Latest / What's on Your Riste? A Watch Podcast / S01E15: American Watchmaking - The Industry That Died and Is Being Rebuilt (Vortic, Cincinnati Watch Co., Weiss, RGM, J.N. Shapiro)

Transcript

S01E15: American Watchmaking - The Industry That Died and Is Being Rebuilt (Vortic, Cincinnati Watch Co., Weiss, RGM, J.N. Shapiro) · What's on Your Riste? A Watch Podcast

• 0:00
  There's a town called Waltham, MA.
• 0:03
  Population today about 6000 people, mostly a Boston suburb,
• 0:07
  a few good restaurants, a commuter rail stop, nothing
• 0:10
  particularly distinctive. In 1854, Waltham was the most
• 0:15
  important watch manufacturing town in the world.
• 0:19
  The Waltham Watch Company, founded just in that same year,
• 0:23
  invented the American system of watch production.
• 0:26
  So before Waltham watches were made one at a time by a single
• 0:30
  Craftsman from start to finish, after Waltham watches were made
• 0:35
  with interchangeable parts on machines by specialized workers
• 0:38
  who each performed one step of the process.
• 0:41
  That idea, interchangeable parts, precision manufacturing,
• 0:46
  repeatable quality at scale, was the American gift to the
• 0:50
  mechanical world. It came from a watch factory in
• 0:54
  Massachusetts. Before it ever reached the
• 0:57
  automobile industry or the electronics industry.
• 1:00
  It lived in the watch industry, and you've probably heard this
• 1:04
  before. You've heard of the industrial
• 1:06
  age, right? For about 100 years, America
• 1:10
  dominated watchmaking. Waltham, Elgin.
• 1:13
  Hamilton, IL Gruen, Howard. The United States made over 100
• 1:19
  million pocket watches between 1850 and 1950.
• 1:24
  America had factories the size of city blocks and Americans
• 1:28
  exported to the entire world. Americans invented the railroad
• 1:33
  grade standard of accuracy, the degree of precision a watch
• 1:39
  needed to achieve to be trusted for coordinating train
• 1:43
  schedules. Because if your watch was wrong
• 1:45
  and the trains ran wrong, people died.
• 1:49
  And those of you that have a ball watch, for example, you
• 1:53
  know what I'm talking about. And then across the second-half
• 1:58
  of the 20th century, it all died.
• 2:01
  So today we're going to talk about what happened and about
• 2:04
  what a small number of people are quietly doing to rebuild it.
• 2:09
  Let's get into it. Welcome back to What's on Your
• 2:34
  Rest Day. I'm watch Offski.
• 2:36
  The last episode. We reset the tone with tool
• 2:39
  watches, the beaters, the unkillables, the watches you
• 2:43
  wear when you are actually living rather than thinking
• 2:47
  about what you're wearing this week, we turn the lens somewhere
• 2:51
  we haven't been on this show. America, this is a decently long
• 2:56
  episode with lots of ground to cover, so let's get moving.
• 2:59
  History first, then the reckoning, then the people doing
• 3:03
  the rebuilding. So segment one, we're going to
• 3:06
  call this The Rise. America as the world's
• 3:09
  watchmaker. Let me give you the shape of the
• 3:12
  story before we get into the specific brands.
• 3:14
  American watchmaking reached its apex in like the late 1800s and
• 3:18
  early 1900s. You had two or three dozen
• 3:21
  companies producing pocket watches at enormous scale,
• 3:25
  factories that were kind of these engineering marvels of
• 3:29
  their time. The American approach were
• 3:30
  machines, precision, interchangeable parts, the
• 3:34
  division of Labor. It was so efficient that the
• 3:36
  Swiss actually came to America to study how we were doing this
• 3:40
  American watchmakers went to glass suits, for example, in
• 3:43
  Germany to teach the German American the the German
• 3:46
  Americans these to teach these Germans American production
• 3:50
  methods. Now when we get into the next
• 3:54
  part, American precision manufacturing and the specific
• 3:57
  philosophy across all of the Atlantic and European
• 4:01
  manufacturers was fascinating. They were looking to see how we
• 4:05
  did our infrastructure. And so the student was teaching
• 4:10
  the teacher. Then across the 20th century,
• 4:13
  for example, a series of forces hollowed out the entire
• 4:17
  industry. Wristwatches replaced pocket
• 4:19
  watches after World War One, and the American companies were
• 4:23
  slower to adapt. Swiss made wristwatches.
• 4:26
  Those movements were often cheaper, and when American
• 4:30
  manufacturers tried to compete on price, they found themselves
• 4:33
  in a race that they couldn't win.
• 4:35
  Hamilton, perhaps the most beloved American watch brand, a
• 4:38
  supplier to the US military for generations.
• 4:41
  They had to close their Pennsylvania manufacturing
• 4:43
  operation in 1969, and Waltham had already collapsed.
• 4:47
  And Elgin, they were already gone.
• 4:48
  Gruen, the Cincinnati based company that had made
• 4:51
  beautifully sophisticated watches from 1870 all the way
• 4:55
  through the 1950s, and their remarkable building called Time
• 4:59
  Hill. It folded in 1958, and then in
• 5:03
  1969, Hamilton's factory in Lancaster, PA, shut its doors.
• 5:08
  The last movement manufacturer in the United States, Hamilton's
• 5:12
  caliber 992 B rolled off the line and for the next 38 years,
• 5:18
  nearly 4 decades, not a single mechanical watch movement was
• 5:22
  made on American soil. That's the collapse.
• 5:25
  Now let's talk about the reckoning segment 2.
• 5:28
  I'm going to call the reckoning what you know and and quotations
• 5:32
  made in USA actually means. So by the 2000 and 10's, the
• 5:37
  phrase Made in USA had become one of the most powerful
• 5:41
  marketing tools in the American watch market.
• 5:45
  Brands were using it aggressively because American
• 5:47
  customers increasingly wanted to know that they were buying and
• 5:51
  supporting domestic manufacturing.
• 5:54
  That desire, again, is legitimate.
