So how is that New Year’s resolution going? Ours lasted about as long as a well-regulated automatic movement power reserve. Minus the reserve. But we are still committed, dear readers, to continue our journey into the more accessible world of horology, with the occasional dip into watches that fit more into our ‘grail’ category.
So on with it! The first NFTGMT of 2026.
Image: Heron Watches
GMTs are travel watches, and this GMT is for travellers whose destinations are bars that are as famous as the city in which they reside. So if you’re drinking slings at the Long Bar in Singapore, a Bellini at Harry’s in Venice, or a daiquiri in Cuba’s El Floridita, this, is your watch. From Montreal-based Héron Watches, the Cigar Club GMT runs on a Miyota 9039 and is a shade less than 38 mm so you can wear it with a smoking jacket. Passport not included.
Image: Ocean to Orbit
Then again, for others (not us) travel means climbing something: a wall, a mountain, a rock. This watch, recently released by Melbourne’s Ocean to Orbit, actually has climbed K2 (in prototype), the second highest mountain in the world. O2O took inspiration from classic Omega, Rolex and Smith adventure watches, but managed to make something that looks like nothing else. Available in March, this limited edition won’t last long.
Image: G-Shock
Speaking of looking like nothing else, the G-Shock Maison Kitsune collaboration (collab, for the young folk) hit stores in December. Maison Kitsune (Kitsune is ‘fox’ in Japanese) is a 21st century fashion label. They make clothes and accessories, of course, but also a music label and a café too. This G-Shock stays true to G-Shock: tough, reliable watches you could, well, take up a mountain if you wanted to. All dressed up with a bit of Parisian couture.
Watch500 A-Z | H is for HZ Watches
Images: HZ Watches
What is it? HZ is an Australian-based microbrand founded by Matt Zillman in 2023. Matt, like a lot of us who have too many watches, wanted a ‘grab-and-go’ quartz watch that looked good too. His first model, the HZ.01, sold out soon after it launched. Since then HZ has added the .02 and .03 to the stable.
So what is the vibe? The vibe, you ask? It’s quartz of course. Specifically, quartz vibrates at a frequency of 32,768 vibrations per second. 32,768 Hz, in the standard language of science stuff. HZ stands for Herz, as in Heinrich Rudolph Hertz, who discovered electromagnetic waves way back in the day.
Anywho, HZ watches are all quartz-powered, which means two things. They are always ready-to-wear (no setting, more or less), and they are super accurate. HZ uses both Swiss Ronda and Seiko movements, both of which tick the accuracy box.
So what does £500 get you? The whole lot. The HZ.01 ‘Everyday’ is the GADA and kicks an Art Deco vibe, the HZ.02 is a classic chronograph, and the HZ.03 “Blue Marble”, is a titanium-cased watch where the seconds are tracked by a tiny Earth. HZ pulls off something that we don’t think that many micros do. They make unique, affordable, high-quality watches, that, since they are quartz, are pret-a-porter, for those who parlez-vous.
Watch500 Explainer | The Quartz Crisis
What was the quartz crisis? For most of the 20th century, Switzerland was the global watch industry, turning out around 95 percent of the world’s mechanical watches and employing some 90,000 people. That blew up in 1969 when Seiko launched the Quartz Astron, a battery-powered, quartz-regulated watch that kept time far more precisely than most mechanical pieces. Over the next decade, inexpensive quartz watches from Japan (and to a lesser degree, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China) swamped the market. Swiss exports halved, and two‑thirds of Swiss watch jobs disappeared. If you ever wondered if the ‘crisis’ in ‘quartz crisis’ was hyperbole, it wasn’t.
So, this was all because of one Seiko watch? Well, not just the watch. The Astron was the starting gun, but the real issue was Seiko’s industrial machine: a vertically integrated company that controlled everything from movements to cases and could mass‑produce quartz watches at scale. At the same time, this was really a two‑front war: on one side analogue quartz from Seiko and friends, on the other the new digital craze kicked off by Hamilton’s Pulsar in 1972, and quickly joined by Casio and a stampede of electronics firms: National Semiconductor, Fairchild (the original Silicon Valley tech firm), Intel (for real), Hewlett‑Packard (also for real), Texas Instruments (also for real) and others, all cranking out LED and then LCD watches.
Switzerland had no answer, until a group of Swiss banks brought Lebanese businessman Nicolas Hayek to sort out the mess. Hayek’s solution became the Swatch Group.
You say you want a revolution: the original Astron.
Image: Deutsches-uhrenmuseum
Sorry, Swatch? That Swatch? Yup. Before the crisis, the Swiss industry was a maze of small, independent family-owned firms that worked fine when you were the only game in town. But that highly decentralised industry was not nearly efficient enough to compete with Japanese manufacturers. Hayek brought together two loosely affiliated organisations: ASUAG (Longines, Rado, plus movement giant Ebauches) and SSIH (Omega, Tissot, etc.) and merged them into SMH – the Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking. Notice the prominence of ‘microelectronics’ in the name. It’s not a coincidence.
Inside the new structure, all the scattered movement and component firms were consolidated into ETA, which became the industrial heart of the group. Brands that once designed and assembled their own movements, like Omega and Longines, now drew from a common ETA catalogue, with standardised calibres and shared parts to cut costs and simplify production. ETA also absorbed or acquired other small manufacturers, gradually building a vertically integrated supply chain that could support not just SMH brands but much of the wider Swiss industry.
Once Swatch Group showed that scale plus branding worked, consolidation spread across the rest of the industry. Richemont absorbed Cartier, Piaget, Vacheron Constantin, IWC, Jaeger‑LeCoultre, Panerai and A. Lange & Söhne into their orbit. LVMH pulled Zenith, TAG Heuer, Hublot and Bulgari into its own portfolio.
Crisis averted. At least until the Smart Watch came along.
This Week in Grails: The Jaeger LeCoultre Polaris Geographic
Image: Jaeger LeCoultre
At a not unreasonable price of 18K for high holorogy, this JLC world timer has a dial that features “a double gradation from darkest to lightest, the ocean-grey dial exudes depth, enhanced by a triple finish of opaline, grainy and sunrayed.” Do we know what that means? We do not. But it looks great, it’s a JLC and we love world timers. Hence, the Polaris wears the grail crown this week.
Watch500 publishes two newsletters: the News from the GMT, covering watch news and industry insights, while The Five brings you themed watch picks. Get the best of the $500 watch world - new releases, brand discoveries, industry insights, and the stories behind timepieces that are eminently affordable, framed around poor cultural references.
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