Openwork: Inside the Watch Industry

A quick news note: On Friday, July 24, Collective, along with New York spice importer Burlap & Barrel, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging the federal government's latest Section 301 tariffs. We'll dig into the details on our next episode. In the meantime, you can read more here.

On this episode of Openwork, Gabe Reilly and Asher Rapkin talk with Karel Bachand, founder and chief engineer of Barrelhand, the San Francisco brand rethinking American watchmaking. Karel reverse-engineered an Urwerk as a teenager and cut his teeth on microgravity devices at NASA Ames before building Monolith — a mechanical watch designed from first principles as an aerospace tool, and one that couldn't be made in Switzerland.

The conversation digs into the question the industry avoids: after sixty years of luxury and heritage, what does a watch brand look like when it picks substance over story? Karel breaks down building an American supply chain from scratch, why decentralized manufacturing beats bringing it all in-house, and why a mechanical movement — not quartz or digital — is the right call for the harsh reality of a spacewalk.

It's also a frank take on collector blind spots, like the assumption that a modified Sellita movement is a cop-out instead of a deliberate, reliability-driven choice, and on growing the independent watch community by drawing in people from outside it. Explore Karel's work at barrelhand.com.

Openwork is a weekly podcast about how the watch industry actually works. An unfiltered look behind the scenes — no press releases, no hype, and no sponsored takes. Hosted by Asher Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, co-founders of Collective Horology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find us online at collectivehorology.com. To get in touch with suggestions, feedback or questions, email podcast@collectivehorology.com.

How did Tudor go from a brand you couldn't even buy in the United States to a half-billion-dollar powerhouse selling 300,000 watches a year? In this episode of Openwork, Gabe Reilly and Asher Rapkin trace the rise of Tudor — from its wilderness years in the shadow of Rolex to the 2009 reinvention that produced the Heritage Chrono, the Black Bay, the Pelagos, and an in-house movement. Along the way they unpack the ETA supply crisis, the 2008 financial crash, and Rolex's move upmarket that opened the door for Tudor to walk through.

But this isn't the usual "poor man's Rolex" conversation. Gabe and Asher argue that Tudor's real role is stranger and smarter than that: the gonzo laboratory where Rolex tests every material, case size, and business model it's too disciplined to try itself. Tudor is the black sheep by design — the pressure-release valve that lets Rolex stay conservative while quietly backfilling the market it left behind as prices climbed.

So where does it go from here? With 260-plus boutiques, celebrity wrists, and a brand that's broken into mainstream culture, Tudor looks like a company on the path to a billion dollars. The question is whether it gets there on brand alone — and whether a watch that exists relative to Rolex can ever truly stand on its own.

Openwork is a weekly podcast about how the watch industry actually works. An unfiltered look behind the scenes — no press releases, no hype, and no sponsored takes. Hosted by Asher Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, co-founders of Collective Horology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find us online at collectivehorology.com. To get in touch with suggestions, feedback or questions, email podcast@collectivehorology.com.

To mark 250 years of American independence, we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations: our sit-down with Josh Shapiro, the American independent watchmaker behind the Resurgence — the only watch that currently meets the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's standard for "Made in America." It's a fitting week to ask a question that feels newly urgent in an era of tariffs and reshoring: what would it actually take to bring watchmaking back to the United States at scale?

Josh takes us from the industry's staggering height — when American factories employed over 100,000 people and produced millions of chronometer-grade watches a year, so far ahead that the Swiss crossed the Atlantic in 1876 to study our methods and race to catch up — through the forces that dismantled it: the pivot from pocket watches to wristwatches, an aggressive Swiss cartel, Depression-era trade deals, and a postwar collapse that was already terminal long before the quartz crisis delivered the final blow. Along the way he explains why the single hardest thing to rebuild isn't machinery or capital, but people, and why "Swiss Made" and "Made in America" are two very different promises.

Told through the lens of building the Resurgence in his Los Angeles workshop — the CNC machines, the $150,000 balance-staff breakthrough, the North Dakota jeweler he coaxed out of retirement — this is a clear-eyed look at the slow, deliberate work of rebuilding an industry from the roots up, and what any of us can do to support it.

