Baltic And Space One Team Up On A Very Special Watch; Bravur Perfects Colors; MeisterSinger's Unitas 1Z Edition; Naoya Hida & Co. Teams Up With The Armoury; GP's Chocolate And Gold Laureato Chrono

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. This edition was written on the road to the Croatian coast where I will shut off my computer the second I hit send and I’m ready to unwind. Finally.

In this issue

• Baltic And Space One Team Up On A One-Of-A-Kind Futuristic But Classic Jump Hour Watch

• Bravur Perfects Their Colors On The New Grand Tour Sprinter

• MeisterSinger Continues Its 25th Anniversary Celebrations With New Unitas 1Z Edition

• Naoya Hida & Co. Teams Up With The Armoury For The Floating Feathers Reference Type 4A-2

• Girard-Perregaux Gives Us A Laureato Chronograph Two-Tone In Chocolate And Rose Gold

👂What’s new

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Baltic And Space One Team Up On A One-Of-A-Kind Futuristic But Classic Jump Hour Watch

Pretty much all of my favorite watches from Geneva Watch Week were shown to me under embargo. That sucks, because I’ve seen some pretty cool things and we’ll have to wait quite some time to read about it. Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait that long for this one, perhaps the coolest watch I’ve seen at Chronopolis, the indie show in Geneva. Six years is a long time to spend on something that breaks convention this completely. The Seconde Majeure is a collaboration between French brands Baltic and SpaceOne, and the result is a watch that couldn't have come from either brand alone. Baltic's restraint keeps it wearable. SpaceOne's obsession with movements makes it unlike anything else at the price.

The case is 38.4mm wide and 12mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.5mm. That might sound large, but in real life it wears much smaller. I assume that’s a result of the very light and airy dial. The 316L stainless steel is treated to linear brushing across the mid-case, with a polished bezel and polished chamfers on the arched bevels. The crown sits at 12 o’clock, recessed flush into the case, hinting that this very classic case might be holding something quite unusual inside. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is where this watch makes its case. Rather than the solid front panel and small apertures common in jump-hour watches, the Seconde Majeure uses stacked, off-centre transparent discs — jumping hours at the top, continuous minutes at the bottom — floating over the movement below. Time is displayed in two darkened windows at 12 and 6, but the layered, printed discs add depth and a futuristic dimensionality to the whole thing. This looks like it fell out of a fantastically art-directed sci-fi movie. The dial plate is made out of a single piece of maillechort — also known as German silver — and you can have it in one of two finishes. One is a rather straightforward vertical brushing. The other is just absolutely incredible, completely transforming the look of the watch and elevating it to something that could easily be haute horology. The second finish is called charbonné, a signature technique performed by expert watchmakers in Théo Auffret’s atelier. Done exclusively by hand, it requires up to three hours of work, giving each watch a truly unique character.

The movement is a Soprod P024 automatic, reliable, accurate, and known, but then modified with a bespoke jumping-hour module designed by Auffret. It beats at 28,800 vph with a 38-hour power reserve. It's hidden behind a solid engraved case back numbered to each watch, which is sensible given the P024's industrial looks. The strap is a light brown Alcantara from Delugs, with matching stitching, curved spring bars, and a steel pin buckle.

The Baltic x SpaceOne Seconde Majeure will go on sale Tuesday, May 12th at 4PM CET and the order window will be open until May 17th at 4PM CET. All orders placed in that window will be honored and deliveries are expected in November. Price is set at €3,500. See more on the Baltic website.

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Bravur Perfects Their Colors On The New Grand Tour Sprinter

I love it when a watch picks an unusual niche to live in. And no one does that better than Bravur, the Swedish watch brand that has gone all in on cycling watches. Over the past few years, they’ve released chronographs tied to specific Grand Tour races since the beginning of their Grand Tour series — the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France, and last we checked in, the La Vuelta III that completed the trilogy. Now, they are going somewhere different. The new Grand Tour Sprinter doesn't celebrate a race at all. It celebrates a role — the domestique-turned-weapon, the rider sheltered and saved for the final kilometer, then unleashed.

