BuyingTime Daily - December 31, 2025
Year-end wrap: 2026 predictions, indie alternatives, standout reviews, and year-in-watch picks—plus imminent Rolex & Tudor price hikes. Happy New Year!
Time Graphing today’s watch universe
As 2025 draws to a close, today’s edition of Buying Time feels appropriately reflective while still keeping one eye firmly on what’s coming next. The big theme running through the news is price pressure, with Rolex and Tudor set to introduce increases later this week that will ripple across the market just as collectors reset their expectations for 2026. Rising gold prices, inflation, and tariffs remain the unavoidable backdrop, and one forward-looking column makes the case that brands will be forced to balance higher retail pricing with tighter dealer margins, sharper retail strategies, and a growing reliance on certified pre-owned programs to maintain momentum.
That pre-owned shift was underscored by Bob’s Watches opening a luxury secondhand boutique at JFK, a telling signal that authenticated resale has become mainstream enough to live comfortably alongside duty-free perfume and boarding gates. At the same time, Watches of Switzerland CEO Brian Duffy’s interview showed how scale players are broadening their identity, pairing commercial growth with long-term philanthropy in ways that strengthen brand culture as much as public perception.
Collectors worried about Swiss New Year price hikes were also given an escape route, with renewed attention on independent makers from France, Britain, and beyond, where distinctive design and storytelling can still undercut traditional prestige pricing. Expert predictions for 2026 reinforced that sense of divergence, pointing to unconventional case shapes, overlooked vintage segments, and a heating-up pre-owned market for names like Patek Philippe, Rolex, and A. Lange & Söhne, where condition and originality will matter more than ever.
On the product front, heritage and innovation continued to share the stage. Bulova closed out its 150th anniversary with a documentary and commemorative releases that tied American watch history to modern relevance, while a deep dive into the Omega Speedmaster Alaska Project reminded readers how experimental tool watches can evolve into cult classics. Historical storytelling carried through with Ruth Belville’s remarkable business of timekeeping, a reminder that precision once depended as much on people as on technology.
Year-end lists rounded out the mood, recapping the most memorable watches of 2025, from bold all-black designs to standout calendar complications and emotionally resonant editor picks that balanced heritage with experimentation. New and recently reviewed watches kept the present tense alive, including refined independents like Laurent Ferrier, playful and culturally rooted releases from Swatch and Raketa, and serious tool-watch value from Synchron, alongside hands-on reviews of highly artistic creations from Stollenwurm and the closing chapter of the Vingt-8 era at Voutilainen.
Before we turn the page, a quick reminder that Rolex and Tudor price increases arrive imminently, making this final stretch of 2025 a meaningful one for anyone still on the fence. Most importantly, thank you for spending part of your year here. Wishing all of you a happy, healthy, and safe New Year. The next issue of Buying Time will land on Monday, January 5, 2026, and we’ll be ready to get right back into it. -Michael Wolf
News Time
CORDER’S COLUMN: My predictions for the watch industry in 2026
As the watch industry moves into 2026, brands are grappling with rising costs from gold prices, inflation, and new tariffs on Swiss imports, leading to broad price increases. Rolex and Tudor are already setting the tone, with Rolex implementing average hikes of around 7%, which puts pressure on competitors to follow suit while still protecting demand. To cushion the blow, brands are likely to adjust dealer margins and refine retail strategies, especially as Switzerland’s share of the global market continues to slip. At the same time, certified pre-owned programs and major store expansions are being used to reinforce brand value and reshape the luxury watch landscape.
Bob’s Watches Is Opening a New Luxury Pre-Owned Watch Boutique at JFK
Bob’s Watches is opening a luxury pre-owned watch boutique in New York’s JFK Airport on December 19, marking the first time a dedicated second-hand luxury watch retailer has entered a major international airport. Travelers will be able to buy authenticated pre-owned pieces from marquee brands like Rolex, with a curated selection focused on popular, current styles in top condition. The boutique targets both last-minute gift buyers and enthusiasts who value convenience and confidence in authenticity. Despite tariff headwinds on Swiss imports, demand for pre-owned watches has remained strong, with values of many Rolex models climbing sharply over the past fifteen years.
