerland in 1906, in a music box workshop a few kilometers from the Italian border. The first watches came out detailed with gold plating and rubies over 17-jewel movements. By 1911 he had a tourbillon in production, an extraordinarily difficult complication that Coifman adapted from Breguet’s original design and made his own. That single fact tells you what kind of operation this was. You do not produce a tourbillon in 1911 if you are cutting corners. In 1953, the brand was commissioned to produce a dozen 18K gold mechanical chronographs for a private collectors group, labeled the Red 12. Half a century of Swiss craft, limited runs, hand-assembled movements, a quiet reputation among people who paid attention. Not a household name but a respected one in some watch circles.

Then the brand went silent for decades until the early 2000’s the name was acquired by Invicta. The Swiss factory address they advertised turned out to be a sales showroom. The watches appearing under the S. Coifman name were, according to collectors who traced it at the time, movements sourced from other makers and rebranded. The 1906 story stayed in the marketing, but the craft it described did not survive the transition.

S. Coifman is a zombie label now. Still findable on the internet if you go looking, but carrying zero cultural weight. There was no public collapse, no announcement, and no moment anyone could point to outside of the Invicta acquisition. Just a slow fade into oblivion. Slow enough that nobody marked it, until the name was a forgotten name and nothing else.

Glycine is well along on that road. The Airman might persist in quartz movements and rose gold cases sold by Compeve on TikTok for years to come. That is not survival. That is a name being rented out until it stops generating revenue, and all provenance is gone.

This is not abstract to me. I own a Glycine Airman “The Chief” in PVD bronze. I love the watch. I love the dial aesthetic. I love having a 24-hour dial in my collection, and that’s why it will stay. It houses an ETA base GL293 automatic movement.

I also own a 2004 S. Coifman. The SC0083, Limited Edition. I bought it with full awareness of what it was. One of the last watches Invicta produced under that name while they still remembered what the name was supposed to mean. Automatic Selitta movement, real finishing, actual intention in the design. A watch that still carried the memory of what S. Coifman had been, even as the conglomerate behind it was already moving on.

The S. Coifman Heritage SC0401 is on Walmart.com right now for $105. Quartz and mineral crystal with no customer ratings and no memory. The SC0401 and my SC0083 share nothing but a name.

I have watched this story end once already. I have the watches that prove it. The Glycine on TikTok Shop under “Fashion Men’s Watches” is the ending, and I recognize it because I have already seen it.

Sadly, I will not be buying another Glycine because there is no Glycine to buy anymore.

-Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I was scrolling TikTok on a Tuesday afternoon when I scrolled past a watch I wasn’t looking for. The Orient Star Contemporary Semi Skeleton, thirty-nine millimeters, skeletonized front and back with the movement in plain view beneath the dial and caseback. It was genuinely beautiful, and it was also too small for my wrist, so I kept scrolling. A few videos later, still in Orient Star territory, I found the Keshiki.

Orient Star released the Keshiki series in 2025 around a concept called snowlight. An actual Japanese aesthetic suggesting the particular quality of light that reflects off snow-covered ground and softly illuminates what sits beneath it, a world lit from below rather than from above, indistinct and quiet in a way that pictures almost never capture correctly.

Deep navy-blue in the upper half gives way to pale winter grey in the lower, the transition gradual enough that you notice it differently depending on where the light is coming from. The XII is rose gold, placed where the moon would sit in that kind of sky. The hands are grey, designed to dissolve into the landscape of the dial rather than read against it. The movement shows through the open skeleton face and again through the caseback. The whole watch is built around the idea that beauty can be quiet, that a dial can reference a specific moment of winter light without explaining that it’s doing so.

It was limited to 1,000 pieces worldwide. When I found it there was one unit left in stock, and I bought it before I finished deciding whether I was going to.

There is something worth understanding about Orient Star that took me a while to learn correctly. The brand sits under Akita Epson Corporation, the same organization that manufactures Grand Seiko’s highest-end movements and houses the studio where Credor pieces are made largely by hand. Epson deliberately wound down the Royal Orient line because it competed too directly with Grand Seiko. The same company that decided to protect Grand Seiko’s ceiling also makes Orient Star, priced deliberately below it, built by the same people, carrying the same institutional standards into a different tier.

That provenance explains things about the Keshiki that the price doesn’t immediately suggest. The finishing, the way the dial concept feels genuinely considered rather than decorative, the particular quality of attention you sense in the object when you hold it. Some watches carry the weight of who made them, and this is one of them.

I did not find this watch through deliberate research. I found it because an algorithm showed me something I couldn’t wear and I kept scrolling, which is not the kind of origin story a serious collector is supposed to have. But there is a version of luck that only works if you’ve already done the preparation to recognize it. I knew Orient Star’s reputation before I landed on the Keshiki. I understood immediately that snowlight was a real design philosophy rather than marketing language, because I’d spent enough time with Japanese watchmaking to know the difference between the two. When the page showed one unit remaining on a 1,000-piece numbered run from a brand with no US retail presence anymore, I knew what I was looking at, and I moved. Deep research is just part of the hobby.

When the box arrived, the watch looked exactly like it should, which is rarer than it sounds. The graduation on the dial, deep blue dissolving into pale grey, does something in person that photographs suggest but never quite capture. It shifts depending on the angle of the light. You look at it differently at noon than you do at the end of the day, and that shift feels intentional, like the watch was built to behave that way rather than to sit still and be admired. The rose-gold XII is restrained enough that you notice the moon reference before you notice the color. The skeleton movement is visible without performing visibility, which is the right way to do it. There is no part of this watch that asks you to be impressed by it. It just does what it does and expects you to be paying attention. If you have not seen an Orient Star in person, you need to.

The Keshiki has its first outing this Thursday. The Omni Champions Gate, a resort weekend that has quietly become an annual tradition. Chrissy’s daughter Abigail and her cousin Nina are both eight years old, and school is back in two weeks. Chrissy’s brother Billy and his wife Danielle will be there, and two days of whatever a family resort weekend looks like when two second-graders are running the agenda will follow.

It is not the kind of setting that immediately calls to mind a watch built around the Japanese aesthetic of winter light on snow-covered ground. That’s fine. The watch doesn’t need the room to match the philosophy. It just needs to be on the wrist when the weekend happens, doing its job without announcing itself, learning what it means to live in a life rather than sit in a box.

That is what the wrist time is actually for. The scroll was luck, and the recognition was preparation and research, but neither of those things is the same as knowing what you have. The Keshiki earns that the way every watch eventually has to: in the real world, with real people, in rooms nobody designed for it.

The Numbers

The Keshiki scored 63 out of 100, carried higher by the F6F44 in-house movement, the Epson provenance, and the genuine limited production, and held back by brand visibility and the absence of a Roadmap lane to give it formal elevation. The SPR classification is Over, meaning the score-to-price ratio sits above the optimal band for the Daily Drivers tier, but not dramatically so. Fair market value on the rubric formula comes to $880. The price paid was $696.78 against a $739.99 retail, sourced from the grey market on a unit that was the last of 1,000 pieces. Paying $183 below FMV on a watch that was already discounted from retail is the kind of number that confirms what the wrist already told you.

-Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I called it last to the party once.

That was the line in Heads. The Timex Tide, ordered before any of the chaos that followed, still sitting in transit while sixteen watches showed up ahead of it. I’m revising that. Not last, just fashionably late.

Here’s what I didn’t explain in Heads. I didn’t fully get it myself yet.

Chrissy and I paddle board out to Shell Key a few times a year. We drop in at Butler’s Hole near Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg. The water between the two is four feet deep at high tide. Less than one at low. Boats can’t get in. Most people never find it. Crystal clear, mostly empty, the kind of spot that makes you understand why anyone puts up with Florida summers.

We’ve made that paddle at least once a year for the past three years. At least three times, we’ve stayed too long.

The sunset gets you. You tell yourself fifteen more minutes. The tide doesn’t care. By the time we turn back, the water that carried us out has pulled away, and the 1.7 miles back to the car becomes a slog through muck and seagrass. Boards in hand. In the dark. Because we were watching the sky instead of the chart.

I check the tide tables the night before we launch every time. I also forget them by the time we’re loading boards onto the truck every time.

I didn’t buy this watch because I was building out a field watch collection or for its diving depth. I bought it because I found out, almost by accident, that a watch could track tides. Tides. Temperature. Compass heading. All off one dial on the wrist. No chart to remember. No app to check on the water before or forget to check. I had no idea that was even a thing a watch could do. Once I knew, I bought it.

Everything else that showed up in those four weeks, the Longines, the Oceaneva, the Swatch in moonshine gold, I bought because something in me said yes. The Tide I bought because it fixed something. Then it sat in a fulfillment queue for months while the rest of the collection kept moving.

This is my fifth Timex Expedition. The other four are solid field watches. Good pieces. None of them do what this one does. I didn’t go looking for it. I stumbled onto the capability and bought the watch before I’d even finished reading the spec sheet.

The case is listed at 45mm. Wears closer to 48. I was worried about the diameter. It sits better than I thought it would. The dial is barely blue. Subtle. Reads like a working tool, not a showpiece. One orange hand drives all three readings: tide, temperature, compass. Not three separate subdials fighting for space. Just one hand doing three jobs. The INDIGLO is faint. I’ll say that honestly. Not a dealbreaker, but it’s there. Quartz, because a tide table is not a place you want your power reserve running out. $289 list.

The compass needs calibration at each location. Magnetic declination changes depending on where you are, and a compass that doesn’t account for that will read wrong. That’s not a flaw. That’s just how compasses work. Some of the bad reviews probably come from people who skipped that step. I’ve calibrated mine.

I should say the obvious thing. I own dive watches rated to depths that would kill me. A few at 6000 meters. More at 1250. Others at 1000. A whole pile at 200. I honestly don’t know how many across all of them. Somewhere in the same collection there’s at least one dress watch rated to 100 meters. A dinner table watch with the same water resistance number as a $289 Timex I bought for sandbars.

The easy joke is that I’ve built a collection of watches rated for pressure I’ll never generate. But that’s not true. I dive. I snorkel. I fish. I’m on a boat or in the water most weekends. These watches get wet. Water resistance isn’t just a depth number anyway. It’s a pressure rating. A twelve story water slide puts out more dynamic pressure than a calm swim at 100 meters. So does standing under a waterfall in Ocho Rios with the falls hammering your wrist. A 100 meter watch would not survive everything I do in a season. The deeper ratings aren’t overkill. They’re appropriate.

But none of those watches, no matter how deep they’re rated, can tell me when the water is leaving Butler’s Hole. That’s not a depth question. It’s a timing question. The Tide is 100 meters of water resistance doing a job that a 6000 meter diver was never built for. They solve different problems. This one solves mine.

The watch is ready. Compass is calibrated. Season’s open. Florida had other plans the first time we tried to get out there. Tropical system in the gulf putting down too much wind and rain to paddle. That’s summer here.

Shell Key will be there when the weather clears. So will the watch. And when Chrissy and I finally get out there, with the light going orange and the sandbar starting to show, I’ll have something on my wrist besides a tide table I memorized last night and forgot this morning.

Fashionably late, but right on time.

-Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I walked into the watch shop aboard the Norwegian Prima to look at a TAG Heuer.

Specifically the Carrera Chronograph, the Glassbox, the reissue with the domed crystal that bends the light over the dial the way the original did in the sixties. I had it pictured as my 2027 birthday watch, the year I turn forty-nine, the kind of marker that deserves a watch with a story attached to the date. Then I put it on, and it sat too small on my wrist. The proportions that read so right in the photographs disappeared the moment I actually saw them on my wrist. A watch I had wanted for months, attached to a year I had already chosen, stopped wanting me back the moment it was on the wrist. That happens. It is exactly why you try the thing on before you believe the thing, and exactly why a birthday watch should never be bought sight unseen, even from yourself.

The shop itself was not really a shop. It opened into an atrium on deck seven, watches under glass in every direction, and the cases continued one floor up on deck eight, stacked directly above, two full decks of an authorized dealer built into the ship. Breitling, Longines, Oris, TAG, a case of pre-owned Rolex sitting on top of the whole operation like it had nothing left to prove. I expected a gift counter and found a floating retailer two decks deep. I spent more time in those two atriums than I am going to admit in writing.