Openwork is a weekly podcast about how the watch industry actually works. An unfiltered look behind the scenes — no press releases, no hype, and no sponsored takes. Hosted by Asher Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, co-founders of Collective Horology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find us online at collectivehorology.com. To get in touch with suggestions, feedback or questions, email podcast@collectivehorology.com.

This week we're proud to welcome Bamford London to the Collective line card. George Bamford is the OG of modern collaborative watchmaking, but it's his own designs — the D300 Ceramic Diver, the Monopushers, the GMTs — that pulled us in: pieces that read as instantly recognizable without ever aping the usual suspects, built from forged carbon, ceramic, and titanium, at a genuinely accessible price. They also slot perfectly into the decade-plus renaissance in English design and watchmaking. Then we get into the real subject of the episode, which is almost the opposite of Bamford's forward-looking material science: the rise of analog culture, and why it's quietly driving one of the strongest stretches the US watch market has ever seen.

US watch sales jumped nearly 30% in the first five months of 2026 — and that's sell-through reported by retailers, not sell-in. We felt it in our own business, posting our biggest sales month ever before June was even over. But the more interesting question is why, and we make the case that this moment is fundamentally different from the COVID boom. That run was narrow and speculative: a handful of steel sports references, mania, watches as assets to flip. What's happening now is broad-based and rooted in the intrinsics — design, handwork, the human connection between the person who cut the dial and the object on your wrist. The three segments leading the way tell the story: neo-vintage and vintage, independent brands, and the $50,000-and-up tier where handcraft lives.

We zoom out from there, because watches are riding a much bigger wave. Vinyl now outsells CDs, with most of Gen Z owning records — and plenty of buyers who don't even own a turntable, which tells you the object itself is the point. Film cameras are back in production, analog synths are having a moment, and a real backlash is building against a digital licensing economy where you rent your media instead of owning it. We get into what that physical, patient, you-actually-own-it impulse means for collecting, why automating the hunt drains the fun out of it, and where neo-vintage reissues might go in 2026 and 2027.

Openwork is a weekly podcast about how the watch industry actually works. An unfiltered look behind the scenes — no press releases, no hype, and no sponsored takes. Hosted by Asher Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, co-founders of Collective Horology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find us online at collectivehorology.com. To get in touch with suggestions, feedback or questions, email podcast@collectivehorology.com.

We're on summer hours, but we wanted to keep something in your feed as much as we can — so this one comes from our Watches Of podcast, a conversation Gabe recorded in person with Claude Greisler of Armin Strom. Claude is one of the brand's two modern co-founders and its master watchmaker, and he made the trip out to Los Angeles for Open House, where a full spread of the Armin Strom collection was on the tables. Before the watches, the two sat down for a wide-ranging talk about how he got here.

Claude's path is what makes this one worth your time. He grew up in a family of watchmakers, trained for the better part of a decade across Swiss watchmaking, restoration, and movement construction, and cut his teeth on high complications at Christophe Claret. But unlike so many of his peers, he never put his own name on a dial. Instead, with his childhood friend Serge Michel, he took over Armin Strom: a legendary local watchmaker whose vision was a single, clear idea — the movement should be the star of the watch. That conviction is the spine of the conversation, from the decision to become a true in-house manufacturer to the brand's signature complications and its philosophy of transparent mechanics.

This is also, at heart, an Openwork episode. What we keep coming back to on this show is the power of a clear, strong brand identity, and Armin Strom is a near-perfect case study: a watchmaker who walked away from the obvious move to inherit a brand with a reason for being, then re-engineered it from scratch. Along the way, Claude demystifies resonance — what it actually is, and why Armin Strom's approach to it is so distinct — using a couple of analogies that made it click for Gabe, and probably will for you too. We'll be back next week with a regularly scheduled episode.

Openwork is a weekly podcast about how the watch industry actually works. An unfiltered look behind the scenes — no press releases, no hype, and no sponsored takes. Hosted by Asher Rapkin and Gabe Reilly, co-founders of Collective Horology. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find us online at collectivehorology.com. To get in touch with suggestions, feedback or questions, email podcast@collectivehorology.com.