First Production
On orange dials, Florida founders, and the watch that started it all.
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.