• 5:55
  So so was the skepticism about whether brands claiming it were
• 6:00
  being honest. And so in 2015, a man named
• 6:03
  Nicholas, I believe his last name is pronounced Menous
• 6:07
  Menousos. MANOUSOS.
• 6:10
  He was the vice president of the Holological Society of New York.
• 6:13
  And he wrote an article for Houdini titled Smoke and Mirrors
• 6:16
  in the American Watch Industry. And the article raised serious
• 6:20
  questions about whether brands marketing themselves as Made in
• 6:23
  USA were being fully honest. You know, he's asking questions
• 6:27
  like, were they making, you know, were they making watches
• 6:30
  in America? Were they assembling these
• 6:33
  watches in America but with foreign parts?
• 6:35
  Were they doing something in between and calling it something
• 6:38
  that it possibly wasn't? And so this article actually
• 6:41
  triggered an investigation by the FTC, the Federal Trade
• 6:44
  Commission. And the FTC standard for made in
• 6:48
  the USA is stricter than most people would realize.
• 6:51
  It requires that all or virtually all of the products be
• 6:55
  made in the United States, not assembled here, not designed
• 6:58
  here, not not not taken parts and pieces like literally made
• 7:03
  here, right. So meaning that the components
• 7:05
  themselves must be produced on American soil.
• 7:08
  The FTC investigated multiple brands.
• 7:11
  Some cleaned up their language, 1 brand in particular.
• 7:14
  And you'll hear this one coming from Kansas City Nile.
• 7:16
  It's Niall Nile luxury in Kansas City.
• 7:20
  Again, they became a high profile case.
• 7:23
  They'd been marketing their watches as made in the USA while
• 7:27
  using Swiss movements, which are quite literally essentially to
• 7:31
  how you know a watch works. Niall was ultimately cleared of
• 7:34
  any formal wrongdoing, but the investigation was public and it
• 7:37
  damn, it was pretty damaging. And so by 2018, the brand was
• 7:40
  out of business. The founder said that the
• 7:42
  pressure of the experience contributed to the company's
• 7:45
  collapse. But again, if you look back at
• 7:47
  what what Niall was doing, he was trying to have an American
• 7:50
  watch brand in the US. And so again, the the litigious
• 7:53
  nature of kind of our society in the crushing a brand that was
• 7:56
  trying to do something. Now again, the verbiage of
• 7:59
  using, you know, made in the USA with Swiss, Swiss components
• 8:02
  maybe. Yeah.
• 8:03
  It was pushing the limits of what what is appropriate for the
• 8:06
  FTC. Now I'm not here to again, to to
• 8:09
  to re litigate what happened to Nile.
• 8:11
  The founder has spoken about it candidly and publicly, and by
• 8:15
  most accounts, the brand was made-up of people who genuinely
• 8:17
  care about American manufacturing.
• 8:20
  I don't think they were being malicious.
• 8:22
  The watch industry as a whole was being investigated as well,
• 8:25
  not just them. So but but I think the episode
• 8:29
  to them was important because it forced this honest reckoning
• 8:32
  with a question the industry has kind of been answering very
• 8:36
  sloppily. The question is and that the
• 8:39
  bigger question again, you know, I love questions.
• 8:41
  What does made in USA or made in the USA actually mean for
• 8:45
  mechanical watch? Because making a mechanical
• 8:48
  watch is not like making furniture or clothing.
• 8:51
  A fully in house mechanical watch movement has hundreds of
• 8:55
  individual components, gears and plates and bridges and springs
• 8:59
  and jewels, escapement parts, most of which are specialized
• 9:02
  enough that almost no one in America was making them in 2015.
• 9:07
  Even the Swiss don't fully make everything in Switzerland.
• 9:10
  Made in Switzerland under the current rules requires only 60%.
• 9:15
  I think I've said in the past 65% right.
• 9:17
  And even then I was, I was, I was wrong. 60% of the value, the
• 9:21
  values catch that word must be Swiss.
• 9:24
  And then the final assembly has to happen in Switzerland. 60%,
• 9:27
  not all of it. Now that means that if they get
• 9:29
  a movement and they can get it from an Asian, you know,
• 9:32
  distributor manufacturer and they can charge, you know, 49
• 9:34
  bucks for the movement and they can bring it into Switzerland.
• 9:37
  And then now they can mark it up as they assemble or put it
• 9:39
  together or case it for 500 or $600.00.
• 9:42
  Now that's a Swiss movement, right?
• 9:43
  So when the FTC says all or virtually all must be American
• 9:47
  made, that is an extraordinarily demanding standard.
• 9:51
  A standard that by 2015, only one American manufacturer was
• 9:56
  anywhere close to even meeting that.
• 9:58
  And by 2023, only one American watchmaker could fully and
• 10:02
  honestly claim it. So we're going to talk about
• 10:05
  them today. But first let's start with the
• 10:07
  beginning of kind of what modern rebuilding kind of looks like.
• 10:10
  So let's talk about segment 3. We're going to get into a brand
• 10:13
  called Vortec VORTIC, I'm going to call them the American Bones.
• 10:17
  American Cases. The first brand we're going to
• 10:21
  talk about started with a question to college students
• 10:24
  asked themselves when they were at Penn State University.
• 10:27
  RT Custer and then Tyler Wolf. They're both engineering
• 10:31
  students. When one of their professors
• 10:33
  challenged them to design something that was uniquely and
• 10:36
  genuinely entirely American made or made in the USA.
• 10:41
  And they discovered in researching the challenge that
• 10:43
  there was essentially nothing in the consumer market that was
• 10:47
  completely and honestly completely 100% American made.
• 10:50
  No phones, no clothes, no watches.
• 10:53
  And then they discovered something else in the United
• 10:56
  States. They discovered that between
• 10:57
  1850 and 19, fifty, 100 million pocket watches were coming from
• 11:02
  Illinois, from Elgin, from Waltham, from Hamilton, from
• 11:05
  South Bend and Rockford. And all of those watches, those
• 11:08
  movements, those, those, those pieces were scattered across the
• 11:12
  country in estate sales and pawn shops and antique stores and and
• 11:16
  junk chores. They were orphaned, and the gold
• 11:19
  and silver cases had long been sold off for their medals.