The Breitling on my roadmap was never supposed to happen this soon. The Navitimer Automatic GMT 41, steel, ice blue dial, alligator strap, sits in 2032 on the plan, six years out, two acquisitions past the one I am supposed to make next. Watch jail starts now, as a direct result of this purchase. No acquisitions until 2028 at the earliest, and that clock only began ticking because of what happened in those two atriums. I had a TAG that did not fit and a Breitling that was not due for the better part of a decade, and somewhere in that shop both of those facts stopped mattering. The honest version is that I probably should have already been in jail before I bought it. I was not. I am now.

After the Glassbox came off my wrist, I drifted to the Breitling case and picked up a Superocean Heritage, black dial, steel bracelet, the same steel and red gold construction the brand builds across the line. I was turning it over, thinking it through, when Chrissy pointed at the one beside it. Same watch underneath. Blue dial, rubber strap. She liked it better. She was right. The blue did something the black did not, and the rubber strap took the whole piece somewhere more relaxed than the bracelet was ever going to. She noticed it before I did. She usually does.

I need to say something about the room itself, because it changed how I think about buying a serious watch at all. I have bought most of this collection online. A photo, a spec sheet, a checkout page, a box on the porch. That is efficient and I do not regret a single one of those purchases, but it is not an event. This was an event. Two sales associates in business suits worked with me at once, one pulling pieces from the case while the other walked me through the movement and the history without ever making it feel like a script. Nobody rushed the decision. Nobody pushed the Navitimer because it was the safer sell or steered me away from the Superocean because it carried a bigger number. It felt, and I am going to use the word because it is the right one, kingly. Not because anyone flattered me. Because two professionals treated a watch purchase as something worth their full attention, in a room built for exactly that, and I had never actually felt the difference between buying a watch and being walked through buying a watch until that afternoon. I am a believer now. I will go back to a counter for the next serious piece on purpose, not because the ship happened to have one in the atrium.

Here is what it is. The Superocean Heritage B31 Automatic 42. Blue dial, blue rubber strap, stainless steel and 18K red gold. Real gold, not a coating, not PVD warming up a steel case to imitate something it is not. The B31 inside is Breitling’s first in-house three-hand movement, roughly 78 hours of reserve, turning behind a sapphire crystal, 200 meters of water resistance, a ceramic bezel built to shrug off the scratches a life near water hands out. Arrow hand for the hours, spear for the minutes, the same shapes the original wore when this line started in 1957. The date sits quietly at six.

The dial is the blue that is hard to name. Not navy, not royal, something the light has to negotiate with. Indoors it reads deep and quiet. Under the Caribbean sun it opens all the way up. The gold against that blue is the entire argument, and the watch never raises its voice to make it.

It is, by a wide margin, the most serious watch I own. Retail at any authorized dealer is $8,250. Duty free at sea did what duty free does, and a someday watch became a this week watch. I have had it about a week now. Long enough to know.

The Navitimer would have been the sensible Breitling, on the schedule I had actually written down. This one is the statement, six years early, with no slot reserved for it at all. Where the Navitimer keeps its voice down, the Superocean walks into the room in steel and gold and a blue dial and lets the room notice. I did not set out to own a statement. I set out to own a TAG that turned out too small. The watch I carried home says more than I would ever have asked a watch to say on my behalf, at a moment the calendar had not cleared for it.

Here is the part worth being honest about, and it is the part I have not fully worked out yet.

Breitling was always going to be in this collection. That much was decided long before I stepped onto the Prima. What I had not decided, and still have not decided, is what happens to the rest of the plan now that the Breitling slot is filled six years ahead of schedule, by a different model than the one I had written down. I do not have a clean answer. I am not going to pretend I do. This watch was not paid for the way the roadmap is supposed to pay for things. Watch jail, for the next two years, is not a willpower exercise this time. It is a repayment period, plain and simple, the cost of buying out of sequence and out of pocket. The two years are how long it takes to make that right.

What I can say is narrower than a resolution. Looking at a watch online is never going to equate to looking at the watch in person, on the wrist, under real light, next to the version that turns out to be better. The Navitimer was the right answer to a question I had only ever asked on a screen. Whether that means the Navitimer comes off the roadmap entirely, gets pushed somewhere else as a future one per brand exception, or simply waits its turn anyway because Breitling already has a watch in this collection now, I do not know yet. The Bible has not been updated for it. I am naming the gap here, on the page, because that is the rule that actually governs how this changes: the shift gets written down as it happens, not quietly resolved before anyone sees the mess.

That said, I did not pick this specific watch. Chrissy did, or near enough. She is the one who noticed the blue before I did, who steered me one case over without making an argument for it, who was simply right in the way she usually is in a room full of options. I am not going to pretend the deciding moment was mine. It was not.

The next morning we were in Georgetown, and in a shop in Grand Cayman I stood in front of a Patek Philippe Calatrava for the first time. The watch at the far end of a plan that runs to 2053. The terminal piece. I have been walking toward it for a year and I will be walking toward it for decades, and there it was behind glass, exactly as worth the walk as I had believed it would be. I did not buy it. It is not time.

So two days handed me both ends of the same truth, sitting closer together than they have any business sitting. The watch at the end of the plan, seen and left in its case because the plan still has to mean something. And the watch that jumped the plan entirely, already on my wrist, six years and one model ahead of where I told myself it would arrive.

One I am still earning, on schedule. One arrived early and out of order, and I am keeping it, and I have not yet decided what that costs the rest of the plan. That is the honest place to leave it.

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I wrote a whole article about how to pack a watch box for a cruise. Five watches, seven nights, each one assigned a role I had reasoned my way into before the ship left port. It was good advice. I stand behind every word of the framework.

Then I went on the cruise.

Here is what the wrist time actually said, which turned out to be a different conversation than the one I planned.

The Five, Reconsidered

The Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II in Damascus and White did all the work.

I packed it as the party watch. The Glow Party was night seven, white was the move, and I had a watch with a white enamel dial and a white rubber strap waiting for exactly that moment. We never made it. I was on a hot streak in the casino and chose the table over the dance floor, which is a story for another article, and the themed night the watch was named for came and went without us.

It did not matter, because the watch had already justified the trip. It climbed Dunn’s River Falls. It sat poolside at the private island. It went into the ship’s hot tub and came to the weight room. It became the piece I reached for without thinking, every wet and active hour of the week. The FKM strap and the dive rating did exactly what they were built to do, and I had filed them under decoration for a party we skipped. The watch I packed for one night I never attended earned the entire week instead.

The Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II in Navy got one good compliment and a quiet retirement.

This was supposed to be the every day watch. What it actually got was a strong opening night and almost nothing after. One of the sales associates in the ship’s watch shop complimented it the first evening, which is the kind of endorsement that means something coming from a person who stares at watches for a living. Then I barely wore it again. The Damascus and White had taken over the role I assigned the Navy, and two dive watches in a five-watch bag is one dive watch too many. I did put the Navy back on for the last morning, breakfast and the long way home, which felt right. A watch that bookends a trip without filling its middle is still a watch that was there for the parts that mattered.

The Armand Nicolet was the one the watch people noticed.

There are always watch people on a ship if you know how to spot them, and they found the Armand Nicolet. That dial is hard to miss. It really pops, the acqua surfacing and receding depending on where the light comes from, and it pulled more unprompted conversation than anything else on my wrist. It earned its place in the bag through the talking rather than the timekeeping, which is its own kind of utility. A watch that starts conversations with strangers who care about watches is doing work the spec sheet does not list.

The Mido was almost too dressy for a trip that had no formal nights.

I bought the Baroncelli for formal dining rooms, and then it turned out there were no formal nights to speak of, at least not the way I had pictured them. What there was instead was The Hudson, the main dining room, where I wore the Mido twice with outfits built to match it. It delivered exactly the formality I asked of it, which on this particular family cruise was a touch more than the room strictly required. It still looked correct. It still drew compliments. It just taught me that the gap between dress and overdress is real, and that a ship’s idea of dressed up is calibrated differently than a Swiss boutique’s. Right watch, half a notch high, worn anyway and worn well.

The Citizen GPS read poorly, but it set easily.

The timezone watch was supposed to be the effortless one. Find a satellite, set itself, always know the local hour. In practice the automatic satellite lock was slower and less reliable than the pitch promised, and I ended up setting the timezone by hand for two of the four ports. To its real credit, the manual change was effortless, one click of the crown to push the hour forward or back, the easiest manual time zone adjustment I have used on any watch. The bigger problem was legibility. The dial and the hands share too much of the same color, and the contrast a watch needs to be glanceable at a dinner table simply was not there. It solved the problem it was bought for, mostly, while making me work to read the answer. A real limitation, named honestly, because the article that sold you on a watch should be the article that corrects the record.

The automatics ran down, and there was no good fix.

Here is the practical failure nobody plans for. I packed four automatics across the five slots, and you cannot wear four automatics at once. The ones that sat got no motion, and a watch that gets no motion winds down. I spent more of the trip resetting time and date on stopped watches than I expected to. I even went looking for a solution mid-trip, a travel watch winder that could keep four pieces running, and discovered that nothing like that exists in a travel package. Single and double travel winders are everywhere. A four-watch travel winder is apparently a problem the market has decided not to solve. So the automatics stopped, and I wound them, and stopped them again by not wearing them. Five automatics in a bag is four stopped watches and one running one, at any given moment.

The Ship Was a Watch Store I Did Not See Coming

I knew there would be a watch shop aboard. I did not know it would hold literally thousands of watches, an authorized dealer for Tissot, Hamilton, Longines, TAG Heuer, Oris, Breitling, Citizen, Bulova, and Invicta, with a sizable case of pre-owned Rolex on top of all of it. This was not a gift shop with a watch counter. This was a genuine retail operation floating in the Caribbean, and I spent more time in it than I will admit to Chrissy in writing.

Which is how the trip acquired two watches I did not plan for.

The Two I Did Not Plan

The one I won.

Fifty-two millimeters of transparent red plastic. A plastic dial under mineral crystal. A digital movement out of China. A polyurethane strap. The Invicta Racing Burnout Digital retails for fifty dollars, and I did not pay even that, because I won it in a raffle aboard the ship. It is, by every rule I have ever written down, exactly the kind of watch this collection exists to exclude. Battery quartz. No provenance. No research. No filter. Zero intentionality. It arrived by pure chance, the way a door prize arrives, with no story except the one it landed in.

The one she picked.

Chrissy chose the Breitling. I want to say that first, because it is the part that matters most and the part the standalone article is going to be about. The Superocean Heritage, rose gold and steel, blue dial, blue rubber strap, the B31 manufacture movement, two hundred meters of water resistance, picked up off the counter and handed to me by the person I was on the trip with. I could not say no. Not to the watch, and not to her. Duty free crossed the final T, the discount that turned a someday watch into a this-week watch.

There is a longer story here, about the watch I actually walked in to see, about how the Superocean was not even the Breitling I had been considering, about what it means that the most serious watch I own is the one piece my own filter did not choose. That story deserves its own room, and it is coming. For now it is enough to say the Superocean belongs, fully and without tension, and that it will always be this trip. The Norwegian Prima, my parents aboard, the twins newly graduated, Chrissy beside me. I will look at that blue dial forever and see June 2026. The provenance is the point. The watch is the door, and the room it opens is that week.

Later, in the lobby of the Prima Theater, a gentleman noticed the Breitling on my wrist and remarked that it was a really nice raffle gift. I laughed and told him the truth, that the fifty dollar Invicta was the raffle prize and I had bought the Breitling myself. We both had a good laugh about it. He was not wrong to be confused. On this trip, the watches arrived in exactly the reverse of the order the prices suggest.

What I Would Change

Hindsight is the whole reason to write one of these. Here is what the next bag looks like, corrected by the one that actually sailed. I am already thinking about it for the Margaritaville Beachcomber in April.