THE BIG INTERVIEW: Watches of Switzerland CEO Brian Duffy
Brian Duffy details how Watches of Switzerland has formalized its charitable efforts by establishing the Watches of Switzerland Group Foundation, designed to support long-term initiatives in youth, education, and disadvantaged communities. With £8.5 million raised, the Foundation emphasizes measurable impact, tracking how funds directly improve opportunities and outcomes for young people facing economic and social barriers. Duffy also underscores the importance of employee engagement, noting that colleagues’ involvement in fundraising and advocacy amplifies both reach and effectiveness. He encourages other businesses to align philanthropy with their core values so that giving becomes a genuine source of organizational pride and positive change.
These alternative indies could help you beat Swiss watchmaker’s new year price rises
Rising prices from Swiss watchmakers, driven by tariffs and inflation, are pushing more enthusiasts toward independent brands from France and other regions. These independents offer distinctive designs and personal storytelling that often feel more individual than traditional Swiss prestige pieces. Organizations like the Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers and Francéclat are helping elevate these brands by showcasing them alongside established maisons at major industry events. Standouts include 1977 and Pequignet with their locally rooted, in-house movements, B.R.M Chronographes and Hegid with motorsport and modular concepts, and names like Beaubleu, Yema, Trilobe, March LA.B, and Alexander Shorokhoff that foreground craftsmanship, creative displays of time, and limited production.
Feature Time
Oracle Time: Watch-World Predictions for 2026, According to 5 Experts
Experts foresee 2026 as a year where design-led watches and unconventional case shapes move into the spotlight, with vintage pieces—especially ladies’ watches from the 1970s and 1980s—remaining an underexplored opportunity. The pre-owned market for A. Lange & Söhne is expected to heat up, particularly for rare early models, while top-tier brands like Patek Philippe and Rolex stay highly selective amid rising gold prices. Independent makers may see shifts in ownership as financial pressures mount, which could either spur innovation or dilute brand character depending on who invests. Collectors are urged to focus on condition and originality, especially with vintage Rolex, as price gaps widen between truly exceptional pieces and the rest.
Bulova wraps up 150th anniversary in typical innovative style.
To celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2025, Bulova released a one-hour documentary, America Telling Time: 150 Years of Bulova, tracing the brand’s legacy and its influence on American life. The ten-part film covers milestones such as Bulova’s early ladies’ collections, its advocacy for equal pay, and groundbreaking marketing moves like the first-ever radio and television watch ads. It also highlights Bulova’s deep ties to music, including its sponsorship of Frank Sinatra’s TV show, and shows how the brand balances Japanese manufacturing with its American identity. Alongside the documentary, Bulova launched commemorative watches that reinforce its dual commitment to innovation and heritage as it looks toward the future.
A Close Look At The Omega Speedmaster Alaska Project — An Apex Predator Among Space-Dwelling Chronographs
The Omega Speedmaster Alaska Project grew out of the original Speedmaster’s success during the early space missions, prompting Omega to engineer a more specialized tool for extreme conditions. The Alaska I prototype introduced a titanium case and removable thermal housing to withstand the brutal temperature swings of space, and its successor, Alaska II, later found its way onto the wrists of Soviet cosmonauts. Though these early versions never entered full production, a civilian Alaska Project Speedmaster launched in 2008, preserving key design elements like the white dial, red accents, and thermal shield. The result is a technically intriguing, historically rich Speedmaster variant that has become a cult favorite among space-watch enthusiasts and collectors.
Ruth Belville And The Business Of Time
Ruth Belville carried on a remarkable family tradition in London, personally delivering precise time to clients from the late 19th century until 1940. Armed with the Arnold chronometer, she walked daily to institutions such as banks and rail offices, offering a tangible, human alternative to telegraph time signals and, later, broadcast time. Even as new technologies made her service seem increasingly anachronistic, she continued her rounds through wars and rapid modernization, maintaining a loyal clientele that valued her reliability and character. After her retirement at age eighty-five, the Arnold chronometer passed to the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, preserving the story of a life spent literally keeping society on time.