• 11:23
  But the movements, the actual mechanical hearts of those
• 11:26
  watches, they were still there. They were still ticking, still
• 11:28
  beautiful, overlooked. And guess what?
• 11:31
  Undervalued. And so, Custer and Wolf, they
• 11:33
  decided to do something profound about that.
• 11:36
  They founded Vortec Watch Company in Fort Collins, Co, and
• 11:40
  the idea was simple. It literally turned out that all
• 11:42
  they needed to do was do something a little different.
• 11:45
  They were going to genuinely take something that was
• 11:48
  difficult to execute. They're going to figure out a
• 11:50
  way to do it. Take antique American pocket
• 11:54
  watch movements from Hamilton, Waltham, Elgin IL watch company
• 11:58
  Rockford, Ball Hampton from South Bend, and then restore
• 12:02
  them to running condition and then convert them into
• 12:05
  wristwatches by building an entirely new case around them.
• 12:09
  And the cases were made by Vortec themselves in Fort
• 12:12
  Collins, in their own, with their own machines, from
• 12:15
  American materials. And so the result was, in the
• 12:19
  truest sense of the word, American.
• 12:22
  The movement inside has an original piece of history.
• 12:25
  Sometimes it's 100 years old, sometimes older.
• 12:28
  And it was made in an American factory by American workers in
• 12:31
  an era when American watchmaking was at its absolute apex.
• 12:35
  And the case is new. It's made in Colorado in the
• 12:37
  21st century. And the watch is a
• 12:39
  collaboration, but it's across generations.
• 12:42
  And what makes this work? What makes it more than just a
• 12:45
  conversation piece is the actual restoration that Vortec has to
• 12:49
  do. Vortec employs trained
• 12:51
  watchmakers who take the movement, disassemble it
• 12:53
  completely, clean every component, they replace the worn
• 12:55
  parts, and they use the original field service manuals from kind
• 13:00
  of the now defunct American companies, and they bring the
• 13:03
  movement back to running condition.
• 13:07
  Their team hunt for orphaned movements constantly through
• 13:10
  estate sales and pawn shops and antique dealers, and some of the
• 13:14
  movements they find are dated before the Civil War.
• 13:20
  There's also the legal story, which is worth telling.
• 13:23
  After Vortec launched, the Swatch Group, which owns Modern
• 13:26
  Hamilton brand, sent them a cease and desist letter before
• 13:31
  Vortec had shipped a single watch again.
• 13:33
  Here's a giant trying to crush right a small player.
• 13:36
  Swatch claimed that using antique Hamilton movements and
• 13:40
  the Hamilton name on the dial infringed on their trademark.
• 13:44
  And Vortec. Guess what?
• 13:46
  People don't like being pushed around, so Vortec pushed back.
• 13:49
  The case went to federal court, and in September of 2020, guess
• 13:53
  who won Vortec. Vortec won.
• 13:56
  The federal court ruled that converting an antique pocket
• 13:59
  watch into a wristwatch, regardless of the brand name on
• 14:02
  the dial, is legal. The antique movements are
• 14:05
  historical artifacts. They belong to history, not to a
• 14:08
  Swiss luxury conglomerate. And so Vortec preserves American
• 14:12
  history one watch at a time. And that's their tagline.
• 14:15
  And it also literally is true. So if you don't know anything
• 14:18
  about Vortec, check them out. Segment 4, we're going to talk
• 14:22
  about Cincinnati Watch Company. We're going to say this is Time
• 14:25
  Hill's successor. OK.
• 14:27
  The second brand starts in Cincinnati, OH, and with a
• 14:31
  building on E Macmillan St. It says in Cincinnati, there's a
• 14:36
  remarkable structure that looks like a medieval Guild hall.
• 14:39
  It's like half timbered and stone.
• 14:42
  It's sitting on a hill above the city.
• 14:44
  And it's called Time Hill. It was built in I think 1916 and
• 14:48
  19/17/17 for the Gruen Watch Company and the Cincinnati based
• 14:53
  watchmaker that was, you know, founded this whole thing was
• 14:56
  Dietrich Gruen. It's GRUEN.
• 14:58
  And that was about the 1870s. And Gruen was one of the most
• 15:01
  important American watch companies of the earliest 20th
• 15:05
  century. And they helped popularize the
• 15:07
  wristwatch in America. And they were partly responsible
• 15:10
  for the design innovation that made wristwatch movements thin
• 15:15
  enough to wear comfortably. And they're they assembled these
• 15:18
  watches at this place called Time Hill again until about
• 15:21
  1958, when the company folded. And after 1958, nobody assembled
• 15:26
  watches in Cincinnati. That was until 2018.
• 15:31
  Pop up Cincinnati Watch Company right there, founded by Rick
• 15:33
  Bell and Mark Stegman. And they started a company
• 15:37
  called Build Your Own Watch, literally kits that enthusiasts
• 15:41
  could assemble at home and decided to that the next step
• 15:43
  was to build a genuine watch brand that was rooted in
• 15:46
  Cincinnati's history. So for my modding commuted out
• 15:49
  there, those folks that like to mod watches as well.
• 15:51
  Tip of the hat to the Cincinnati Watch Company and specifically
• 15:54
  Bell and Stegman for kind of starting with this build your
• 15:57
  own watch mentality and the idea of getting people to become
• 15:59
  watch makers as well, right? Building their own watch and
• 16:02
  then turning that into Cincinnati Watch Company.
• 16:05
  Her first release in 2018 was the Union Terminal watch.
• 16:09
  It was inspired by this famous Art Deco clock that hung in
• 16:12
  Cincinnati's Union Terminal train station and the there was
• 16:15
  AP-40MP40M. There's a pilot watch in 2020
• 16:22
  the brought in the third co-owner and the piece that made
• 16:25
  the operation kind of genuinely serious.
• 16:27
  They they brought in Jordan Ficklin and Jordan is to put it
• 16:30
  plainly, one of the most credentialed watchmakers in
• 16:33
  America and you probably never heard of him.