Fewer automatics. This is the big one. Four automatics in a five-watch bag meant a rotating cast of stopped watches and a lot of wasted setting. Two automatics maximum, and the rest light-powered or quartz, anything that holds its time sitting still. The grab-and-go category I have softened on for years is exactly the category a cruise rewards, because a watch that is right the moment you pick it up is worth more on a trip than a movement story you have to rewind. A Citizen Corso, black dial, luminous hands and markers, Eco-Drive so it never stops, leather strap, around three hundred and forty dollars, is precisely the kind of legible light-powered piece this bag was missing.

Straps, not bracelets. I did not expect this one. Between the walking, the water, and the drinking, my wrists swelled more than they do at home, and the metal bracelets stopped being comfortable by mid-afternoon. The FKM strap on the Oceaneva and the rubber on the Breitling, meanwhile, were perfect, forgiving when my wrist was at its largest and never once a problem. For April the rule is straps over bracelets, full stop. A swollen wrist on day four does not care how nice the bracelet looked on day one.

One dive watch, not two. The Navy and the Damascus and White did the same job, and only one of them needed to be there. The Damascus and White won on the strap and the versatility. Next time the Navy stays home and the slot it would have taken goes to something that fills a different need entirely.

A legible travel watch beats a clever one. The Citizen GPS was a neat trick that read poorly all of the time, even though it set easily by hand. For the next cruise the priority flips. I would rather have a watch I can read instantly at a dinner table than a watch that promises to set itself and then makes me squint to confirm it did. Legibility is the feature. Everything else is garnish.

The winder problem has a partial answer. Nobody makes a true four-watch travel winder, but there are compact units, like the small FRUCASE travel winders, that are not perfect and not built for four, yet are small enough to actually pack. Not a real fix. A hedge. The better answer is still the first one, pack watches that do not need a winder, but if I insist on bringing automatics that will sit, a compact winder is at least a thing that exists. The bag mostly solves the winder problem by not creating it.

Plan for the ship’s watch shop. I walked into a floating authorized dealer with no plan and no budget line for it, and I walked out having bought a Breitling I love. That worked out. It worked out because the Breitling was already on my roadmap and the occasion was real, not because walking in unprepared is a strategy. Next time I go aboard knowing what I would say yes to and what I would not, because a duty-free watch counter in the middle of the ocean is a very persuasive room.

What the Framework Was Actually For

I built this collection on rules. Non-plastic movements, the honest mechanical stuff, automatics and manual winds, no battery quartz on the roadmap. In-house manufacture. One per brand. An ascending path with a Patek at the far end of it. The rules are real and I am not abandoning them, because they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

But the cruise complicated the story, and I want to be careful about how I say this, because there is an easy version that is a lie.

The easy version says the rules were never the point, that underneath every filter was a single secret question, does this watch hold something true, and that both new watches pass it equally. That is too clean. It launders the Invicta into belonging, and the Invicta does not belong. It is a fifty dollar plastic digital watch that fails every standard I hold, and no amount of sentiment about a good week changes what it is. It is in the collection despite not belonging there. That is the honest sentence, and I am not going to soften it.

The Breitling is different. The Breitling belongs. It was on the roadmap, it is a serious watch, it was chosen by Chrissy on the trip of a lifetime, and it satisfies the rules and the meaning at the same time. There is no tension in the Breitling. It is exactly what the framework was built to acquire, arriving early and arriving beautifully.

So what do I do with a watch that fails every rule and that I am still never going to get rid of? I keep it, and I am honest about why. Not because it secretly qualified. Because it was there, in the room, the same week my parents were aboard and my sons were newly graduated and my partner was beside me. The rules decide what I buy. They do not get to decide what I am allowed to keep when chance hands me something that witnessed a week like that. The collection is mostly discipline. The Invicta is the one exception that proves the discipline was always in service of something the discipline cannot measure.

That is the more honest landing. The framework governs acquisition. It does not govern memory. And every so often a watch that should never have made it past the door ends up staying anyway, not because the rules bent, but because the rules were never the only thing in the building.

One More Thing, in Georgetown

In Georgetown, Grand Cayman, I walked into Kirk Freeport and saw a Patek Philippe Calatrava in person for the first time. The terminal watch on my roadmap, the one that sits at the end of a plan that runs to 2053, sitting in a case in front of me in the Caribbean. It was gorgeous in the way that only a thing you have been moving toward for decades can be gorgeous. I did not buy it. It is not time. But I have now seen the door at the end of the hallway, and it is exactly as worth walking toward as I believed it was.

In the same store I spoke with a Rolex sales associate whose mother, it turned out, lives in the same city as my parents. We talked watches and we talked home, two people from the same small corner of Florida standing in a duty-free shop on an island, finding the thread that connects everything back to the people the watches are really about. The collection is a memoir told through objects. Sometimes the memoir writes a line for you, in a jewelry store in Grand Cayman, about how small the world is and how the people stay at the center of it.

Five watches for seven nights was a good plan. The cruise improved it the way reality improves a plan, by ignoring the theory and keeping the truth. The watch I packed for a party I skipped carried the week. Two watches I never planned for came home, one that belongs and one that does not, and I am keeping both. And at the end of the hallway, seen for the first time in person, the watch I am still walking toward.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around.

The Guide

Most people who wear watches don't think about them when they travel. They pick one — the indestructible one, the cheap one, the one they wouldn't cry over — and they wear it every day until they're home. That is a completely reasonable approach.

But if you're reading this, you probably aren't most people.

A cruise presents a specific set of watch problems that land travel doesn't. You're aboard a ship in salt air. You're swimming in the ocean, standing under waterfalls, climbing ruins in ninety-degree heat. You're also, some nights, dressed for dinner in a restaurant that charges $200 a plate. The watch that works at Dunn's River Falls is not the watch that works at the captain's table. And you're doing both in the same week.

Here's how to think through it.

Start With Your Environments

A Caribbean cruise typically involves five distinct environments, each with its own demands. Sea days are casual — you want something comfortable, low-stakes, easy to reach for without thinking. Port excursions in cities call for something that looks good and doesn't advertise too much value to the wrong person. Active excursions — waterfalls, snorkeling, beaches — need real water resistance, not the nominal 30m rating that means 'don't shower in it.' Private resort days are somewhere between beach and sea day. Formal dinners call for something with presence.

Map your itinerary against those environments before you open the watch box. Know which days are which before you decide what's coming.

Understand Water Resistance Ratings — Actually

The rating on the caseback is not a depth guarantee. It's a pressure test conducted in a lab under static conditions. Moving water — surf, a waterfall, jumping into a pool — generates dynamic pressure that exceeds the static rating. A watch rated 50m is suitable for swimming in calm conditions, not for standing under a waterfall or diving from a boat. For genuinely wet excursions, 100m minimum is the honest threshold. 200m gives you real margin.

If you're going somewhere that will submerge the watch, the watch needs to be built for it. This is not a negotiable point.

Leave Your Best Piece Home

This is the rule most collectors resist and then follow anyway after one close call. Your grail watch — the one with the waiting list, the birth year, the story you'd need three paragraphs to explain — does not belong on a cruise ship. Salt air is corrosive. Crowded markets are crowded. Ship cabins are not safes. The watch you'd spend the rest of the trip worrying about is the watch that should stay on the shelf.

This isn't about fear. It's about appropriate deployment. A watch is a door, not a status symbol. Bring the doors that open onto the right rooms for that week. The grail opens a different room entirely.

The Replaceable Watch

Every cruise packing list needs at least one watch you'd be genuinely fine losing. Not fine in the 'I'll get over it eventually' way — fine in the 'I'll order another one before the ship docks' way. This is your excursion watch. Your waterfall watch. Your 'I'm going to forget I'm wearing it' watch.

The replaceable watch is not a compromise. It's a philosophy. It says: I've thought about this, I know what this day demands, and I've deployed accordingly. That's collecting intelligence, not collecting poverty.

How Many Is the Right Number

The honest answer is: however many your travel case holds, plus the one on your wrist when you board. That's not a joke. It's the only framework that actually works.

A four-slot travel case gives you five watches for seven nights. That's enough. One for sea days. One for active excursions. One for city ports. One for formal nights. One for the day you want something different. You won't need more than that, and you'll wear every one of them if you've packed with intention.

The Turn

That's the framework. It's sound advice. I'd give it to anyone.

Here's what I'm actually putting in the box for eight days aboard the Norwegian Prima — Port Canaveral to Nassau to Jamaica to Great Stirrup Cay to Cozumel and home — departing June 21st with Chrissy, the boys, and my parents. Jansen and Vaughan just graduated high school. This is our first cruise together as a complete family, and I'm building the whole trip around that fact. The watches I'm packing are part of it. The moments we'll have are the other part.

My travel case holds four watches. I'll wear one onto the ship. That gives me five.

The Longines Year of the Horse stays home. It lives in its box in the bedroom, and it will be there when I return. Some watches don't travel. That one has earned the right to stay exactly where it is.

The Five

Mido Baroncelli Jubilee — The Formal Dress Watch

Rose gold PVD case · Anthracite dial · Caliber 80 COSC · 80-hour power reserve · $601

I bought this watch for this cruise. Not for a hypothetical dinner, not for a future occasion — for the specific dining rooms aboard the Norwegian Prima on specific June evenings. Rose gold against a dark dial. COSC-certified movement with 80 hours of power reserve. It looks like it belongs somewhere with a wine list and a dress code, which is exactly where it's going. The ceiling of the bag. Everything else works around it.

Armand Nicolet MH2 — The Smart Casual Watch

Acqua dial · Swiss Made automatic · 43mm · Sapphire crystal · 100m · $800

The Mido covers the formal nights. The Armand Nicolet covers everything else that still requires intention — the smart casual dinners, the evening events, the hours between the sun going down and the dress code going up. Swiss Made, clean three-hand automatic, acqua dial that reads differently depending on whether the light is coming from above or from the side. It is the watch that says you dressed for the evening without saying you tried too hard. Forty-three millimeters of considered presence, for the rooms that don't require a tie but would notice if you didn't care.

Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II Navy Stainless — The Every Day

1250m water resistance · Sellita SW200-1 · 42mm · #26 of 1000 · $404

When you're on a ship, you want a dive watch. Not because you're diving — because the ocean is everywhere and you stop thinking about it. This is the watch for poolside, for sea days, for the casual hours when nobody is dressed for anything and the only requirement is that you stop thinking about what's on your wrist. Navy dial, stainless case, numbered limited edition. It communicates competence without announcing itself. That's the whole job.

Citizen Eco-Drive CC3031-51E — The Timezone Watch

Satellite Wave GPS · F150 movement · 3-second signal reception · 44mm · 100m WR · $408

You move through four time zones in eight days. Nassau, Jamaica, Belize, Cozumel, home. Each one is a different hour. The Citizen solves this problem the way solved problems should be solved: you stop thinking about it. Satellite GPS timekeeping receives a signal from the sky, computes your precise position, and displays the exact local time. Three seconds. Anywhere on earth. The perpetual calendar stays correct until 2100. The Eco-Drive means it never dies. It is the most practical watch I own, and it's coming because on a cruise crossing time zones, a watch that always knows what time it really is isn't a luxury. It's a solution.

Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II Damascus White — The White Party Watch / Falls Watch

1250m water resistance · Sellita SW200-1 · 42mm · Damascus steel case · White enamel dial · White FKM strap · $359

Norwegian Prima runs a white party on the first night at sea. The dress code is white. I have a watch with a white enamel dial, a Damascus steel case forged from layers of 304 and 316L stainless, and a white FKM rubber strap. Limited to 1,000 pieces. Acquired refurbished. The Damascus pattern on the case catches light the way folded steel catches light — differently depending on the angle, never the same twice. It is, without question, the most visually distinctive watch in the bag. Dunn's River Falls is a terraced waterfall climb in Ocho Rios, hands linked in a human chain, water coming down at you the whole way. The white watch goes to both. The FKM strap handles the heat and submersion better than any metal bracelet. Built for 1,250 meters of depth. Going to a waterfall and a party. The overkill is the point.

The Longines is in the bedroom. The case is packed. The gangway opens June 21st.

Five watches. Four in the case. One on my wrist when I walk aboard.