9 of the Best Accessible Guilloché Dial Watches to Buy Now
Advances in CNC machining have made guilloché dials—once the preserve of elite artisans—far more attainable, allowing brands to produce intricate patterns at prices under £3,000. This selection spotlights nine standout pieces, such as the Minim MN01 Laan4 with its refined, patterned dial, the Heinrich Radiance with bold spiraling motifs, and the Etien T04 Aqua with a Flinqué enamel surface that plays beautifully with the light. Other highlights include the Selten M1 Moonphase’s shimmering mother-of-pearl and the visually striking Jianghun Classic Guilloché, both pairing aesthetics with practical specs like solid movements and water resistance. Together, they show how collectors and casual wearers alike can now enjoy the elegance and craft of guilloché without stepping into six-figure territory.
Blast from the Past: Spotlight on Carlo Ferrara Regulatore Sport
Carlo Ferrara’s ‘Regulatore’ watches reimagined the classic regulator layout by dividing the dial into two segments for clearer, more intuitive time reading. At the heart of the design is a clever D-shaped gear that alters the underlying movement, allowing the hands to trace a distinctive and engaging path. The Regulatore Sport adds a stainless-steel bracelet and a sportier stance while preserving the refined Italian design language and strong wrist presence. Though the brand is no longer active, these watches remain appealing to collectors thanks to their robust ETA 2892-A2 movement, excellent build quality, and unique blend of mechanical creativity and everyday usability.
Recapping Time (2025)
The Time+Tide Team picks their favourite watches of 2025
The Time+Tide team looks back at a packed 2025, spotlighting a wide range of standout releases from major fairs and launches throughout the year. Each contributor selects a personal favorite, from the Zenith G.F.J. Calibre 135 with its historically rich movement and artistic dial to the avant-garde Breguet Expérimentale 1 with its cutting-edge magnetic escapement. Other highlights include the glamorous Furlan Marri Disco Volante Diamonds Onyx and the bold Tudor Black Bay “Carbon 25,” each illustrating a different facet of modern watchmaking. Together, these picks show how 2025 balanced heritage, experimentation, and fresh design language across the industry.
Shades of Darkness: The 6 Best All-Black Watches of 2025
All-black watches took center stage in 2025, with top brands embracing stealthy aesthetics paired with serious technical credentials. The lineup includes pieces like IWC’s Ingenieur Automatic 42 Ceramic, which combines a robust ceramic case with long power reserve, and TAG Heuer’s Monaco Flyback Chronograph TH-Carbonspring, which leans into motorsport-inspired design and advanced materials. F.P. Journe’s Chronomètre Furtif offers discreet high horology in a low-key package, while Longines, Hublot, and A. Lange & Söhne each put their own spin on the monochrome theme. Across these six references, blacked-out styling becomes a canvas for innovation rather than just a fashion statement.
Recap: The Best Calendar Watches of 2025
This recap surveys the most impressive calendar watches of 2025, from ultra-complicated perpetuals to inventive new takes on date displays. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar 7138 stands out with a slim case and user-friendly interface, while the Berneron Quantième Annuel draws attention with a distinctive double regulator layout and rich finishing. Chopard’s L.U.C Lunar One and Krayon’s Anyday showcase poetic moon phases and original mechanical solutions for calendar information, and Frederique Constant delivers an accessible perpetual calendar for buyers seeking value without sacrificing refinement. Roger Dubuis’s Hommage La Placide rounds out the list with high-end complication work and strong visual identity, underlining how diverse and creative the calendar segment has become.
Editors’ Picks: Most Memorable Watch of 2025
The WatchTime editorial team reflects on the watches that left the deepest impression in 2025, weaving personal perspectives into a broader look at the year’s standouts. Picks range from a lightweight titanium Cartier Santos and the TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Fragment to a women-focused Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Automatique and the characterful Angelus Chronographe Télémètre. The handmade Urban Jürgensen UJ-2 symbolizes a fresh chapter for the brand, embodying artisanal watchmaking at a high level. Across all these choices, the editors emphasize not only technical and design merit but also the emotional resonance that keeps certain watches at the forefront of conversation.