• 16:35
  He holds a Washington step diploma, the the Swiss training
• 16:38
  certificate and his CW 21 the this the American watchmakers
• 16:45
  clockmakers Institute certified watchmaker of the 21st century
• 16:48
  designation. So he holds this title of
• 16:51
  specialist and fine horology from the foundation of the Hot
• 16:54
  Horology and the Swiss organization that certifies
• 16:58
  excellence in the highest tiers of watchmaking.
• 17:00
  So this dude is a legit watchmaker and he spent seven
• 17:04
  years as the executive director of the AWCI training other
• 17:08
  watchmakers. And so Flicklin is not like a
• 17:10
  micro brand watchmaker. He's a seriously credentialed
• 17:13
  professional who chose to come home to Cincinnati to assemble
• 17:17
  watches. And so if you don't have
• 17:18
  Cincinnati Watch Company on your radar, this would be a a logical
• 17:22
  step of maybe where you pause me and you go check them out.
• 17:24
  OK, Now Cincinnati watch Company designs, they are explicitly
• 17:30
  rooted in American visual history.
• 17:32
  And so Cincinnati Watch field, for example, the Cincinnatus,
• 17:36
  they are named after this Roman statesman who became
• 17:40
  Cincinnati's civic inspiration. It's a rugged, wearable field
• 17:44
  watch. It has a salida movement inside.
• 17:47
  It's assembled and regulated in five positions in Cincinnati
• 17:50
  with a certificate of quality assurance.
• 17:53
  It's actually signed by Jordan on delivery and the Union
• 17:56
  Terminal watch that has this look of Art Deco like a clock
• 18:00
  that it's inspired by. There's this P40M, the pilot
• 18:04
  watch, It draws from the military, specifically World War
• 18:07
  2 aviation. So each design is a piece of
• 18:10
  Cincinnati and they put that on your wrist.
• 18:12
  And again, I love the history of that and I love the connections
• 18:14
  to not only just America, but specifically the Cincinnati.
• 18:18
  A portion of the proceeds from every single watch goes to
• 18:22
  charity. They benefit and support their
• 18:24
  local community. Cincinnati Museum, for example,
• 18:27
  a free store, food bank, the Tri-City War Bird Museum, They
• 18:32
  explicitly donate back to these organizations within their own
• 18:35
  community. So again, this is explicitly a
• 18:38
  watchmaking operation, but they use it as a civic act, not just
• 18:42
  a product. And so again, pricing for these
• 18:44
  watches typically under $1000 for most models, that kind of
• 18:48
  the entry point. And then there's, you know, if
• 18:50
  there's one brand, I think in this episode for listeners to
• 18:52
  want to own a piece of American watchmaking history without this
• 18:55
  major financial commitment again.
• 18:57
  And we talked about $1000 being not a financial commitment and
• 19:00
  and watchmaking, because if you're this far into this thing,
• 19:02
  you kind of know what I'm talking about.
• 19:03
  But I get that it's a lot of money.
• 19:05
  So this is this is one of those brands to consider.
• 19:07
  Now let's get into segment 5. I'm going to talk about Weiss.
• 19:10
  It's Weiss. But if you are German, then
• 19:13
  you're probably going to pronounce it Vice.
• 19:15
  And they are kind of the West Coast movement watchmaker that
• 19:18
  moved away from the West Coast. So the third brand is kind of, I
• 19:23
  would say a tier above Cincinnati Watch Company, not in
• 19:27
  regard to the aesthetics or anything like that, but just in,
• 19:29
  in regard to what their their price points are.
• 19:32
  OK, so third brand, again, we're talking about as we get into
• 19:35
  this brand movement, the conversation is going to shift
• 19:38
  from kind of assembled in America to movement manufactured
• 19:43
  in America. So Weiss Watch Company and
• 19:45
  again, founder is Cameron Weiss. And it can be pronounced Weiss
• 19:49
  in the German way. I founded this company in Los
• 19:52
  Angeles in 2013. And Cameron's background is
• 19:56
  worth noting. So he trained at the Nicholas
• 19:59
  Hayek Watchmaking School in Miami, and it was named after
• 20:03
  the legendary former watchmaker of the Swatch Group.
• 20:06
  And so again, you know, probably Hayek, this is a Swiss.
• 20:10
  So this is an accredited Swiss watchmaking program, but it's
• 20:13
  run in the United States. And then from there, he did
• 20:16
  further training. He actually was at Auto Mars, BK
• 20:19
  and Basharan Constantine. And then instead of going to
• 20:23
  work for us with Brandon in Switzerland, he came home and
• 20:27
  started a watch company in Los Angeles.
• 20:30
  Now the first 10 Weiss watches were assembled in his dining
• 20:33
  room. And his future wife, I believe
• 20:35
  her name was Whitney or her name is Whitney, helped him take them
• 20:38
  to market in San Francisco around June of 2013.
• 20:42
  And the response was enough to keep him going.
• 20:44
  And so Cameron's first workshop was kind of like a, you know, a
• 20:48
  walk in closet, right? And then in 2016, he had done
• 20:51
  something that almost knew no American was attempting.
• 20:54
  He manufactured his own movement, the caliber 1000 and
• 20:58
  three 1003. It's a manually wound, 21,600
• 21:04
  beats per minute or beats per hour, 2 1/2 Hertz movement.
• 21:07
  And it had a small seconds at 9:00.
• 21:10
  And the movements architecture draws a lot from the larger
• 21:14
  format Swiss ETA or the ETA Unitas 6497.
• 21:19
  It was a pocket watch caliber known for its generous
• 21:21
  proportions and visibility. And so Cameron took that
• 21:24
  architecture like we've known a lot of folks have done in the
• 21:26
  past and then he re engineered it and then now makes about 95%
• 21:31
  of the parts himself, including the escapement, which is
• 21:34
  notoriously difficult to produce and is commonly outsourced by
• 21:38
  even brands that call themselves in house manufacturers.
• 21:41
  And so the movement is machined, hand jeweled, plated and it's
• 21:46
  finished in his his workshop. And that workshop now has moved
• 21:49
  to Tennessee, I believe. And so you can find sometimes
• 21:51
  you can find a Weiss watch, you can find them, we call them
• 21:54
  California dials when they'll actually have Los Angeles, CA on
• 21:58
  the front, on the dial, on the face side.