The Norwegian Prima leaves Port Canaveral on June 21st. Chrissy, the boys, my parents, and five watches that know exactly what time it is, anywhere on earth.

The Citizen doesn't care what time zone I'm in. Neither will I.

The Christopher Ward C60 Pool Diver arrives in October. It will make its debut aboard the Margaritaville Beachcomber, departing PortMiami April 3, 2027 at 4:00 PM. St. Thomas, San Juan, Puerto Plata, and home. Stateroom 2434 awaits. The second cruise already has its watch.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I'm a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection — not the other way around.

There are evenings a cruise gives you that don’t belong to any category on paper. Not formal. Not beachside. Something in between: a good dinner at a restaurant that doesn’t require a tie, a cocktail hour when the light is going gold, an evening where getting dressed meant something without meaning too much. The Mido Baroncelli owns the formal end. The Oceanevas own the water. Neither one answers the other question.

The in-between space is where the right watch earns its keep quietly. Something with enough presence to read as intentional, relaxed enough that it doesn’t own the room. A summer dress watch, in the truest sense: built for short sleeves and warm evenings, for occasions that reward thought without demanding ceremony.

That’s the gap the Armand Nicolet MH2 was bought to fill. Here’s the honest accounting of why it was acquired, what the brand is, and what the dial showed before and after wrist time settled the question.

Armand Nicolet MH2 A640A-TF-MA2640A · Acqua dial · 43mm stainless steel · ETA 2824-2 automatic · 25 jewels · 28,800 vph · 38-hour power reserve · Sapphire crystal · Exhibition caseback · 100m water resistance · Swiss Made · List $1,295 · Paid $800.36

A Watchmaker in the Bernese Jura

The origins of Armand Nicolet begin around 1875 in Tramelan, a town in the Bernese Jura. The Jura is not Geneva. It’s not the Vallée de Joux where the grand complications are born. It’s an agricultural mountain region that learned watchmaking the way it learned everything else: through patient, unhurried craft applied over generations. Armand Nicolet, son of a watchmaker, set up his Atelier d’Horlogerie after a brilliant apprenticeship, and by 1902 he had affirmed his technical maturity by producing a pocket watch with guilloché rose gold case, enamel dial, single button chronograph, complete calendar, and minute repeating function. That watch still exists. It’s in the brand’s museum in Tramelan.

When Armand died in 1939, his son Willy assumed control and developed the factory into one of the most important movement finishing operations in the region. This is the part of the story that most brand histories skip because it’s less romantic than founding myths. Armand Nicolet wasn’t making watches with their name on the dial during those decades. They were doing something more essential and less visible: finishing complicated mechanical movements for other famous Swiss brands. A genuine T1 operation. The kind of company that the watch industry depends on and almost never acknowledges.

In 1987, Willy Nicolet met by chance an Italian entrepreneur named Rolando Braga, who had been active in the watch field for two decades. Braga fell in love with the idea of recovering the extraordinary mechanical movements still held in the factory and decided to close his company in Italy and move to Switzerland. What followed was not a buyout. It was a collaboration: Swiss manufacture meeting Italian design sensibility, with production maintained at the historic Tramelan factory and a design and marketing operation established in Brescia, Italy. The technical rigor stayed in Switzerland. The aesthetic language came from Italy. The watches that emerged from that partnership don’t announce the collaboration. They wear it.

The MH2 is one of them.

MontreHeure 2: What the Name Means

MH2 stands for MontreHeure 2. The “Montre Heure” designation marks the midrange sports automatic line. The “2” doesn’t mean version two in the way consumer electronics use version numbers. It means the line evolved. Learned something from what came before it. Carried the good things forward and left the rest.

That’s a quiet kind of confidence. Not new and improved. Not a marketing refresh. Just 2. The watch that came after they understood what the first one needed to be.

The standard MH2 A640A is a three-hand automatic. No chronograph complications, no GMT function, no date window cluttering the dial. It does one thing: tells time. The case is 43mm stainless steel throughout, no ceramic, no PVD. Sapphire crystal. Exhibition caseback. 100 meters of water resistance. What’s inside that caseback is the ETA 2824-2, which is both the least romantic detail of this watch and the most important argument for it.

The Movement Case: ETA 2824-2 and Why It’s the Right Call

The ETA 2824-2 is not exotic. It won’t earn you a paragraph in a horological journal. It’s a Swiss workhorse movement that has been running reliably inside watches at every meaningful price point for decades, regulated and fitted by whoever is casing it, and largely left alone to do its job.

For this watch, that’s exactly the right choice.

The ETA 2824-2 runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour, 25 jewels, 38-hour power reserve. It holds its regulation, doesn’t demand babying, and will still be running correctly in fifteen years if you service it. When you buy a watch with this movement at this price point, you’re not paying for movement mystique. You’re paying for what the movement gets out of the way to show you: the case work, the dial execution, the design intelligence of a Swiss-Italian partnership that has been at this since 1987.

The roadmap watches require in-house manufacture movements because the movement is part of what you’re buying at that tier. The MH2 is a discovery-lane acquisition filling a genuine gap in the rotation. For that job, a well-regulated ETA 2824-2 is not a compromise. It’s the correct specification.

The Dial: Acqua and the Guilloché Beneath It

Armand Nicolet makes the MH2 in several dial colors. The acqua chose itself.

But the color is only half the story, and arguably the lesser half. Beneath the acqua finish is guilloché: an intricate hand-engraved pattern that catches light in every direction, a texture so detailed it reads differently depending on the angle, the hour, where you’re standing. Most people won’t know the word for what they’re looking at. They’ll just know they can’t stop looking. The guilloché is the real star of the dial. The acqua is what gives it color. Together they produce something that doesn’t have an obvious price.

The color itself is specific: the shade of shallow saltwater when the sun is directly overhead, the particular color that Florida water turns in the hour before sunset. It sits between teal and turquoise without committing fully to either one. It has depth without being navy. It’s warm without being green. In direct sunlight it pops hard, demanding attention in a way the rest of the watch’s clean stainless case does not. Indoors it settles into something more contemplative. That range is part of what makes the dial interesting to wear across occasions.

The case architecture supports the dial rather than competing with it. Stainless steel throughout, clean and unfussy. No functional bezel markings, no dive scale, no pretense of utility the watch wasn’t built for. It frames the guilloché acqua the way a good mat frames a painting: by being present without being interesting.

The Acquisition: The Blind Impulse Audit

Retail price on the Armand Nicolet MH2 A640A: $1,295.

What was paid: $800.36, through Jomashop, gray market.

The Blind Impulse Audit asks a harder question than the standard accounting. Not just what was paid and where, but what the filter missed in the moment, what the purchase was blind to, and whether the decision survives honest retrospection without dressing it up.

Here’s what the audit finds: the gap was real. The rotation had the Mido for formal evenings, the Oceanevas for anything near water, and a collection of divers and field watches that all announce their utility on the wrist. Nothing for the warm evening where getting dressed meant something without meaning too much. That gap had been present longer than the Armand Nicolet had been on the radar.

What was partly blind to: the 43mm case size, which reads differently in photographs than against the wrist, and which the bracelet resize confirmed is a real question rather than a spec-sheet number. Screw-pin links and two precision screwdrivers, nearly an hour to size it correctly. That’s a long time to think about whether a watch is the right call. It came out the other side still believing it was. The gray market channel at this tier is the right call for an ETA-based piece, and the Jomashop warranty coverage is not a meaningful trade-off for a movement that independent watchmakers have been servicing for decades. The audit holds.

What the Wrist Confirms

The 43mm sits perfectly. That was the open question, and the wrist time answered it.

Indoors the dial is very present. The acqua and the guilloché together are quite noticeable without being overbearing: the kind of thing that earns a second look from across the table without asking for it. The legibility is clean and immediate. The watch is comfortable across a full day in a way that doesn’t require thinking about it, which is exactly what a watch for casual occasions should be.

In direct sunlight the dial pops hard. The guilloché catches the light at every angle, and the acqua takes on more intensity outdoors than it shows in photographs or under indoor lighting. It’s a more visually dynamic watch than its clean case suggests it has any right to be.

This was a test run. The real occasion is the Norwegian Prima, sixteen days out. The watch passed with flying colors. That’s all a test run is supposed to do: confirm that the right piece is in the right slot before the moment it was actually bought for arrives. The MH2 is confirmed. The gap is filled. The Prima can come.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection — not the other way around.

I did not buy this watch to collect it.

That sentence deserves to sit on its own for a moment, because it describes something that almost never happens in this collection. Everything in the case has a story that starts with want, with gap, with the particular pull an object has when it belongs in a life you are building. The Citizen Eco-Drive CC3031-51E Satellite Wave GPS started somewhere different. It started with a problem.

The Norwegian Prima leaves Port Canaveral on June 21st. Eight days, four ports, Nassau to Jamaica to Great Stirrup Cay to Cozumel and home. Every one of those stops runs on a different relationship with time — port arrival windows, excursion departure times, dinner reservations that do not move. I will be crossing time zones, stepping off a ship into equatorial heat at seven in the morning, and making my way back before the gangway lifts. A watch that requires a manual crown adjustment to update its timezone is a watch I will set wrong, or forget to set at all, or set correctly once and then get wrong again without noticing. That is not a small problem on a cruise.

So I did what the collection asks: I identified the gap, then found the piece that fills it exactly.

The CC3031-51E runs on the Citizen Caliber F950. It is an Eco-Drive movement, which means it draws power from any light source — indoors, outdoors, natural, artificial — and converts it through a photovoltaic cell beneath the dial. Citizen has been building Eco-Drive movements since 1976. This is not emerging technology. It is fifty-year-old engineering that has been refined to the point where a full charge runs the watch for approximately six months in complete darkness. I will not be in complete darkness. The charge question is settled before it becomes one.

Satellite Wave is the feature that resolved the timezone problem. The watch receives GPS signals from satellites orbiting at roughly 20,000 kilometers above the earth and uses those signals to set the time and timezone automatically, on demand, in a few seconds. I press a button. The watch finds a satellite. The time is correct. There is no crown to pull, no offset to calculate, no manual timezone database to scroll through. Nassau sets itself. Ocho Rios sets itself. Cozumel sets itself. I stop thinking about it.

The rest of the spec: 44mm case in stainless steel, 100 meters of water resistance, mineral crystal over the dial, perpetual calendar that handles date corrections automatically forever. It is a substantial watch on the wrist and a precise one. It arrived from Best Buy for $407.67

There is a version of this that runs further out. The Citizen F950 Attesa is the top of the Citizen Eco-Drive line: titanium case, in-house movement finishing, a watch that occupies a different tier of seriousness. I am not there yet with Citizen because I have not done the work with Citizen yet. This watch is the start of that work. If the CC3031-51E proves itself over years of travel, if the GPS function becomes something I rely on the way I rely on the Oceanevas in the water, then the Attesa becomes a legitimate roadmap consideration. The collection builds on evidence, not desire. The evidence starts accumulating June 21st.

I did not buy this watch to collect it. I bought it because it solved a problem. The collection gets to find out whether that is enough.

It usually is.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

I looked at fourteen watches.

Glycine Combat Sub. LIV Dual Lume GX1. Citizen Promaster Dive. Straton Syncro Sports Day/Date. Berny Auto Titanium Railroad. Aristo Swiss Auto Aviator. LIV Gravel Full Lume. Tresod Ocean Master Swiss Auto. Shinola Lake Superior Monster Auto. TAG Heuer Aquaracer Pro 300 Night Diver. Doxa Sub 300 Carbon Whitepearl. Orient Sports M-Force Auto Orange. Tissot T-Sport Siderale Auto. And the Christopher Ward C60 Trident Lumière, which I want to say something about specifically: it is not on this list because I rejected it. It is on this list because it is not yet available. That watch is on my radar for a future conversation. This was not that conversation.

Thirteen watches considered and rejected. One not yet available. I bought the Oceaneva.

Again.

The brief was specific, the way the best briefs always are.

Two occasions. One watch.