The Latest Time
Laurent Ferrier
A Skyline Worth Waiting For – the Laurent Ferrier Classic Auto Horizon
The Laurent Ferrier Classic Auto Horizon blends elegant design with real-world practicality, including a discreet date function and small seconds display. Its light blue galvanic lacquered dial plays beautifully with the light, while the stainless-steel case takes inspiration from 19th-century pocket watches, making it suitable for both dressy and casual settings. Inside, the Calibre LF270.01 uses a platinum micro rotor to deliver efficient winding and a 72-hour power reserve, all visible through a sapphire caseback. Priced at approximately CHF 45,000 (about $35,900), it showcases the refinement and independence of Laurent Ferrier’s watchmaking.
Raketa
Raketa’s Latest Wristwatch is Key-Wound and Wood
Raketa’s Golden Key is a limited edition wristwatch inspired by a 1930s Russian fairytale and crafted from walnut wood. It offers both a key-winding system and a conventional crown, echoing historical wooden clocks while channeling a 1970s aesthetic with baton hands and oblong hour markers. The watch uses a Soviet-era cal. 2609 movement, prioritizing charm and reliability over haute complications, and is sized at a compact 38.8 mm in diameter and 10.88 mm in height. Limited to 300 pieces and priced at €2,900 (about $3,400), it delivers a distinctive mix of nostalgia, design, and collectability.
Swatch
Swatch Year of the Horse
“Year of the Horse Riding the Clouds” is a special Swatch collaboration with Chinese artist Yu Wenjie, celebrating the Year of the Fire Horse. Priced at SGD 137, the watch features two dynamic horses in mid-flight, rendered with fiery accents and a backdrop inspired by traditional Chinese scroll paintings to evoke resilience, independence, and good fortune. The release underscores Swatch’s long-running commitment to art partnerships, connecting watch design with contemporary cultural themes. It also ties into broader initiatives like the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, which has hosted hundreds of artists and fostered cross-cultural creativity.
Synchron
The New Synchron Ti300M SEALAB Is Testing My Willpower
The Synchron SEALAB Ti300M is a Grade 5 titanium professional dive watch rated to 300 meters, aimed squarely at the serious tool-watch segment. At 41 mm in diameter and just 11.9 mm thick, it offers a wearable profile, aided by a screw-down crown, anti-reflective sapphire crystal, and X1 Super-LumiNova for legibility in low light. Inside, the Swiss La Joux‑Perret G100 movement provides a 60-hour power reserve, making it robust enough for everyday wear as well as diving. Priced at $990 on pre-order and $1,390 MSRP, it delivers strong value for a Swiss-made titanium diver with modern specs and strap options that reinforce its functional character.
Wearing Time - Reviews
Stollenwurm
Stollenwurm Series 2 Hands-On: Limited-Edition Watches With Enamel Tarot Card Faces
Stollenwurm is a mythology-inspired luxury brand founded by Edward Tourtellotte, and its Series 2 collection features enamel-dial watches depicting the Major Arcana of Tarot cards. Each reference is limited to just five pieces and powered by a bespoke automatic movement developed with Swiss Telos, using high-end materials such as titanium, platinum, and tungsten. The dials, created by artist Hannah Perry Saucier, employ intricate enameling techniques that recall medieval art and give each watch a deeply symbolic, narrative quality. With 110 watches in total across the collection, a classic round case, 50 meters of water resistance, and both bracelet and calfskin strap options, Stollenwurm aims squarely at collectors who value heavily detailed craftsmanship and meaning-laden design.