• 22:00
  And then the newer ones, you'll see them either they don't have
• 22:03
  that or they're they're stating where they're at now, which is
• 22:05
  in Tennessee. And so I think it's, it's truly,
• 22:08
  it's, it's this sort of virtually every watchmaker at
• 22:12
  every single price point is just, I think that for me, this
• 22:15
  is fascinating. So again, his, his jewels and
• 22:18
  his main springs are sourced from specialists.
• 22:20
  And again, this is the kind of the true logic of what he's
• 22:23
  doing here. I think the infrastructure to
• 22:25
  produce those things at any quality level in the US just
• 22:28
  don't exist yet. So for him to find jewels in
• 22:30
  main springs, he's going to get the, the, the right quality
• 22:32
  parts. But I have a feeling that that
• 22:35
  he has this kind of this this desire to be able to try to
• 22:38
  figure out if there's a way in the future or maybe in the next
• 22:41
  generation, we're going to have people making mainsprings and
• 22:43
  jewels in the US. That's just my guess.
• 22:46
  Now, each movement takes approximately 35 hours of work
• 22:50
  to complete. And so the Weiss American Issue
• 22:55
  Field Watch is kind of their flagship piece.
• 22:57
  It's 42mm, the dial that draws from these vintage aviation
• 23:01
  instruments, and the straps are made from Horwian leather and
• 23:05
  the 113 year old kind of Chicago tannery that makes some of the
• 23:09
  finest Leathers in North America.
• 23:12
  The watchmaking, the leather, the finishing, all of it is as
• 23:16
  American as Cameron can make it. And so Weiss has again since
• 23:20
  moved their primary operations to Nashville, TN and production
• 23:24
  runs. I believe he runs about 1500
• 23:26
  watches per year, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on that
• 23:28
  number. It could be less, it could be
• 23:30
  more, which for an American in house manufacturer is it's an
• 23:35
  achievement. The pricing start at really
• 23:37
  around 1100 bucks $11150.00 for a standard field and they rise
• 23:42
  up into the mid kind of 2000 range for watch that are beyond
• 23:45
  that and specifically with the caliber 1003 with the in house
• 23:49
  they can go up from there. Now this is how to think about
• 23:53
  Cameron. He's not claiming that
• 23:55
  everything is on American soil. What he's doing is what any
• 24:00
  serious manufacturer would do in the 21st century.
• 24:03
  He's being honest about what he makes himself and he's being
• 24:06
  transparent about what he sources and what he makes
• 24:09
  himself is genuinely impressive for an operation of his size.
• 24:13
  And I, I tip, I tip my hat to him.
• 24:15
  And then his watches are also just, I think they're beautiful
• 24:17
  to look at. The movements are stunning.
• 24:19
  His straps are actually really comfortable as well, including
• 24:21
  the textile ones. And I've had those watches in
• 24:25
  the 42mm and they're just, they're just really solid
• 24:27
  watches. They feel like they're well
• 24:28
  built. Segment 6, we're going to get
• 24:31
  into RGM the we're going to call RGM the elder statements
• 24:35
  section. So RGM watch company, RGM are
• 24:38
  the initials of Roland G Murphy and he's based in Mount Joy, PA.
• 24:44
  It's a small town in Lancaster County and they it's kind of
• 24:48
  considered Pennsylvania Dutch country, which is kind of this
• 24:51
  history has this, it does have a history of precision
• 24:54
  manufacturer that goes back generation.
• 24:56
  So Roland Murphy, he started his profession watchmaking career in
• 25:01
  about the 80s and he trained at a technical school in Lancaster,
• 25:04
  but then he also went to WASP up in in Switzerland.
• 25:08
  He came back to Pennsylvania and then he went to work developed
• 25:11
  for kind of product development for the Hamilton Watch Company.
• 25:14
  And the same, that's the same Hamilton that had closed his
• 25:17
  manufacturing operation in 69, but by 92 he had left and he was
• 25:21
  starting RGM on his own. So for 15 years, RGM was
• 25:25
  producing watches using Swiss movements.
• 25:27
  They were beautiful, handcrafted, hand finished and
• 25:31
  they were carefully made watches, but they weren't in
• 25:33
  house. And so Roland, he, he was
• 25:36
  building a foundation, clients and reputation.
• 25:39
  And then he got something that's that's pretty rare in the watch
• 25:42
  community. He got financial stability to do
• 25:45
  what he actually wanted to do. So in 2007 and 2008, RGM
• 25:49
  launched caliber eight O 1. And it was the first mechanical
• 25:52
  watch movement manufactured in the United States since
• 25:55
  Hamilton's caliber 992. That that one had come off the
• 25:59
  line in like 1969. And so nearly 40 years of
• 26:03
  silence. And then that ended with one
• 26:05
  watchmaker in a small town in Pennsylvania.
• 26:08
  The caliber eight O 1 is not a show off.
• 26:11
  It's a deeply serious piece of work.
• 26:13
  It's hand wound, it's 19 joules, it has 18,000 beats per hour.
• 26:17
  It runs at a 2 1/2 Hertz. It's a slow and deliberate rate
• 26:21
  and the movement is finished with what we would consider Cote
• 26:24
  de Geneve striping and prolage. The bridges were designed with
• 26:29
  this conscious homage to history in America.
• 26:34
  And Roland, I think, loves the fact that this was shaped with
• 26:39
  these references of Keystone. Howard Watch Company is
• 26:43
  specifically Edward Howard's model from like the 18, maybe
• 26:47
  the early 20th century. I said 18, but I mean 20th.
• 26:50
  And the the Winding Clique is inspired by the Illinois Watch
• 26:54
  Company's Illini model. And it's a, it's, there's this
• 26:57
  deep winding wheel and it kind of echoes the finish of what was
• 27:01
  happening in these other watches specifically like the Illinois
• 27:04
  Bunn Special with Bunn. So when you look at the
• 27:07
  movement, you see an entire history of American watchmaking
• 27:11
  kind of folded into a contemporary design.