The first: the Omni ChampionsGate Back to School Glow Party, a pool event, outdoor, after dark, the kind of evening that runs on UV light and momentum. I have been before. I know what it asks of a watch: water resistance that means something, visibility in blacklight conditions, a colorway that earns its place in that light. The second: the white party on the first night at sea aboard the Norwegian Prima, June 21st. The dress code is white. The ship is leaving Port Canaveral. The occasion is the opening act of a graduation cruise for Jansen and Vaughan, our first trip as a complete family. Both occasions were already on the calendar. The white party already had a watch assigned to it in print, in “Five Watches for Seven Nights,” before this piece existed. That assignment was correct. What this piece adds is the full accounting of how the watch got there.

Two occasions united by a single requirement: the watch needs to be white. Genuinely white. Not off-white, not silver, not a dial that photographs light against a dark strap. White. And it needs to be built for the water, because both of these events will find it there.

That requirement, applied honestly to thirteen candidates, leaves you in a specific place.

The Oceaneva Deep Marine Explorer II White Dial Damascus Steel Watch is, at first glance, the simplest watch in the lineup. White enamel dial. White FKM rubber strap. Damascus steel case and bezel, layered forge-welded construction of 304 and 316L stainless steel. Sellita SW200-1 automatic, 26 jewels, 38-hour power reserve, 28,800 bph. Anti-reflective domed sapphire crystal, 4.8mm thick. 14.8mm case thickness with sapphire at the thickest point. 1,250 meters of water resistance. 42mm case. Planned for 1,000 pieces in the white dial colorway, with 150 produced so far. Mine is number 90 of those 150.

The Damascus case is the thing. Not because Damascus steel is rare in this collection, it isn’t. The CIVIVI KwaiQ folder carries a Damascus Tanto blade. The Explorer VI carries a Damascus dial. But Damascus on a watch case is a different argument than Damascus on a blade, and different again from Damascus as a dial surface. The forge-welded grain is visible in the case walls, in the bezel, in the buckle. The pattern shifts with the light, with the angle, with the moment. Against a white enamel dial, the Damascus reads the way folded steel is supposed to read: like something made rather than manufactured.

In hand, it feels almost exactly like the Explorer VI. That’s not a surprise; the engineering family resemblance is intentional. What the white does is something the VI doesn’t do: it pops. The enamel against the Damascus grain is a genuine contrast, and the Grade A Swiss Luminova on the indices charges fast and holds. I’ve ordered a UV flashlight to charge the lume for video. It arrives today. Under blacklight, white reads differently than any other colorway in this collection. The watch was built for 1,250 meters of depth. It’s going to a pool party. The overkill, as always with Oceaneva, is the point.

The thirteen watches deserve honest accounting.

The TAG Heuer Aquaracer Pro 300 Night Diver is a legitimate piece with night-specific engineering and dive credibility stretching back to the tool watch era. It is also $1,500 to $2,000 for a watch I would wear to a pool party at ChampionsGate. The math doesn’t hold.

The Doxa Sub 300 Carbon Whitepearl is the most dangerous watch on that list. A genuine icon. The white dial, the Professional colorway, is exactly the aesthetic this collection has been circling since before there was a roadmap. The Carbon Whitepearl runs north of $1,500. It is on no roadmap. Buying it for a glow party would be precisely the kind of decision this collection has rules to prevent. It is still on the radar. It will wait.

The Glycine Combat Sub was a natural candidate given what’s already in this collection. The Airman Vintage The Chief lives here. The Combat Sub is a legitimate Swiss automatic in the right price range. It is not white. It was never going to be white. The brief eliminated it cleanly.

The others, the Citizen, the Orient, the Tissot, the Shinola, the LIV pieces, the Straton, are honest watches at honest prices from brands with real histories. None of them are white. None of them clear the water resistance bar without compromise. Several of them are interesting. None of them are right.

Thirteen watches, one brief, one correct answer. The rules don’t require a new brand when the brand already in the collection builds the right watch.

Here is the part I want to be honest about.

I have been resisting adding more Oceaneva.

Not because the brand doesn’t deserve it. Not because the collection doesn’t have room. Because there is a version of this where the affiliate relationship and the loyalty points and the refurbished sale invitations become a rationalization engine rather than a legitimate argument. I know what that version sounds like. I have been watching for it.

But the honest accounting produces a number that is hard to argue with.

Nine Oceaneva watches in this collection. Total MSRP across those nine pieces: $15,993. Total paid: $4,103. The delta is $11,890.

I own roughly $16,000 of Oceaneva for $4,100.

That number is the product of three separate mechanisms running in parallel, none of which were designed together but all of which compound toward the same outcome.

The first mechanism is the refurbished sale. Oceaneva invites previous customers, not loyalty program members, not subscribers, simply people who have bought from them before, to access refurbished inventory at discounts that are not available anywhere else. Both OceanTreks, the Navy Blue Explorer II, all four GMT 1250Ms, and this watch arrived through that channel. The discounts are heavy. The watches are certified and restored. The OceanTreks came in under $100 each. The Deep Marine Explorer II White Dial Damascus Steel Watch, a $499 watch at standard retail, arrived at $359.10 after my affiliate code.

The second mechanism is the affiliate relationship. Code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels returns 10% to the reader and 8% back to me. That 8% commission runs quietly against every Oceaneva purchase in any given cycle, reducing the net effective cost of the collection below what the invoices already show.

The third mechanism is the loyalty program. One point per dollar spent. This purchase brought my balance to 4,636 points. I have already redeemed 4,500 of them for a $240 coupon toward the Oceaneva Power Reserve 6000m Red, a Grade 5 Titanium deep-sea piece limited to 50 units that ships in July 2026. Those points were not accumulated accidentally. They were the collected arithmetic of every Oceaneva transaction since 2022, saved deliberately for a specific watch. The ecosystem didn’t just reduce the cost of this purchase. It partially funded the next one.

Three mechanisms. None of them linked to each other. All of them running simultaneously. The result is a collection that grows faster, at lower cost, than any outside buyer could replicate at retail. That is not a loophole. That is what it looks like to be this far inside a brand.

The watch that broke my resistance wasn’t the most expensive one I could have bought. It was a refurbished piece at $359, solving a specific brief against thirteen considered alternatives, inside an ecosystem that made the math impossible to argue with.

The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around. That sentence appears at the bottom of every piece I write about Oceaneva, and I am going to tell you exactly what it means in practice: I had the rules before I had the relationship. I had the watches before I had the affiliate code. The filter pointed at Oceaneva because Oceaneva was doing the work. The ecosystem followed from that, not the other way around. When the filter and the affiliate agree, I say so plainly and let the reader decide.

The white party is the first night at sea. ChampionsGate comes later, after summer settles in and the school year turns over and the pool lights go UV and everything white glows. The UV flashlight arrives today. Whatever the lume does under that light, it will be on camera.

Ninety of one hundred and fifty made. Damascus grain shifting in the Florida light. White enamel that does not apologize for being white.

The ecosystem did its work. I let it.

— Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around.

It started, as these things sometimes do, with the wrong watch.

I came across a Facebook post for a Maen collaboration. It was a brand I’d been tracking, paired with a dial I couldn’t stop looking at. Painted. Hand-painted. Not printed, not laser-etched, not the product of a machine that never blinks. An actual human hand had done that. I didn’t fully understand it yet, but something in the image pulled hard enough that I went looking.

That’s how I found IFL Watches. And that’s when I understood what I was actually looking at.

IFL Watches. Check their FAQ if you want to know what the letters stand for. It’s the kind of answer that tells you exactly who these people are.

IFL is a creative operation built around a premise that sounds almost too simple: the perfect canvas was already sitting on people’s wrists. Founded by Karar Aimer and operating globally, they’ve evolved beyond what a traditional watch company could ever be. They take genuine base watches like Casio, Seiko, Rolex, and Citizen. Recognized names with proven movements and proven cases. Disassemble them with certified watchmakers. Then an artist takes the dial and paints. Then the watchmaker reassembles everything with the same precision the original engineer demanded.

It’s a collaboration built into the process. Two separate crafts, two separate visions, one piece. They’ve extended this philosophy beyond watches into accessories and art installations. Sculptures made from vintage watch parts, clocks, wall art. The entire operation refuses the obvious. The result is something the original engineers never intended and probably wouldn’t recognize. That’s not a flaw. That’s the entire philosophy.

The Maen collab was priced beyond what I wanted to pay. So I kept scrolling through their catalog. Dials painted like galaxies, like oceans, like things you’d expect to see through a lens rather than wear on your wrist. Then I landed on the Casio Edifice Midnight Sky.

Deep blue. Stars rendered in abstract pointillism, each one placed by hand, the spacing slightly different, the weight of the brushstroke unique to the moment the artist made it. Built on a 39.5mm Edifice platform with polished and brushed stainless steel, integrated H-link bracelet with a folding clasp that micro-adjusts. A Seiko NH35A automatic movement inside: 24 jewels, 21,600 vibrations per hour, 40-hour power reserve. Sapphire crystal protecting the dial. 100 meters of water resistance. Limited to 200 pieces of this particular design.

The page said 1 left. I bought it. It went to sold out.

A day later, 1 left appeared again. My best guess? Someone put it in their cart, the timer expired, the inventory reset. Cart mechanics creating the illusion of availability. I don’t know for certain, but it makes sense. The next day it was gone again. Sold out. Weeks later, still sold out. The page now says “Sign up to be notified when the watch is available.”

I got the last one. Not the last one of the moment, or the last one until the next batch. The actual last Midnight Sky in this particular run.

And here’s what I didn’t realize until after the purchase had already cleared: if every dial is painted by hand, if no two star patterns are the same, if the artist’s hand never lands in exactly the same place twice, then there was always only one left. Every watch is a completely different watch wearing the same name. A new sky. A new moment frozen in paint. The scarcity of the run and the uniqueness of the dial are two different things operating in the same space.

The scarcity was real. And it still is.

I have a telescope. It’s too bright here in the suburbs of Tampa to see much with it. The kind of light pollution that erases the stars from the sky. They’re still there, of course. I know that. But knowing and seeing are different things, and I miss the difference more than I expected to.

So now I wear one instead.

There’s a broader case to be made for what IFL does. The industry’s best manufacturers, like Rolex, Tudor, and Omega, chase perfect repeatability, measured in microns. Every dial identical, every index aligned to a tolerance that would make a Swiss engineer comfortable. IFL inverts that logic entirely. They build the variation in on purpose. When precision engineering and artistic expression collide inside the same watch, most collectors never think about that collaboration. I find it quietly radical.

I’ve written before about the objects that earn their place in a life. Not the ones that arrive because of a name on the dial or a number in an auction catalog, but the ones that find you through a different door and turn out to belong. The Midnight Sky arrived through a Facebook ad for a watch I didn’t want to pay for. It belongs on the basis of what it actually is: unrepeatable, handmade, worn on a wrist that has spent years building a framework for exactly this kind of exception.

The watch arrived. There is deviation in the dial from the product photos, as there should be — hand-painted work carries variation. But the variation is refined, subtler than I expected. The pointillism holds its detail. This is my first Casio automatic, and it surprised me. It feels like a watch built to be worn, not just displayed.

The specs matter here because they’re not compromises. A Seiko NH35A is reliable and proven — used in watches that cost three times this price. The sapphire crystal protects the hand-painted dial without distortion. The 100-meter water resistance is practical for daily life. The polished and brushed finishing on the case creates depth rather than flash. This isn’t a watch where specs were cut to hit a price point. It’s a watch where specs were chosen to do the work.

The case is smaller than my preference. It’s 39.5mm instead of my sweet spot at 42mm. But that’s personal architecture, not a flaw. It wears really well. Everything feels considered. This is my first Casio automatic, and it surprised me. I love it.

If you’re looking for a 1-of-1 experience in a watch without paying six figures, this is the way to go.

-Jaime

I bought the Mido Baroncelli Jubilee for a ship.

Specifically, for the dining rooms aboard the Norwegian Prima. For the evenings when the Caribbean itinerary calls for something with presence, when the linen shirt comes out and the room has a wine list and a dress code and the kind of lighting that makes every decision you made getting dressed feel justified. Rose gold PVD case. Anthracite dial. COSC-certified movement with 80 hours of power reserve. A dress watch chosen for a specific week in June, aboard a specific ship, at a specific latitude.

