A new (to me) brand - Speake-Marin
This week I attended a dinner with the COO of Speake-Marin.
This is a Swiss brand celebrating 20 years in operation, re-launching in the US now. Evidently this brand makes a number of movements for other makers and had a small in-house shop making one-off customized watches for some years, but recently has decided to make a new series of limited runs of several of their lines. Their site does a good job on their history https://www.speake-marin.com/. They note they make basically everything except for their watch crystals in-house, and all of their movements are their own design and concepts.
They are very well finished watches. Two caught my eye. One was their dual time zone. A mark of their brand is a small seconds dial at 1:30, evidently a unique spot as it causes the entire movement architecture to be different. It’s also partially skeletonized and has a cool retrograde date function. The case and lugs are called the “Piccadilly” design, which is historic for the brand, but does cause the watch to sit high for its size. It comes in 38 and 42mm, but with the case shape, the 38 is the star.
It comes in a number of bold color ways - here’s a green one (sorry for the plastic wrapped shot!)
The other one I liked more than I expected was the Ripple, their integrated bracelet steel. This one is very hard to capture in a photo as the sculpted ripples in the dial play very nicely in the light. This wears very well on the wrist. It is a 40mm.
So, new to me and thought you all might like to get to know this brand. According to the Christian, the presenter, this brand will only be available through select ADs. In my area (mid-Atlantic US) that will be Little Treasury https://littletreasury.com/.
BTW one of their designs was purchased by Kevin O’Leary and worn on Shark Tank (on a red band, of course) but I won’t hold that against them!
Always interested in variety, but must be useful
Thanks for sharing, I will have to looking into it more.
The ripple dial caught my eye. If I had anywhere near the money, definitely would buy before a royal oak. Cool brand. Thanks for introducing it to me.
Big fan. Have followed them for a while and some of the designs under founder Peter Speake-Marin are aesthetic jewels.