• 27:13
  And I think a lot of people forget when they're looking at
• 27:14
  RGM watches, they're kind of seeing, they're seeing old.
• 27:17
  And then it's sort of slowly bringing them into the modern
• 27:20
  era and they're all made all, you know, like 90% of the parts
• 27:24
  are made by RGM in Mount Joy. So in 2010, RGM followed the
• 27:28
  Caliber 8 O one with something called the Pennsylvania Turbion.
• 27:32
  It was the first serially produced American Turbion ever
• 27:37
  made. A Turbion is again or Ology's
• 27:40
  most story complication again. It's this rotating escapement
• 27:44
  cage. It was invented by Brigade in
• 27:46
  like 18 O1 to average out these positional errors in the balance
• 27:50
  wheel. So for Roland to produce 1 in
• 27:53
  Pennsylvania from American parts at a time when Swiss and German
• 27:57
  manufacturers were still the only ones doing it, it's an
• 27:59
  absolutely extraordinary achievement.
• 28:03
  And so RGM produces approximately 200 watches per
• 28:07
  year total. Like every model, the prices
• 28:10
  reflect the reality of what an in house manufacturer would look
• 28:13
  like at scale. And so the Aliber caliber 8 O1,
• 28:16
  those pieces start in like the low to mid 5 figure range and
• 28:20
  then they go up from there. The the Pennsylvania Turbion can
• 28:25
  get into the six figures easily. Now RGM is in every meaningful
• 28:31
  sense America's watch manufacturer.
• 28:33
  It's not the most famous, it's not the flashiest, but I would I
• 28:36
  would pause it to say that they are the most legitimate.
• 28:39
  So when you wear an RGM, you're wearing what American watch
• 28:43
  making looks like when it is done with complete integrity.
• 28:46
  That is rare anywhere. It is extraordinary to be here.
• 28:51
  Now let's get into Segment 7. We're going to call this JN
• 28:55
  Shapiro and we'll call this the sub subtitle or subheader.
• 29:00
  We'll call this the Apex. So the 5th, 5th brand I want to
• 29:04
  discuss is JN Shapiro. This is the one that earns some
• 29:07
  serious headlines in like 2023 when it was released and, and
• 29:10
  for good reason. JN Shapiro.
• 29:12
  He's based in Inglewood, CA, just outside of Los Angeles, and
• 29:15
  he was founded by Joshua Shapiro.
• 29:18
  Joshua Shapiro's origin story does not start at like a
• 29:21
  watchmaking school. It doesn't even start in
• 29:23
  Switzerland or some famous manufacturer or in a family with
• 29:27
  any like a watchmaking history. He was a school principal, a
• 29:32
  school principal, a history teacher, and a school principal
• 29:36
  in Los Angeles who became obsessed with a single
• 29:40
  watchmaking craft. Joshua was obsessed with the
• 29:45
  concept of guyochet. Now guyochet is this technique
• 29:49
  of engine turning using a rose engine lathe, which is a machine
• 29:53
  that kind of moves through this elliptical or circular pattern
• 29:56
  and it cuts these very precise but repeated geometric patterns
• 30:00
  into metal surfaces. And it's a technique that can
• 30:03
  create these distinctive shimmering textures.
• 30:05
  You'll see them on like Patek Philippe dials and on the cases
• 30:08
  of like antique pocket watches on the movement bridges of these
• 30:11
  really high end Swiss manufacturers.
• 30:13
  And it's a disappearing craft. I've discussed them, I think at
• 30:16
  the beginning of this season where we talked about
• 30:19
  Parmigiani, for example. And so there are a couple of
• 30:23
  dozen people in the world who do it really well.
• 30:25
  And Joshua Shapiro is one of them.
• 30:28
  And he started by making engine turn dials for other
• 30:32
  watchmakers. So he built his skills, he built
• 30:34
  his reputation. And in 2010, he launched his own
• 30:37
  brand with the kind of Infinity series and watch watches whose
• 30:42
  dials featured his legendary Infinity weave Geo shape
• 30:46
  pattern. And it's difficult to explain,
• 30:48
  so just, you know, again, if you need to pause or just go back
• 30:51
  and circle back on this one, just Google search JN Shapiro
• 30:55
  Infinity Weave or Guy O'Shea. And it's a design that
• 30:58
  collectors immediately recognized as exceptional.
• 31:01
  The Infinity series ran to about 100 pieces in total.
• 31:05
  And then over 4 years of development, he built something
• 31:08
  called the Resurgence. And the JN Shapiro Resurgence
• 31:11
  was released in 2023 and I want to be precise about what it
• 31:15
  represents it because the claim is significant and it has to be
• 31:19
  stated accurately. So the FTC, their standard for
• 31:23
  Made in the USA, requires that all or virtually all of the
• 31:28
  product be made by Americans, and also that all of the product
• 31:33
  itself is American made. So for mechanical watches, that
• 31:36
  is an almost impossibly demanding task.
• 31:40
  The infrastructure to make every component of a mechanical watch
• 31:43
  in the United States simply does not exist in any meaningful way
• 31:47
  for the resurgence. Shapiro and his team, eight
• 31:50
  people in total, make 148 out of 180 components in their
• 31:55
  Inglewood workshop. Think about that for a second.
• 31:58
  And their workshop, they're making 148 out of 180 components
• 32:02
  for their their movements and for their for their watches.
• 32:06
  The remaining components again, jewels, main springs, sapphire
• 32:10
  crystals, gaskets and spring bars.
• 32:13
  Things that you know are you need specialized manufacturers
• 32:16
  and infrastructure to do they just don't exist domestically.
• 32:20
  And they're not definitely not at the quality level required by
• 32:23
  some of these brands, though Superheroes is very transparent
• 32:26
  about every single one of these things and where the sourcing
• 32:29
  decisions occur. And he's actively working on
• 32:31
  bringing a hairspring production in house.
• 32:34
  Think about that, which would be an almost unprecedented
• 32:37
  achievement for a many American manufacturers.
• 32:40
  So the result is a watch that by any serious analysis meets the
• 32:45
  FTC's all or virtually all standard.
