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- Sometimes you have to take a step back to launch yourself forward.
Sometimes you have to take a step back to launch yourself forward.
Pragma, Speake-Marin, and Koala crusaders.
Mitchell Barber
October 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
🌟 Editor's Note
Lately, I’ve been craving something tangible. All of this social media and AI has me feeling strung out and dry. It makes me a little nervous to think about the direction we’re heading in, not just because I think it’s wrong, I’m no techno-sceptic, but because of what we’re leaving behind. Perhaps I’m being dramatic, but I miss the smell of a good book and the crinkle of a newspaper. It feels like we’re taking too many steps forward and not enough steps back.
So, I’m happy to say, in the spirit of the tangible, I’ve started working on a physical broadsheet-style newspaper. I’m thinking it will be issued quarterly and include 100% original content only for the magazine (not on thesubdial.com). Interviews, stories, and photography. All about watches and the people that make them.
This is going to be a fun project. I’ll keep you posted!
Enjoy the rest of the newsletter :)
Mitch x
“People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
🤔 What I’ve been thinking about…
Forks and watch retail.As someone who has worked in watch retail for many, many years. I’ve always been interested in how to make the purchasing experience better for collectors. I didn’t know how to make that happen until I watched what is possibly the best episode of television ever. Season 2, episode 7 of The Bear. Cousin Richie learns the importance of unreasonable hospitality by polishing a shit load of forks; it’s incredible. The episode is based on a book called ‘Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect’ by Will Guidara. Never have I read something that resonated so deeply with my ambitions as this book. Apart from the hungry, hungry caterpillar, of course. Some principles learned below.
I’m not yet sure how this fits here, but all I know is that I’m excited to explore how these principles can make my work more meaningful. | Is discounting ruining the watch industry?This may piss some people off, but I think asking for, being offered one or expecting a discount when buying a luxury watch may lead the industry down a hole it will be very difficult to get out of. And the collectors will be the first ones to suffer. Here’s why. The value of a thing lies not in what one gains with it (material value), but in what one pays for it, what it costs us. You will value a watch less, the more of a discount you get. Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you’re buying a Nautilus. You’re paying full retail price, walking out the door with your head held high. Now imagine you’re getting a 30% discount. Same watch, same brand. How do you feel about the watch now? Are you doubting your purchase more now than before? Why can you get a discount? Is there something wrong with it? It’s no coincidence that the world’s most in-demand brands will never give you a discount, but what comes first, the demand or the discount? There’s more to say here; perhaps I’ll write a full article. |
Interview: Introducing Pragma With Christopher Wegener
Transparency isn’t usually a word I associate with the luxury watch industry.
In fact, the opposite may be true. One of luxury’s defining characteristics is that it’s opaque, it would lose its allure if it wasn’t. Transparent luxury is a paradox.
In this industry, desirability is often created by hiding the truth, or part of it, from the public to create a mystery that drives sales. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I can assure you, there’s no ‘theory’ involved.
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We love to pay for craftsmanship, but very rarely get to see where it comes from. This secrecy pushes us to imagine what's happening behind closed doors and makes us rely on the brand’s marketing to fill in the gaps. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great strategy. The doors to Rolex might as well be welded shut, for example, we don’t know what's happening in their facilities, yet we hand over our money like it’s an ice cream truck on a hot day. Perhaps if we saw that it was more robots than flesh and blood doing the watchmaking, we wouldn’t be as enamoured with it. I'm not saying it’s robots doing the watchmaking, Rolex, please don’t kidnap me.
It makes me wonder, however, does anyone actually care about transparency? Or do we all just want a cool watch to brag to our friends about?
Does this opacity add to or take from the experience of owning a luxury watch?
I want to say more transparency can only be a good thing, but to be honest, I’m not so sure. Is a magic trick only fun if we can’t see how it’s done?
I spoke to Christopher Wegener, the Co-Founder and watchmaker at Pragma recently to find out, and to be honest, this cynical old watch writer has a new-found enthusiasm for open doors and translucent manufacturing. Interview incoming.
Speake-Marin: The Antidote to Generic Watchmaking
The watch industry has a big problem.
It’s something I’ve noticed more and more. Brands are losing their identities in favour of pleasing the masses. It’s hurting creativity.
Some watches have become so generic that the logo could be removed, another brand put in its place, and nobody would bat an eyelid. This has happened across plenty of industries, as social media has made it easier for the opinions of the masses to influence previously isolated design choices. Gone are the days of stubborn CEOs telling us what we like before we knew it, Steve Jobs was great at this. Perhaps we need people like that back.
“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
This is by no means a global trend, however. There are brands out there that don’t seem to care about the opinions of the many, whose design team live in a vacuum and aren’t affected by the pull of mass market appeal. These are the brands that are most interesting to me because they are unapologetically themselves and have the potential to lead a design-focused revolution in their respective industries. One of these brands is the relatively young, but personality rich Speake-Marin.
Did You Know? 🐙 An octopus has three hearts, and two of them stop beating when it swims! Crazy!
Cya in the next one,
Mitch x