It had other plans.

Mother’s Day came first. BJ’s Brewhouse in the early afternoon, the twins, my father, the kind of Sunday lunch that doesn’t announce itself as significant while it’s happening. Chrissy couldn’t make it. The occasion shifted on me and I wore the watch anyway.

That decision, wearing it anyway, is the whole story.

A dress watch is not a dress watch until it’s been somewhere. It’s just an object in a box, promising things it hasn’t delivered yet. The Prima is three weeks out. The Baroncelli needed a table before it needed a gangway, and Mother’s Day offered one.

There’s something I’ve been learning slowly across this collection: the object knows where it belongs better than you do when you’re buying it.

The Seiko I bought on my honeymoon wasn’t chosen for any dining room. It caught the light on a cruise ship gift shop somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas, and I bought it because I was happy and it was there. That watch is a Tuesday in the Bahamas when everything was exactly right. The occasion made it.

The Baroncelli is making the same argument from the other direction. I chose the occasion in advance: a Norwegian cruise, a June evening, the captain’s table energy. Then life rearranged the calendar the way life does. Chrissy couldn’t make it. The restaurant became a brewhouse. The first night out became a Sunday afternoon.

And somehow it was still right.

My father was at the table. That matters more than the venue.

He has his own relationship with watches, informal, unplanned, the kind of collecting that happens to a person rather than being built by one. He’s never had a roadmap or a spreadsheet. He’s just worn things that meant something to him, over the course of a life that earned the right to mean something. I don’t know if he noticed the Baroncelli. I know he was sitting across from it at a table with his grandsons, two weeks before they walk across a stage and start the rest of their lives.

The twins were there too. Jansen and Vaughan, both eighteen, both already wearing Oceanevas I handed them privately before the ceremony, both still figuring out what it means to carry something on your wrist with intention. They’ll understand it eventually. That’s fine. I’m building the education in advance.

I also got a free pizookie from the rewards program.

I want to be honest about that. A COSC-certified chronometer, a movement regulated to within seconds per day, an 80-hour power reserve, a watch positioned by Mido as their dress flagship, made its public debut alongside a complimentary skillet cookie courtesy of accumulated points. The watch didn’t flinch. Neither did I.

This is, in fact, the most B&B sentence I’ve written in a while: the Baroncelli had its first outing at BJ’s Brewhouse and earned a free pazookie. That’s not a failure of occasion. That’s a watch finding its footing in the real world rather than the one I’d planned for it.

The Prima departs June 21st. Eight days. Nassau, Jamaica, Great Stirrup Cay, Cozumel.

The Baroncelli is in the travel case. It will see the dining rooms I bought it for, the dress code evenings, the wine lists and the low lighting and the particular formality a ship achieves at sea when everyone agrees, for one night, to dress like they meant to be somewhere.

But it already has a first chapter. A Sunday afternoon in Tampa, three generations at a table that didn’t match the watch on paper and matched it completely in practice. A father who wears things that mean something. Two sons who will understand that someday. A free dessert from a rewards app.

Some watches need a grand occasion to begin. This one needed a table.

It found one.

—Jaime

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

The orange hit me before anything else.

Not the case, not the specs, not the price. The orange. That particular shade that sits somewhere between safety equipment and race car livery, the color that doesn’t ask permission. I’d wanted it on my wrist for years in the form of a DOXA Sub 300 Professional, that iconic tool dial that search and rescue divers wore into open water and that collectors have coveted ever since. The DOXA was never on the roadmap. The math never made it the right call. So the orange stayed a want, not an acquisition, until I found the watch that started everything for a brand I’d been quietly watching for a while.

The LIV GX1 The Orange Limited Edition. Blacked-out case, knurled bezel, orange pushers, orange dial emerging from black like something that means business. White numerals, black and orange silicone. MSRP $600. First Production on the caseback. Not a batch designation or a limited run marker, but a permanent marking on every GX1, because the GX1 is the very first model LIV ever produced. It wears like it knows what it is.

Florida doesn’t get credit for permanence. The reputation runs the other direction, sun and speed and impermanence, the place where things wash up rather than get built. But if you live here, really live here, you start to notice something. There’s a strain of founder in this state that pushes back against that narrative quietly and without apology. People building things meant to outlast the moment. Things meant to be worn hard.

Traska started in Jacksonville Beach when founder Jon Mack lost a vintage Bulova Snorkel diver to catastrophic water damage while traveling through Vietnam. Worn gaskets, compromised movement, dead watch. Out of that loss came a question worth asking: why wasn’t there a watch tough enough for a real life that didn’t cost a real fortune? He came home and built one. Seven years and multiple iterated models later, Traska has earned one of the most devoted followings in the independent watch space, built entirely through word of mouth, without a hype machine or a celebrity association in sight. Just product, iterated relentlessly until it’s right.

Man of the Sea operates in a different register entirely. Somewhere on the Florida coast, one man, Peg Leg Don, casts bronze nautical watches by hand using the lost wax process, the same method artisans have used for centuries. Place your order and come back in six to eight weeks. What arrives is semi-custom, individually crafted, and closer to wearable maritime sculpture than anything the watch industry has a category for. I follow him on TikTok because watching him work is its own kind of education. Peg Leg Don read the article and reached out to me to say that he uses a foundry in Seminole FL, to cast the cases, he makes the molds by hand.

NSB came out of New Smyrna Beach carrying the space coast in its bones, and the Apollo already has a wrist and a story in these pages. Find it if you haven’t. I was paying attention to Florida before it was obvious. The NSB piece was the first chapter of a conversation this piece continues.

Of all of them, LIV is operating with the broadest portfolio ambition, climbing deliberately across materials, movements, and price points with a visual language consistent enough to feel intentional at every tier. They started with an orange sport chrono that became the foundation of everything that followed.

The brand launched out of the Wynwood Arts District in Miami, the neighborhood that turned warehouse walls into cultural landmarks. That’s not a coincidence for a brand this deliberate about its visual identity. The watches are Swiss-made, built in Switzerland by a brand whose US headquarters happens to sit in the most visually ambitious zip code in Florida. Miami understands bold color. It understands water proximity, tool aesthetics, and the kind of life where what you wear actually gets used. The GX1 is a Miami watch, Swiss-built, wearing its address honestly. It belongs in that light.

LIV doesn’t make a few interesting watches. They’ve built five distinct product lines, P-51 Titanium, Trekker, GX-Diver’s, Gravel, and Genesis, each with its own identity, its own movement philosophy, and multiple variants underneath. Seventy-two watches across every major tool category. That’s a portfolio, not a product.

They’ve also figured out TikTok. If you spend any time on the platform, you’ve seen them. I see the ad at least five times a day, which is either aggressive targeting or a sign that the algorithm knows something about me I’m not ready to admit. What LIV understands is that TikTok isn’t where you close a sale. It’s where you earn the first look. The community they built on Kickstarter gave them the credibility. The TikTok presence gives them the reach. The watches have to do the rest. In my experience, they do.

It starts with the Genesis, the line that started everything, labeled on their own site as “First LIV Design.” Chaz and Esti Chazanow founded LIV in 2014, and Chaz brought over two decades of watch industry experience to the project before a single piece shipped. The original GX1 launched on Kickstarter that same year, funded within the first 11 hours, the most backed Swiss watch project on the platform at the time. The GX1-A followed and shattered records entirely, becoming the most-funded timepiece in Kickstarter history. Across their campaigns, LIV raised $3.2 million in 29 months, the most crowdfunded Swiss watch company ever. That’s not a brand launch. That’s a community building something from the ground up.

Above the Genesis sits the Trekker, their GMT automatic line powered by the Sellita SW330-2, 25 jewels, 56-hour power reserve, hand-finished in Switzerland with a LIV-spec rotor and custom hand heights tuned to the dial. Ceramic bezel, skeleton caseback, sapphire crystal. This is where LIV moved from sport chrono into serious automatic territory, and the Trekker holds its own against GMT offerings from brands charging considerably more for considerably less transparency about what’s inside.

The GX-Diver’s goes to 300 meters, serious dive territory, the same depth rating that defines a professional instrument rather than a lifestyle accessory. That LIV is operating here puts them in the same conversation as brands built entirely around dive credibility.

The Gravel is their outdoor sport chrono line, Dense Carbon cases, their proprietary carbon fiber and polyamide composite, built for conditions where a steel watch would feel like a liability. The McQueen GT40 limited edition sits at the top of that line in Gulf Oil powder blue and orange, referencing the 1968 Ford GT40 that Steve McQueen immortalized at Le Mans. Sixty-two grams on the wrist. You forget it’s there until you need it.

And then there’s the P-51 Cripes A’ Mighty 2.0, sandblasted titanium, ceramic bezel, skeleton caseback, ETA 7750 Swiss automatic, named for Major George Preddy’s P-51 Mustang, top-scoring American ace of the Second World War. The same movement Breitling and IWC have built reputations around at three and four times the price, in a titanium case, direct to consumer, no boutique markup, no heritage tax. I’m deeply considering it.

LIV parallels what Oceaneva was doing early. Not in aesthetic, Oceaneva lives in the serious dive segment, LIV in sport and lifestyle. But in structure. Both brands are building Swiss spec credibility through product rather than story, cultivating a community that feels like early access to something, and climbing upstream with intention. The brands that eventually make their own movements, Oris, Tudor, Christopher Ward with the SH21, all followed a version of this path. Volume first. Identity second. Movement third. LIV isn’t there. But they’re not doing anything that would preclude it either.

I had a question about what First Production actually meant, whether it was a batch designation, a limited run marker, or something else entirely. I asked. James from the LIV Concierge team responded the same day with the answer, pulled directly from the team. I’d reached out previously about the piece itself, and a real person on their text line, not a bot, asked me to send it over when it was done. That’s the LIV Pledge operating exactly as stated. Chaz has been in the watch industry for over 22 years. He and Esti built LIV because he wasn’t satisfied with what the market was offering, and that dissatisfaction channeled into product rather than complaint is what built everything you’ve read about in this piece. Customers on Trustpilot mention him by name, unprompted, noting that he personally reached out after their purchases. That’s not a marketing strategy. That’s a founder who hasn’t forgotten what the brand is actually for. When Chaz and Esti built LIV, they built it in the right zip code, with the right culture behind it. It appears to be operational policy.

Chaz’s story starts with a Swatch. A brother returning from Switzerland, an original still in its plastic case, a ten-year-old who put it on his wrist and never fully took it off. Mine starts with a Swatch Tennis. Different watch, different kid, different decade, same door opening in the same direction. I don’t know that either of us understood at the time what that first watch was actually starting. He figured it out faster. He chose watches over college, spent over two decades learning the industry from the packing room to the factory floor, and eventually arrived at a conclusion he couldn’t ignore: the market wasn’t offering what watch lovers actually deserved. So he and Esti built it themselves. “If everybody could do it,” Chaz says, “they would have done it already.” That’s not a marketing line. That’s what a kid with a Swatch grows up to say when he’s built something from nothing.

My GX1 is marked First Production on the caseback. Every GX1 is. Because the GX1 is where LIV began, the proof of concept that funded the Trekker, the Gravel, the GX-Diver’s, the P-51. The orange dial is as legible as anything I own. The 45mm case wears better than the spec suggests it should. The form-fit silicone integrates with the case geometry in a way that distributes the weight across the wrist instead of sitting on top of it. It is not the DOXA I always wanted. It is something more interesting, the first watch of a brand I believe in, acquired at the moment when believing still required some faith.

The best time to recognize something is before everyone else does. The second best time is now.

—JL

Precision on the wrist. Perfection in the glass. Music to feel. Stories that last.

bezelsandbourbon.com

Affiliate disclosure: I’m a proud Oceaneva affiliate. Use code BEZELS at oceaneva.com/bezels for 10% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. The affiliation followed the collection, not the other way around.

Affiliate disclosure: I'm a proud LIV Watches affiliate. Use code BEZELS at livwatches.com 5% off your order. I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

I carried a secret for months.