• 32:48
  And it's roughly his watches are wait for it, 99% American that
• 32:53
  is to be direct, the first watch that can honestly make the claim
• 32:57
  since 1969. The resurgence is a 38.
• 33:02
  The case comes in stainless steel, it comes in zirconium,
• 33:05
  comes in tantalum, comes in rose gold and white gold and the dial
• 33:08
  is multi layered. It's separately engine turned
• 33:11
  sections and each has a different Geo shape pattern.
• 33:15
  The movement is hand wound. It beats at 18,000 vibrations
• 33:18
  per hour. There are three different
• 33:20
  movement layout options and each is designed in house.
• 33:23
  Each resurgence takes about 400 to 500 hours to produce and the
• 33:28
  production target is about 30 to 40 watches per year.
• 33:31
  Now they range right from about 70,000 USD to about 85,000 USD
• 33:37
  depending on the case material and so on.
• 33:39
  And again, I get that it's serious money.
• 33:41
  This is not an entry level watch.
• 33:42
  But again, as I want to say this without exaggeration, A
• 33:46
  historically significant object, it is the watch that proved in
• 33:51
  2023 that American watchmaking at the highest level of the
• 33:54
  craft is not just theoretically possible, It is happening.
• 33:59
  It's happening in a workshop in Inglewood, CA, made by a school
• 34:03
  principal who decided to learn gyoche.
• 34:05
  And guess what? Never stopped.
• 34:08
  And I think it's a reminder to us as well.
• 34:10
  If you are someone that loves this hobby, you have a passion
• 34:13
  for it, step up and do something.
• 34:17
  If you're if you're working and you enjoy what you're doing,
• 34:19
  awesome. But if you have this little
• 34:20
  hunch that you want to try something different, I'm going
• 34:23
  to tell you right now, there is no better time than the present
• 34:25
  to go and try something and, and, and do something that's
• 34:28
  unique and take care of yourself and your family.
• 34:31
  Now the resurgence has been compared in its ambition and
• 34:34
  technical philosophy to the work of Rodger W Smith in Britain.
• 34:40
  And the most I would say that he's Rodger W Smith is the most
• 34:44
  direct successor to George Daniels.
• 34:46
  Shapiro himself studied the Daniels method, the same
• 34:49
  approaches to in house watchmaking that Smith
• 34:51
  practices. That is, I think the company
• 34:54
  that JN Shapiro is keeping and trying to to build.
• 34:58
  Now, Segment 8, I'm going to call this the thesis, the
• 35:00
  industry that is being rebuilt. So let me give you the shape of
• 35:04
  this rebuild. So in 2025, the American
• 35:07
  watchmaking industry looks something like this.
• 35:09
  At one end, you have Vortec doing, I would say, something
• 35:13
  the the most creative act possible, which is literally
• 35:16
  resurrecting the movements of original American watches in the
• 35:20
  emergent original American watch industry and putting them into
• 35:23
  modern American cases. They're not building new
• 35:26
  movements. They're honoring the ones that
• 35:28
  already exist. And that is kind of a
• 35:29
  continuity. Then there's Cincinnati Watch
• 35:32
  Company doing something equally valuable, which is assembling
• 35:35
  watches in a city that was once home to Great American watch
• 35:39
  companies. They employ a world class
• 35:42
  watchmaker. They make watchmaking become a
• 35:45
  civic act by connecting it to their own community.
• 35:48
  And then there's Weiss actually making a movement in America,
• 35:51
  Not all of it, but most of it. And they're on machines that are
• 35:54
  in his workshop by hand, a school trained person from
• 35:59
  Switzerland, right? He's he was an LA based
• 36:01
  watchmaker and now he's in Tennessee and doing very he's
• 36:05
  doing what very few people in this country are capable of
• 36:08
  doing. Then you've got RGM, right.
• 36:10
  The elder statesman who started this modern rebuild in 2007 with
• 36:16
  the first American made mechanical movement in 40 years
• 36:22
  when the first American Herbion to come out.
• 36:27
  I think out of any company in the United States and well, I
• 36:30
  don't know. I think historically, I think
• 36:31
  that's that's the one they've been he's been doing this RGM
• 36:35
  has been doing this for over 30 years in Pennsylvania.
• 36:37
  They're quietly without much fanfare, just doing what they
• 36:40
  do. And they do this to an audience
• 36:42
  that knows exactly what they're looking for.
• 36:43
  If you're wearing an RGM or you've been looking for an RGM,
• 36:46
  you're already past past the point of this conversation,
• 36:49
  right? And now there's there's Jan
• 36:52
  Shapiro, the apex, I would say for this conversation to the
• 36:56
  place where in 2023, American watchmaking arrived at a moment
• 37:01
  it had not seen since 1969, a watch that is essentially and
• 37:06
  honestly entirely American made. That is not just remarkable,
• 37:10
  that is historic. SO5 brands completely 5
• 37:13
  different approaches and five answers to the same underlying
• 37:16
  question. And the question that I, you
• 37:18
  know, wrestled with when I was writing this was what does it
• 37:21
  mean to make a watch in America today?
• 37:24
  And again, that answer is not simple.
• 37:26
  It's not possible to make a 100% American watch if you define it
• 37:30
  as every raw material and every component.
• 37:33
  And what I'm going to put here is a caveat.
• 37:35
  Not yet. The infrastructure doesn't
• 37:38
  exist. The supply chain doesn't exist.
• 37:40
  The specialized component manufacturers, they don't exist
• 37:43
  or they only exist in small pockets like North Dakota
• 37:46
  company making jewels for Shapiro.
• 37:49
  But the direction is clear. The gap between assembled in
• 37:54
  America and truly made in America is narrowing.
• 37:58
  And that for me is exciting. And I think the next generation,
• 38:02
  I think is going to show something different.
• 38:03
  I think that's going to be someone will look back on this
• 38:06
  podcast, I hope in 50 years, and this will be completely outdated
• 38:11
  because Americans will be doing a lot of this stuff now as this
• 38:16
  narrows, there's a sort of genuine, I think, conviction.