Voutilainen
The Last Vingt-8 And The First Of Something New With The Voutilainen 28MPR Moonphase And KV21 Tonneau
The Voutilainen 28MPR Moonphase serves as a farewell to the long-running Vingt-8 movement platform while showcasing a compact, richly detailed design with a blue Grand Feu enamel moonphase disc and guilloché dial. Measuring 37.5 mm by 12.6 mm, it emphasizes wearability as well as visual depth, with a movement crafted from German silver and solid 18k gold and a moonphase corrector neatly integrated into the crown. At the same time, the new KV21 Tonneau introduces a movement built to support more dial-side complications without a big increase in thickness, housed in a 39.5 mm by 35 mm tonneau case that preserves excellent legibility. Limited to 40 pieces in steel, titanium, and gold, and priced between CHF 134,000 and CHF 142,000, the KV21 signals a new chapter for Voutilainen that honors its past while expanding its technical and design ambitions.
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Talking Time
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BuyingTime at Auction
A few select current auctions that caught our eye on Grailzee and Bezel
[Tuesday’s auction watch, the 2021 H. Moser & Cie Streamliner Flyback Chronograph 42.3MM Blue “Fumé” Dial Steel Bracelet (6902-1201)- was bid to $18,500 but did not meet its reserve. - make an offer]
2024 Roger Dubuis Excalibur Monobalancier 42MM Skeleton Dial Leather Strap (RDDBEX0953)
Auction Report Title: Roger Dubuis Excalibur Monobalancier RDDBEX0953 — Pink Gold Skeleton Drama, With a Deadline
If your New Year’s resolution is “own something wildly unnecessary and mechanically gorgeous,” the Roger DubuisExcalibur Monobalancier (RDDBEX0953) is basically here to help. Your auction ends Thursday, January 1, 2026 at 10:32pm (yes, New Year’s Day—because subtlety is overrated), and the seller says the watch is in very good condition with the box, extras, and papers included.
On paper, this reference is a 42mm Excalibur Monobalancier in pink/rose gold with the brand’s signature openworked attitude: sharp case geometry, a fluted Excalibur-style bezel, and a skeletonized display designed to make “time-telling” feel like a secondary feature. Roger Dubuis positions the Excalibur skeleton calibres as Geneva-built haute horology, and explicitly ties the collection to the Poinçon de Genève (Geneva Seal) standard—meaning the finishing is meant to be a headline feature, not an afterthought.
Under the hood, this model is powered by the RD720SQ automatic skeleton calibre with a quoted 72-hour power reserve and a 4Hz (28,800 vph) beat rate, with the brand describing performance upgrades like escapement optimization and other tweaks aimed at precision and durability. The practical upside is that you can rotate this with other watches for a couple of days and not come back to a dead stop; the emotional upside is that it looks like a tiny, angular city of gears living under sapphire.
Now, about value—because romance is great, but invoices are real. Secondary-market asking prices for RDDBEX0953 listings commonly sit in the mid–$50Ks to upper–$60Ks range depending on completeness, condition, and seller optimism. For example, Chrono24 has shown listings around $55K–$67K for this reference, and there’s been a prominent U.S. listing at $58,495. On the retail side, at least one dealer listing cites a retail price of €85,810 (which tracks with the general “this is not meant to be reasonable” tier this watch lives in).
A quick note on the bezel: the seller describes a diamond-set bezel. Roger Dubuis’s own reference page for RDDBEX0953 emphasizes the Excalibur’s fluted bezel design language, so if diamonds are present, it’s worth confirming whether it’s an original factory configuration, a boutique/special variant, or an aftermarket addition—because that detail can meaningfully affect both collectability and resale liquidity later.
So what’s the play going into the Thursday night finish line? If the watch is truly complete (box, papers, extras), unpolished or lightly handled, and the bezel/dial configuration checks out as original for what’s being offered, you’re looking at a modern Roger Dubuis that delivers maximum wrist presence per square millimeter. It’s bold, architectural, and proudly uninterested in blending in—exactly what a skeletonized Excalibur should be. If bidding stays near the high-$50Ks/low-$60Ks territory, that’s broadly in line with visible market asks; if it runs materially above that, you’ll want the condition and originality story to be airtight to justify paying “retail-adjacent” money for a piece that’s often shopped pre-owned.
However if it lands, it’s a fitting way to start 2026: a Geneva-Seal flex, a 72-hour reserve, and enough skeletonized angles to make your other watches look like they’re wearing business casual.
Current bid: $12,026