Two watches. Same model. Different colorways. Bought deliberately, held quietly, waiting for the right moment. Jansen and Vaughan, my twin sons, eighteen years old, walked past me a hundred times since I ordered them. They had conversations with me at the kitchen table, in the car, in all the ordinary spaces of a life we share. They had no idea.

Friday evening at Clearwater Sound, before they walked across a stage and received their diplomas, I handed each of them a watch. Not a card. Not a handshake. A watch rated to 1,250 meters, built to last a lifetime, built for the deep end, built for wherever they were going next.

They didn’t know what they were heading into yet. I’m not sure I did either, at eighteen. But they had something on their wrists that was chosen before they had a plan.

The watches are Oceaneva GMT Deep Marine Explorer 1250M Pro Divers. Yellow and black for Vaughan. Red and black for Jansen.

I want to be honest about how that decision was made: I looked at both watches and went with what felt right. The same instinct that has driven most of the decisions worth anything in this collection. Vaughan is heading toward computer hardware, circuit boards, the internal logic of things, there’s something in yellow and black that fits that energy, a certain boldness, a willingness to be seen. Jansen, it turns out, is heading somewhere that requires a different kind of readiness entirely. EMT school first, then a few years of work, then Fire College. A man who intends to run toward what everyone else is running from. The red and black suits him just fine.

Two watches. One choice each. No crossover, ever. That last part matters more than it might seem.

I’ve been building watch collections for Jansen and Vaughan separately, in parallel, for a while now. The rule is simple and absolute: no piece in Jansen’s collection can appear in Vaughan’s, and nothing in either of theirs can appear in mine. When the collections eventually transfer, and they will, that’s always been the point, every single piece will be genuinely new to them. Nothing repeated. Nothing borrowed from somewhere else.

I built that structure for them before I told them it existed. That’s the part I want them to understand. Not that I gave them watches. That I thought about them specifically, as individuals, as two different people with two different futures, and built something that reflected that distinction. The no-crossover rule isn’t about the watches. It’s about saying: I see you as separate. I always have.

I gave them the watches before the ceremony, before the crowd, before the pageantry, before any of it became official. Just the three of us. They suspected nothing.

They both thought the watches were very nice. Expensive, even. They were right on both counts, though the real cost wasn’t the price, it was the months of quiet intention that preceded the handoff. They put them on. They wore them to lunch with their mother, then onto the stage at Clearwater Sound, then into the evening that followed.

After the ceremony, the whole family gathered, Chrissy, my parents, all of us, and we took the night to Bascom’s Chop House. Jansen and Vaughan wore their graduation robes to the table. More than a few strangers stopped over the course of the meal to congratulate them. The robes have a way of making an occasion legible to a room. At some point during the evening, the waiter noticed the watches and complimented them. Two eighteen-year-olds in maroon and gold, diplomas in hand, Oceanevas on their wrists, in a room full of people who recognized the moment for what it was.

In the photo after the ceremony, the three of us standing outside in the Florida evening light, Jansen already has the watch on his wrist. You can see it if you know to look. He didn’t take it off. Neither did Vaughan.

That’s the whole story, right there.

I didn’t have this. That’s worth saying plainly, not to generate sympathy, but because it’s true. What I’m building for Jansen and Vaughan is something I’m constructing forward, not passing back. A collection they didn’t know they had. A rule designed to protect them from ever receiving something secondhand. A first watch chosen with more thought than most people put into the last one they’ll ever buy.

I don’t know if they fully appreciated watches before Friday. Probably not the way I do. But I’d imagine one day they will. At some point in a life, everyone needs a good watch. And when that moment fully arrives for them, when they finally understand what they’re holding, they’ll already be holding something worthy of it.

The Norwegian Prima departs June 21st. Eight days. Caribbean ports. And somewhere on that ship, three Oceanevas on three wrists.

The Pro Divers were built for 1,250 meters of depth. We are not going to 1,250 meters. We’re going to Dunn’s River Falls in Ocho Rios, where the climb is wet and the water comes at you from above and you go up hand-in-hand with people you love and the whole thing is slightly ridiculous and completely right. The watches are rated for the deep end. What they’re actually getting is a Tuesday in Jamaica when everything is exactly as it should be.

That feels like a reasonable beginning.

This publication is a memoir told through objects. The objects are the door, not the subject. What I’ve been doing with this collection, the roadmap, the rules, the incremental decisions made one careful step at a time, isn’t really about watches. It’s about paying attention to the things that matter and not settling for less than they deserve. It’s about building with intention toward something you can’t fully see yet. It’s about resisting the disposable version of everything in favor of the thing built to last.

I want them to know that. Not from a speech, I kept it short before the ceremony, because the watches said most of it, but eventually, when they read this. That their father was paying attention. That the parallel collections exist. That the no-crossover rule was designed specifically so that when the time comes, everything in their hands is genuinely, completely theirs.

They walked across a stage Friday evening and started the rest of their lives.

They did it wearing something that was chosen for them before they had any idea what they were walking toward.

That was always the point.

— Jaime

Jaime is a affiliate with Oceaneva Watches. Oceaneva.com/Bezels use code Bezels for an addition 10% off.

C. Perry Snell said it himself: “I have never wanted to build just another building. I wanted to build something that would be a credit to the city and a joy to those who see it.”

He said that in 1926. The building opened in 1928. It is still standing at the corner of Central Avenue and 4th Street in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it is still the most interesting thing on that block.

I walked through it recently as part of a Florida Trust for Historic Preservation presentation — my team giving a walkthrough of a building most people pass without really seeing. I’ve been in a lot of buildings over the last twenty-four years. Snell Arcade is not most buildings.

The first thing you notice, if you’re paying attention, is the skin.

Terra-cotta glazed tile — not brick, not stucco, not the poured concrete that defines so much of Florida’s built environment. Actual terra-cotta, fired and glazed, brought in from somewhere that understood what permanence looks like. Pink Etowah marble from Georgia along the interior. Keystone along the exterior façade from the Florida Keys. A copper canopy, patinated now, shading the sidewalk the way it has since Coolidge was in the White House.

Twenty-five different tile designs inside the arcade alone — and here’s the detail that stopped me: Snell brought many of those tiles back from Europe himself, shipping crates of them across the Atlantic. They were mixed and matched without any preordained plan. No pattern, no grid, no system of repetition. Just the instinct of a man who had spent time in Spain and Italy and understood that beauty doesn’t always require a blueprint.

Every tile is original. Every tile has been there since 1928.

Snell was a pharmacist who became a developer — a chemist-turned-builder who spent decades reshaping the Pinellas Peninsula. He developed Snell Isle. He commissioned Richard Kiehnel, one of the most significant architects working in Florida in the first half of the twentieth century, to design something that would mean something.

What he got was a building that contains, as the historical record puts it, probably every architectural detail that Spanish architecture ever contained. Brackets supporting quadrafoiled arches. Ornate wrought iron. Moorish gothic windows. An ornate tower crowning the roofline. Seven imported statues of Venus on pedestals inside the arcade. Three skylights illuminating a barber shop, a shoe repair, a candy store.

The original plan called for two towers. The Depression stopped the second one from being built. But Snell had designed the foundation to carry both — which means the building standing today is incomplete by its own blueprint, and has been standing incomplete for nearly a century, and it is still the most interesting thing on that block.

There is something worth sitting with in that. The thing that wasn’t built is visible in the thing that was. Incompleteness as record. Ambition legible in the absence of what it couldn’t finish.

By 1933, the Depression had taken the building from him. Snell mortgaged it to fund Snell Isle, the real estate market collapsed, and the bank held it. He never got it back. He died in 1942, and in 1943 a local businessman named Hubert Rutland bought the building and began significant renovations.

Here is what matters about those renovations: Rutland closed off parts of the arcade. He added a mid-level floor. He made the changes his era required. And then, crucially, he stopped. No other significant changes were made during his ownership. The original historic features sat untouched because Rutland apparently understood — or at least intuited — that there are things you don’t improve upon. You maintain them. You protect them from the next wave of decisions.

The building remained in the Rutland family until 1980.

When it sold again, it went through an office conversion. Then, in 2003, twelve residential condominiums on the upper floors. The arcade was reopened. The building went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, which unlocked preservation easements, transfer of development rights, tax incentives — the full toolkit of mechanisms that make it financially rational to keep something alive rather than tear it down.

That toolkit exists because someone decided it should. Because the argument was made, persuasively enough, that a building like this is worth more intact than demolished. That the marble and the tile and the copper canopy and the twenty-five mismatched tile designs are a form of wealth that doesn’t appear on a standard balance sheet but is real nonetheless.

The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation exists to make that argument professionally, institutionally, year after year, building by building. It is, in its way, a collection of a particular kind.

I collect things. Watches, mostly — mechanical movements, things built to resist the disposable. Fountain pens. Vinyl records. Shoes with welts you can resoled a hundred times. The animating principle underneath all of it is the same: some things are built to last, and the ones that are deserve different treatment than the ones that aren’t.

The Snell Arcade was built to last. You can feel it in the materials — not in some romantic, metaphorical sense but literally, physically. Terra-cotta doesn’t crack the way cheaper cladding does. Marble doesn’t compress. Copper doesn’t rust; it transforms. The building is nearly a century old and the envelope restoration that happened in 2016 and 2017 was largely a matter of pointing joints, sealing caulk, repairing lintels. Not replacement. Maintenance. There’s a significant difference.

A watch movement from 1953 — the year Glycine introduced the Airman for Pan Am pilots — can be serviced today. The parts exist. The knowledge exists. The intention to build something that could be maintained rather than discarded was baked into the design from the beginning. The Snell Arcade is the architectural equivalent of that. Kiehnel didn’t design a building for its era. He designed a building for the next several eras, and trusted that each of them would find a use for it.

They have.

The rooftop terrace once housed Bob’s Spanish Village, an open-air night spot that became, during Prohibition, what the historical record charmingly describes as “the world’s worst speakeasy” — the sounds of the party bellowing into the streets with total disregard for the law. The basement was originally Bob’s Cafeteria, lit by a skylight ceiling set under the sidewalk above. An underground spring was breached during construction, flooding the excavation at 3 AM, and the original basement floor was poured two feet below the water table. A fact that has been creating ongoing moisture problems for a hundred years and has not, apparently, stopped anyone from using the basement.

Late in 2025, it was announced that the basement will become Medina 405 — a high-end social club with a wine cellar, a library, a billiard room, private dining, a golf simulator. Once rumored to be a bootlegger’s passage, now a members’ club. The building reinvents itself again without becoming anything other than what it is.

That’s the move. That’s always been the move. Not preservation in amber — not a museum piece behind velvet rope — but something living, adapting, absorbing each new era without surrendering the material fact of itself.

There is a quote attributed to Snell — “I have never wanted to build just another building” — that has been printed in enough historical documents that it’s become inseparable from the building itself. I don’t know exactly when he said it or to whom. But I believe it, because the building proves it.

You cannot build something like this by accident. The tile from Europe. The marble from Georgia. The keystone from the Keys. The foundation poured for two towers when the budget only covered one. The arcade stretching through the building to an open-air post office next door, creating a breezeway through the block in an era before air conditioning, when moving air was infrastructure.

Every one of those decisions was intentional. Every one of them is still visible a century later.

I walked out of that building thinking about the things I own that will still be here in a hundred years. The mechanical watches, maybe — the ones built from materials that don’t degrade, with movements designed to be serviced rather than replaced. The fountain pens. The records. The things I chose because they were built by someone who meant them.

Snell meant this building. You can tell.

———

The Snell Arcade stands at the corner of Central Avenue and 4th Street North in St. Petersburg, Florida. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982. The Florida Trust for Historic Preservation works to ensure buildings like this one have a future as certain as their past.

I have rules about how I acquire things. Research before purchase. Write about the last one before you buy the next. One intentional acquisition per month. I have spreadsheets. I have roadmaps. I have a watch acquisition plan that runs to 2053.

I did not plan to own seven knives.