The case is stainless steel, 38.2mm wide, with a 46,3 mm lug to lug. Interestingly, Bravur doesn’t list the thickness of a watch. When’s the last time you saw a brand that gives you a L2L, but not a thickness? Quirky, I’m telling you. On top is a domed sapphire crystal, surrounded by a steel bezel that has a purple aluminum inlay. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial does what Bravur cycling dials always do well: layers of cycling iconography that feel designed rather than crammed in. The outer ring has that tarmac-like texture, the minute scale mimics the finish line motif, the 12 o'clock marker is shaped like the flamme rouge — the triangular red flag that signals one kilometer to go — and flanking the 1 o’clock baton marker you’ll find an almost invisible upside-down 13, a lucky charm Bravur puts on every Grand Tour chronograph. The most notable functional change is the 15-minute totalizer replacing the traditional 30-minute counter at 3:00, which Bravur says makes it better suited for interval training timing.

Inside is the Sellita SW511 automatic chronograph, the same movement that powered the La Vuelta III. Bravur has fitted a custom rotor and the movement delivers over 60 hours of power reserve when fully wound. The Sprinter is available on a black rubber strap, a black perforated leather strap, or a matching steel bracelet.

The Bravur Grand Tour Sprinter is available to pre-order now with deliveries starting in June, priced at €2,550. See more on the Bravur website.

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MeisterSinger Continues Its 25th Anniversary Celebrations With New Unitas 1Z Edition

MeisterSinger, the brand mostly known for their one-hand time indication, has been having a lot of fun celebrating their 25th anniversary. For their latest release, they’ve gone back to one of the earliest and most important releases in their catalog: the Edition 1Z, first shown in 2004, which combined an enamel dial with a decorated Unitas pocket watch movement. The new Unitas 1Z Edition is a direct revival of that watch, limited to 25 pieces.

The case is new — built specifically to accommodate the oversized Unitas movement — and comes in at 40mm wide with brushed flanks and polished bezel and lugs. The crown is generously sized, fluted, and carries the brand's fermata logo on top. There's a display caseback engraved with the edition number. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is real enamel, which means layers of finely ground enamel powder applied to a copper base and fired repeatedly at around 800°C until you get that luminous, slightly translucent white surface that no printed dial can replicate. Black double-digit hour indices run around the edge, with a peripheral minute scale marked at five-minute intervals and 30-minute intervals picked out in light blue. An inner ring of blue numerals tracks how many minutes have passed since the last full hour. A single heat-blued steel hand sweeps across all of it.

Inside is the Unitas 6497, a hand-wound calibre originally designed for pocket watches and rarely seen in modern wristwatches outside of a handful of independents. For this edition, the movement has been substantially reworked: the bridges are opened and redesigned, decorated with Geneva stripes and blued screws, and a swan-neck regulator has been added for fine adjustment. It beats at 21,600 vph and offers a 46-hour power reserve. The watch comes on an ice-blue leather strap with a crocodile pattern.

The MeisterSinger Unitas 1Z Edition is limited to 25 pieces and priced at €6,990. See more on the MeisterSinger website.

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Naoya Hida & Co. Teams Up With The Armoury For The Floating Feathers Reference Type 4A-2

There's a specific kind of collector that The Armoury attracts. The menswear boutique founded in Hong Kong by Mark Cho and Alan See — with a second location in New York — has always had an eye for objects that reward close attention. Their watch collaborations have been a natural extension of that. This is their third with Naoya Hida & Co., the Japanese independent founded in 2012 whose output centers on ultra-classic watches built on vintage Calatrava proportions. The first collaboration, the Type2C-1 Lettercutter, explored typographic engraving. This new one, the Floating Feathers Reference Type 4A-2, goes into the natural world.

The watch is based on the Type 4A case, built from 904L steel with polished surfaces and polished lateral bevels. At 36mm wide and 11mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 42.9mm, it’s pretty well proportioned. On top is a box-shaped sapphire crystal. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is the showstopper. Made from hand-engraved Argentium silver — a tarnish-resistant silver alloy — it carries three feathers rendered in fine detail by Keisuke Kano, the brand's master engraver. Each feather has individual barbs and vane texture, with the bright polish of exposed silver visible underneath the bead-blasted surface. Surrounding the engraved field is an angled inner flange with 12 individually assembled hand-polished 18k yellow gold spherical minute markers. The hands are the elongated diamond-shaped solid 18k gold pair specific to the Type 4 collection, and a blued steel seconds hand with a caviar spoon counterweight completes the picture. The result is very beautiful.