• 38:20
  And it's not a marketing strategy.
• 38:22
  I think it's American grit. Every one of the watchmakers we
• 38:25
  talked about today has chosen a harder path when an easier path
• 38:29
  was available. And that to me is the definition
• 38:32
  of integrity in this craft. So America wasn't always just
• 38:35
  the customer. America was the manufacturer.
• 38:39
  And if the people in this episode have anything to say
• 38:42
  about it, I think they might be again, in a segment line.
• 38:45
  Let's talk about what's next because that that that this
• 38:48
  content gets me all worked up. So we're going to the next
• 38:52
  episode. We're going to be moving through
• 38:54
  non Swiss world of watchmaking. And so we're going somewhere
• 39:00
  that will feel very different to America and literally every way
• 39:03
  I'm going to take you to Japan. And so there's going to be a
• 39:06
  couple of sections. Part 1 will be kind of the heavy
• 39:08
  hitters because Japan by most technical measures is the most
• 39:12
  accomplished watchmaking country in the world right now and most
• 39:17
  Western collectors don't fully understand that yet.
• 39:20
  We're going to talk about Seiko the full story, not just the SKX
• 39:24
  including like the movement when the the sort of the moment when
• 39:27
  Seiko submitted movements to the Geneva Observatory chronometer
• 39:32
  competitions in 60-7 and then finished 2nd through 4th in the
• 39:36
  standings and the Swiss response was to quietly cancel the
• 39:39
  competition. Now that's the story that sets
• 39:42
  the frame for everything that we're going to discuss.
• 39:45
  We're going to go to Grand Seiko in the 1960s and the sort of
• 39:49
  rebellion, the spring Dr. movement, the one that Seiko
• 39:52
  engineers spent 28 years developing and the snowflake
• 39:55
  dials that are made in shinsu and how they've set this new
• 39:59
  benchmark for what a dial can look like.
• 40:02
  We're going to even go into we're going to get into Crador.
• 40:05
  And Seiko's like hot horology subsidiary.
• 40:07
  We're going to talk about the micro artist studios in this
• 40:09
  small town that brought Philippe Dufour himself to consult.
• 40:14
  They brought him on to talk about hand finishing techniques.
• 40:17
  Almost nobody in the Western watch world community, they even
• 40:20
  know, they don't even know Credor exists.
• 40:22
  And by the episode, the end of the episode, I think you will.
• 40:24
  Or if you already know about them, hopefully I'll give you a
• 40:26
  nugget that you didn't know and we're going to talk about
• 40:29
  Citizen again. I think the company that makes
• 40:31
  the most accurate production wristwatch movements on Earth,
• 40:35
  accurate to ±1 second per year. And also they quietly own,
• 40:40
  again, Bilova, Frederick, Constant, Alpena, and then
• 40:43
  Arnold and Son, plus a few others.
• 40:45
  I think that should be on your radar.
• 40:46
  So that's next. The country that quietly won the
• 40:49
  engineering war while Switzerland was winning the
• 40:51
  marketing war. I don't want you to miss that.
• 40:54
  Now that's episode 15 of what's on your Reese day.
• 40:57
  If you know someone who grew up being told that American watches
• 41:01
  were inferior or who has never considered an American
• 41:05
  watchmaker before or they think that we should not be the envy
• 41:09
  of the world, send them this episode that the story I think
• 41:11
  deserves to be known. And if you are one of those
• 41:14
  watchmakers we talked about RT Custer, Rick Bell, Jordan
• 41:19
  Ficklin, Camera Weiss, Roland Murray, Joshua Shapiro, Thank
• 41:23
  you. Thank you for doing hard things.
• 41:25
  Thank you for doing the harder thing.
• 41:28
  And I think that this, this hobby is richer because you have
• 41:32
  chosen American soil. And if you could, if you are one
• 41:35
  of those people that is enjoying this podcast, please share it
• 41:37
  with other people if you could like it or put a thumbs up on
• 41:41
  it. And then the biggest thing is if
• 41:42
  you are not following, please stop what you're doing and go
• 41:44
  follow it on your platform, whatever that platform is.
• 41:46
  So I'm watch Offski, take care of yourselves and wear something
• 41:50
  good. Out in the old brass blow hands
• 42:15
  bring little back Ford it gone bench time in the second day,
• 42:25
  historic movements wake out of the dust and bone.
• 42:31
  Old hearts stop ticking. They found their way home from
• 42:38
  Rivertown to shop floors, from sketches to the crown, They keep
• 42:44
  the flame alive and turn the old around.
• 42:50
  Made in the USA. Made in the USA.
• 42:57
  Put the past on your wrist, let it sing again today.
• 43:03
  Made in the USA. Made in the USA.
• 43:10
  Still fretting. Faith, That's how they build it.
• 43:14
  Here to stay. Cincinnati whispers back through
• 43:22
  all nut and steel, rooted in America, in history.
• 43:28
  You can feel what they feel. Every lug, every curve carries a
• 43:35
  local name, not borrowed from somewhere else, not built to
• 43:42
  look the same. Then Tennessee lights up.
• 43:48
  We're the maker's own refrain. Cameron Weiss at the bench,
• 43:55
  Cotton his own way. Made in the USA.
• 44:00
  Made in the USA. Put the past on your wrist.
• 44:07
  Let it sing again today. Made in the USA.
• 44:13
  Made in the USA, still sweating faith.
• 44:19
  That's how they build it. Here to stand Pennsylvania hands
• 44:32
  designed to build your own. A pride RDM in their own lane
• 44:40
  with nowhere left to hide. Jay and Shapiro at the the
• 44:45
  wheel, engines turned in house, turns his own douse by hand and
• 44:53
  brings the whole room down. Made in the USA.
• 44:59
  Made in the USA. Put the past on your wrist, let
• 45:06
  it sing again today. Made in the USA.
• 45:12
  Made in the USA. Still sweating the face.
• 45:18
  That's how they build it's gear to stay historic.
• 45:23
  Rebuilt, rebuilt by hands that know the trade, American grit
• 45:29
  and the ticket and the story that they made.
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  Made in the USA.