That’s not how it happened. There was no store, no rabbit hole, no afternoon of deliberate research that ended in a collection. Two people handed me something I hadn’t asked for, in a room I had earned the right to be in, and somewhere between the first knife and the second, the instinct woke up and started making decisions I hadn’t approved yet.

That’s the only kind of beginning that produces a real collection. The ones you plan turn into inventories. The ones that find you turn into something else.

December 2024. The end of a twelve-year road to third-degree black belt.

Chief Master David and Chief Master Laura Kowkabany are 8th-degree black belts in the American Taekwondo Association — an organization where 9th degree is Grand Master and the 10th will never be awarded again. Both of them have been offered the path to 9th. Both of them declined. They have one school, in Tampa, every class taught by their own hands for forty years. That choice — the mat over the institution, every time — is the context for everything they give and everything they withhold.

The curriculum at KFMA includes periodic clinics in gun and knife defense — taught to senior students, embedded in the testing requirements on the path to advanced rank. These are not electives. They are part of what the school considers complete training. I tested on knife defense technique on my way to fourth degree. When the Chiefs give a knife, they are not stepping outside the discipline. They are handing something from inside it.

The gift that year was a Gerber Ultimate Fixed Blade. Four point eight inches of 7Cr17MoV high carbon stainless, textured rubber grip, a sheath engineered for situations where the knife is the last thing standing between you and a bad outcome — fire starter, whistle, diamond sharpener, all of it built in. It is a survival knife in the most literal sense. Not a display piece. Not a conversation starter. A tool designed to keep you alive when everything else has failed.

It was given privately. Both Chiefs. Three third-degrees. No audience beyond the people who had earned the right to be in the room.

I didn’t know then that it was the first of two.

December 2025. The SOG Sogfari Kukri.

Twelve inches of blade. Eighteen inches overall. A double-cut sawback spine, a spiked tang built for pounding through whatever the path throws at you, a ballistic nylon sheath that suggests the knife was designed for forward motion. The Gerber asks: can you survive where you are? The Kukri asks something different. It asks: can you move through?

Same room. Same people. Same private moment.

I don’t know if the Chiefs planned the progression. I’ve never asked. But two knives, two years, one sequence — year one: here is what you need to survive; year two: here is what you need to advance — is not a coincidence. That is a philosophy. It comes from two people who have been teaching philosophy on a mat in Tampa for forty years, whether they call it that or not.

The Gerber and the Kukri are the anchor pieces. The collection exists because of them. Everything since is in conversation with what they started.

Before I knew I was building a collection, I had two knives that turned out to belong to one.

The Mossy Oak Bowie came in 2017 — eight and a half inches of blade, full-tang construction, brass handguard and pins, a rosewood handle that has darkened the way rosewood darkens when it’s been held enough times. It’s the oldest piece. It predates the collection as a conscious project by seven years, which earns it a particular kind of status: not quite an anchor piece, not quite a collection piece. A legacy piece. The thing that was already there when the framework arrived to make sense of it.

The Unlimited Wares HK-1037S came the following year. Camo pattern, sawback spine, hammer pommel, weight-reduction cutouts that give it the look of a knife designed by someone who took the brief seriously. Five ounces. Ten and a half inches overall. 3Cr13 stainless — the honest entry-level steel, the steel that tells you what a blade can be before you understand what the better steels are doing differently.

Neither of them is where the collection lives now. But they were there first, and they stayed, and that counts for something. In any collection built around objects that endure, the things that simply refused to leave deserve their place at the table.

A collecting instinct, once it’s awake, develops opinions quickly.

The Smith & Wesson M&P Special Ops folder came in 2025 and went immediately into the pocket, where it has been every day since. Spring-assisted, recurve Tanto blade, Veff-style serrations, G10 handle with enough texture to hold when the hand is wet or cold or moving fast. Two point nine seven inches of 8Cr13MoV — the step up from 3Cr13, the steel that starts to teach you what edge retention actually means. It is not a display piece. It is the carry. The knife that goes everywhere, the one that answers the question every serious collection eventually has to answer: if you could only keep one, which one? Right now, for me, it’s this one.

The CIVIVI KwaiQ arrived in 2026 and announced itself immediately as something different. Damascus Tanto blade, inline flipper, two point nine seven inches of folded steel that is, honestly, as much art as it is knife. Damascus steel is not the most practical choice — it requires more attention, more care, more awareness of what you’re doing with it. But there is a reason Damascus has been made for centuries, and looking at that blade, the reason is obvious. It is the most visually distinctive piece in the collection. It earns its place by being exactly what it is and not pretending otherwise.

The Kizer Cabox 1048M1 is the argument for utility. D2 tool steel — hard, holds an edge at the cost of some corrosion resistance, the workhorse steel, the steel that doesn’t forgive inattention but rewards the collector who pays it. PVD coating, multicolored G10 handle, three point three six inches of blade in a compact fixed form built for scout carry. It is not romantic. It is excellent. Sometimes that’s the more important quality.

And then the Buck Knives 382 Trapper C, which is a conversation with a completely different tradition. Two blades — clip and spey — 420J2 steel, burlwood handle with nickel silver bolsters, six point one two five inches closed. A traditional American trapper pattern that has been made and carried and used and repaired for longer than most of the other steels in this collection have existed. The Buck doesn’t belong to the same world as the Gerber and the SOG. It belongs to an older world, one where a folding knife was a daily working tool that a man carried until it wore out and then replaced with the same pattern because the pattern was right. I added it because a collection that only speaks one language isn’t really a collection. It’s a preference list.

The collection lives on a green leather mat in my study — B&B embossed in the surface, the logo pressed into the leather the way anything worth keeping eventually earns its mark. The loupe is there. The strap tools. The bourbon glass in the corner of the frame. It is the same surface where watches get opened and evaluated and understood, and it turns out to be exactly the right surface for blades too. Some things belong together because they share a philosophy, not because they share a category.

The Gerber and the SOG are already there. The carry is in the pocket. The legacies have found their place.

The display is still an open question. The larger fixed blades want a different solution than a case — one that accounts for sheaths, for scale, for the difference between showing a knife and housing it correctly. I haven’t found the right answer yet. I’m not going to settle for the wrong one.

That’s not an admission of incompleteness. That’s the collection being honest about where it is. The Chiefs spent forty years not settling for the institutional path when they knew the mat was the right one. The least I can do is extend the same patience to the question of how to display what they gave me.

The anchor pieces are home. The philosophy is clear.

The rest will follow when it’s ready.

— Jaime

The paint is called Tropical Hideaway.

I want to be honest about that. I spent weeks debating the color — hunter green, sage, charcoal slate blue, deep teal. I consulted the room, the furniture, the sightlines, the coastal palette of the rest of the house. I thought carefully about what the room needed to be and how the color would serve that intention. I drove to Lowe’s, stood in front of the Valspar wall, and landed on a chip that was exactly right.

It’s called Tropical Hideaway.

I’ve made peace with that.

The room is a pass-through. That matters architecturally and it matters for the story. There are no doors to close, no way to seal it off from the rest of the house. It opens at both ends and has a window into the kitchen. Whatever goes on those walls has to live with everything visible from them — the seafoam kitchen, the sandy tan hallway, the dark sky blue accent wall in the dining room. The room can’t declare itself a separate world. It has to belong.

The rest of the house is coastal. Not kitschy beach house — something more considered than that, more deliberate. Blue and sandy tan. Seafoam. The palette of a Florida home that takes itself seriously without trying too hard. I’ve been building toward that aesthetic for years.

And in the middle of all of it, for longer than I’d like to admit, there was a red and brown recliner.

It was my mother’s chair. That’s the whole origin story. It arrived the way inherited things arrive — without ceremony, without a conversation, already occupying the space where something else might have gone. It lived in my living room for years. Red, in a house of blues and sandy tans and seafoam. I considered reupholstering it more than once. I never did. The chair was fine. It held a person in a seated position without complaint. It just wasn’t mine, and it didn’t belong to the house I was building.

In February I moved it to the study. A temporary measure while I figured out what I actually wanted in there. The study had been an unused room — broken inversion table, boxes of empty picture frames, the particular accumulation that happens when life moves fast and some things just land wherever they land and stay there. I’d been clearing it slowly, uncovering the built-in shelving that came with the house, building toward something I could feel but hadn’t fully named yet.

Mom’s recliner held the corner while I figured it out.

As chance would have it, my mother needed it back. She’d made an offhand comment about wanting somewhere to sit when my father has the television. The chair that never quite fit anywhere in my house turns out to be exactly what she needs in hers. It’s going home. That’s the right ending for it — not a replacement, not a disposal, just a thing returning to where it belongs so something else can finally take its place.

The replacement is a brown oil wax leather push-back recliner — the Red Barrel Studio Ikraam Chance, parawood frame, channel tufting, walnut arms. I knew where it was going before it arrived. That’s how the right things work. You don’t buy them and find a place for them. You know the place first.

It landed the way I expected. The walnut arms against the honey maple shelving. The dark brown leather in the corner with Tropical Hideaway behind it. The channel tufting — structured but not stiff, considered but not precious. I sat in it for the first time and looked at the room and thought: there it is. That’s the sentence, finished.

To the right, the turntable and vintage receiver and the records I’ve been accumulating for longer than this publication has existed. To the left, the side table with whatever I’m reading and whatever I’m drinking. On the wall beside the door, framed in black: three black belt certificates and the trophies and medals from various 2019 tournaments. The year I won the state title in sparring, forms, combat weapons. They are going to sit nicely next to the 2026 titles from this season. Biography on a wall. Across the room, the French doors to the pool, the bronze ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.

On the rug, unbothered by all of it: Scooby. He’d claimed that spot before the paint dried and hasn’t reconsidered since. Some decisions make themselves.

I want to say something about what it means to finally finish a room.

I collect mechanical watches because they are built to last and meant to be carried forward — serviced, not replaced. I collect vinyl because it resists the convenience of disappearing into a subscription. I collect fountain pens because choosing how to write is its own kind of statement. None of these things were accidents. All of them were decisions, made one at a time, building toward something I could feel before I could name it.

The room works the same way. The shelving was here when I bought the house in 2017, left behind by a woman I never met, a grandmother who moved into assisted living and left her built-ins for whoever came next. The books arrived over forty-something years. The records came slowly and then all at once. The memorabilia — the Emmitt Smith cards, the framed photographs, the baseball, the beer stein — all of it was already mine. It just needed somewhere to sit down.

The red recliner was the last thing I was still borrowing from someone else’s life. It’s gone now. Everything in the room is chosen.

The workbench wall came last. That’s where I open watches — green felt mat, loupe, strap tools, the particular quiet of a Saturday evening with nowhere to be and something worth paying attention to. The new mat arrived recently: green leather, larger than the old felt, the Bezels & Bourbon logo pressed into the surface along with the tagline. It fills the frame the way it’s supposed to. It looks like it was always going to be there.

The cigar humidor lives on that bench too. The room holds everything — watches, records, books, bourbon, cigars, forty-something years of a life that finally has the right place to put it all in the same room at the same time.

The knife display cases are still coming. Two wall-mounted boxes, walnut finish, glass fronts, black interior lining — going up on the fourth wall when they arrive. The Damascus blades will look the way they’re supposed to look behind glass, against Tropical Hideaway, in a room that finally knows what it is. That wall will finish itself when it’s ready.

Everything else is already in its place.

The paint is called Tropical Hideaway and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. The name is slightly absurd for a room I spent weeks designing with intention. It’s also, if I’m being honest, exactly right — a Florida man building a considered retreat inside a coastal house, landing on a color that bridges seafoam and deep water and warm wood grain and aged leather, and discovering that the name on the chip was Tropical Hideaway all along.

Some things just name themselves.

The room didn’t start anything. The Emmitt Smith rookie card was 1990. The books in the childhood cabinet go back further than I can clearly remember. The construction career that taught me what craft actually costs — twenty-four years of that. The taekwondo certificates on the wall represent twelve years and a third-degree black belt and a state championship and two instructors I’d follow anywhere.

The room is just where all of it finally had somewhere to sit down.

Scooby already knew that. He picked the spot before I finished painting.

-Jaime