Iron Annie Bauhaus 5046-1 Review

I saw several Iron Annie watches while in Paris and Vienna, and I'm afraid this one followed me home. It's a 2019 "100 Years of Bauhaus" model, so not currently made but still available for around $200.

For those not familiar with Iron Annie, it is, like Zeppelin, owned by the German POINTtec company, which used to produce watches under the Junkers brand (Junkers has now split off).

It's a quartz that uses the hacking ETA F06.111 movement, so a simple 3 hander with date. The seconds hand ticks (it's not a mecha-quartz) but it hits all the markers very well.

Nicely domed mineral glass with lovely distortions:

Really scratches the itch I had for the Junghans Max Bill Automatic (at about 1/5th the price).

Water resistance is 50m, so very good for a dressy watch. Weight is apparently 35g for the head itself - I don't have a scale to measure with the strap. But it's light.

40mm diameter, 8mm height, 316L case, the lume is pretty good. Not Seiko diver good, but better than any of my Paganis certainly.

5 year warranty, +/-15seconds a month listed, seems to be performing much better than that.

20mm lug to lug, though I'm not tempted to change the strap on this.

The strap when it arrived was a much paler almost orange tan. I put some leather conditioner on it and it darkened a bit:

I still didn't love it so I applied some leather oil, which made it look like this:

I love that.

Out of the box the strap was very soft and supple though - really nice quality leather.

Speaking of leather strap quality, let me take this time to praise both the $200 Iron Annie and the $300 Zeppelin for both coming with attractive comfortable high quality straps, unlike the stiff plasticy looks-like-a-cheap-running-shoe leather strap that came with my $500 Hamilton Khaki Automatic:

More on that when I do the Hamilton review, though I have a B&R strap on the way for that one. But seriously, Hamilton needs to include a better strap - Iron Annie and Zeppelin know a good supplier apparently.

I've had this watch a few weeks now, and it's been very accurate, extremely comfortable, and the leather strap shows no signs of weakening or damage.

For its intended purpose, which is a dress watch that still looks good with jeans and a t-shirt, IMO this kills the omnipresent Orient Bambino, let alone the likes of Daniel Wellington, etc.

Iron Annie makes automatics too, but I quite like the quartz movement on this. As it's not an every day wear for me (I do take that lovely domed acrylic into consideration, not to mention the 50m WR), I like not having to reset it and wind it up if it's been in the box a few days.

Note that all my review "stars" below are weighing the watch in its price category. So going up against Seikos, Orients, etc, not against a Cartier or JLC.