Inside is calibre 3020CS, a hand-wound movement built around the gear train of the Valjoux 7750 — entirely reworked to remove the chronograph and automatic winding, leaving a clean centre seconds 3-hander. It runs a custom three-quarter plate and balance bridge, beats at 4Hz, and stores 45 hours of power reserve. The watch comes on a hand-stitched charcoal grey calf strap made by Jean Rousseau.

The Naoya Hida & Co. Reference Type 4A-2 Floating Feathers for The Armoury is limited to 10 pieces for 2026, with deliveries happening in 2027. Applications are accepted in-store only, at The Armoury's New York or Hong Kong boutiques, from May 17th to May 20th, 2026. Price is set at $33,000 / HKD 257,400. See more on The Armoury website.

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Girard-Perregaux Gives Us A Laureato Chronograph Two-Tone In Chocolate And Rose Gold

The Laureato is 50 years old this year, and Girard-Perregaux has been making the most of it. The latest entry in the anniversary run is a limited-edition chronograph in a two-tone steel and rose gold execution. The reference point is the original 1975 watch, which paired steel with a polished yellow gold bezel and a gold-capped insert running down the bracelet's central link.

The case is 42mm wide and 12.16mm thick, made from 904L steel with a horizontal brushed finish and polished bevels. The rose gold bezel is circular-brushed, sitting on a polished round gold base, while the pushers, screw-down crown, and case accents are all polished rose gold. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is chocolate brown with a full hobnail, a Clou de Paris-style guilloche that fills the entire surface, including the three sub-dial recesses. The sub-dials have wide concentric rings, and there's a date aperture at 4:30 with a brown background. Rose gold-plated baton indices float above the dial, matching the hour and minute hands, which carry white lume. The chronograph seconds hand and the sub-dial hands are plain gold-plated without lume. The combination of chocolate brown and rose gold is unapologetically rich — this isn't trying to be subtle.

Inside is the calibre GP 03300, a modular chronograph built on the GP 3000 base that has been running since 1994. The movement is 25.6mm in diameter and 6.5mm tall, which explains the case's contained profile. It beats at 28,800 vph with a 46-hour power reserve covering time, small seconds, chronograph, and date. The caseback has a sapphire porthole. The matching brown rubber strap carries the same hobnail texture as the dial down its centre and closes with a steel triple-folding clasp.

The new Laureato Chronograph 42mm is limited to 50 pieces, priced at €26,800. See more on the Girard-Perregaux website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Under a moonless Stratford sky, surgeon Frank Chambers and his ragtag crew of grave-robbers—lockpicker, brute, and drunkard—shovel furtively at the Bard’s cursed tomb, driven by a thrill-seeking dare to seize Shakespeare’s skull for science and glory. As dirt yields bone and omens swirl, a botched grave and ghostly wails test their nerve—what unholy price will they pay if the desecrated relic refuses to rest?

• In Steve Kerr’s modest Chase Center office, whiteboard walls scribbled with “competitiveness, joy, mindfulness, compassion” frame a man who calls out blowhards in the White House while chasing a tenth NBA ring amid a graying dynasty’s uncertain end. The Warriors coach—nine-time champion, son of an assassinated diplomat—unflinchingly dissects politics’ lost dignity, Draymond’s fire, and basketball’s three-point obsession, his contract dangling like unpacked roller bags. Can candor and championships endure in a league chasing billions?

• A seventeen-year-old crown prince taxis an Iranian Air Force tanker onto a dusty Colorado airstrip, arm dangling casually from the window, heir to a throne teetering on the edge of revolution. In Lubbock’s flat Texas expanse, amid luxury pools and fighter-jet wings, Reza Pahlavi trains as pilots chant “Down with the shah!” outside his door—his American dream colliding with his father’s crumbling empire. Nearly fifty years on, as war rages, can this exiled royal reclaim a nation’s future?

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Vuk