Timex Drops A GMT Into A Titanium Marlin Jet; Norqain Goes On Holiday; Temporal Works Roughs Up the Series A Rambler; The Titanium Hermès Cape Cod Is A Great Summer Watch; Bulgari's Perpetual Calendar In Blue

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Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. What a fantastic lineup of watches today. I would even get the Norqain, that’s how good the lineup is.

In this issue

• Timex Makes The Already Cool Marlin Jet Even Cooler With A Titanium Case

• Norqain Takes It Easy With The Freedom GMT And Takes It On Holiday

• Temporal Works Roughs Up the Series A With The Quite Elegant Rambler

• Hermès Reworks The Cape Cod In Bead-Blasted Titanium And It’s A Fantastic Summer Watch

• Bulgari Turns Its Record-Breaking Titanium Perpetual Calendar Blue

👂What’s new

1/

Timex Makes The Already Cool Marlin Jet Even Cooler With A Titanium Case

This is a slightly bold claim, but I believe that the Marlin has done more for Timex's reputation than almost anything else in the past decade, and the Jet sub-line is where that revival gets really interesting. It’s a wonderful collection that takes the best of 1950s design and makes it more resilient for everyday life. This new version adds a GMT hand and switches to titanium, a first for the Jet family. Timex making a titanium travel watch under €530 with an automatic GMT movement is exactly why I love them.

The case measures 40mm wide and 14.5mm thick, which sounds tall, and it is, but also a lot of that thickness is used up by the heavily domed hesalite box-shaped crystal. Helping the watch feel smaller is the fact that it’s made out of titanium. Out back is an open caseback with the Jet logo printed on the glass. Water resistance is 50 meters, the only potential downside.

The dial keeps things very subdued, in the best possible way. It has an ivory-grey base with a soft metallic sheen, and each applied baton marker sits in its own recessed section, which gives the surface fantastic depth. A 24-hour scale sits between the markers and the GMT has a white triangular tip outlined in red. There’s a date aperture at 3 o’clock, and there’s a thin elegant line running down the center of the dial. Looks fantastic.

Inside is the Seiko NH34A, a caller-style GMT beating at 3Hz with roughly 41 hours of reserve. It's not a showpiece, with industrial finishing and a Timex-engraved rotor visible through the back, but it will keep on ticking. Caller GMT means you set the fourth hand independently to a second zone, which is the more useful complication for someone tracking other time zones. The strap is black textured leather with a steel pin buckle.

The Timex Marlin Jet Titanium Automatic GMT is available for preorder now with deliveries starting in October 2026, priced at €529. See more on the Timex website.

2/

Norqain Takes It Easy With The Freedom GMT And Takes It On Holiday

Norqain has a bit of an unusual lineup and fanbase, one I’m still trying to figure out, but every so often the let loose and have a little fun. Sure, they can’t make the entire brand just these watches, but these are by far the best thing they do. The latest in their line of fun watches is the Freedom GMT Enjoy Life "Holiday" which is here just in time for your summer travels.

The stainless steel case is 40mm wide, 14.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49.3mm. You get the usual Freedom hardware here: a screw-down crown, the customisable Norqain plate on the left flank, and a box-shaped sapphire crystal that suits the whole playful brief. Water resistance is 100 meters, which covers the kind of poolside-and-beach itinerary the dial keeps suggesting.

But who cares about the case when you have a dial like this. A matte white surface carries a colourful world map dotted with holiday icons, meeting a kangaroo in Australia, a tuk-tuk in Thailand, a shark's fin lurking above the 5 o'clock marker. Around the edge is a multi-coloured 24-hour GMT ring marking out Happy Hour, sleep, and coffee time, each with its own icon. The GMT hand gets a turquoise tip, the rhodium-plated applied markers and faceted hands wear white Super-LumiNova, and the date at 6 o'clock swaps in a holiday icon every seven days in case you forgot what the watch is for. It's a lot, but Norqain commits and it worked out.

Inside is the Norqain Manufacture Calibre NN20/2, produced by Kenissi. It’s a COSC-certified traveller-style GMT with a jumping local hour hand, adjustable independently in one-hour steps. It beats at 4 Hz, with a 70-hour power reserve. The bridge reads "Adventure, Freedom, Independence" and the rotor is branded, though the view through the sapphire caseback is partly blocked by the "Enjoy Life" logo and "ONE of 500" text. The watch comes on a steel bracelet or a white rubber strap, and hidden among the 500 examples is one holding a Golden Ticket good for a holiday for two at the Ayada Maldives.

The Freedom GMT Enjoy Life "Holiday" is available now, priced at €5,350 on the bracelet or €5,210 on the rubber strap. See more on the Norqain website.

3/

Temporal Works Roughs Up the Series A With The Quite Elegant Rambler

Temporal Works is the watch project from Mark Cho and Elliot Hammer, the founder and creative director behind menswear institution The Armoury, and it's only about six months old. The first Series A watches came out at the end of last year as a simple and elegant dress watch that would go with pretty much anything that The Armoury stocks. Now we’re getting the Temporal Works Series A Rambler, same dressy feel, but a very deliberate field ethos.

The case measures 37mm wide and 10mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 45mm. The big change from the original on the outside is the finish. Where the first Series A was polished, the Rambler gets a bead-blasted case that immediately looks more casual and tool-adjacent. Water resistance is 50 meters, which could be doubled without any protests from customers.

But it’s the dials that will sweep you off your feet, with two matte sector options. "Black Sesame" and "Red Bean" are their names, one a browish-black and the other a rusty red, both very earthy in tone and with handsets inspired by vintage pilot watches. The brand logo sits at 4:00, on one of the three distinct lines on the dial that all intersect in the middle. A very unique and satisfying look.

Inside is a Sellita SW210 with roughly 42 hours of power reserve, a hand-wound workhorse. The straps are great: olive canvas for the black dial, gray Alcantara for the red. A bead-blasted Staib bracelet is available for an extra $250 if you want it.

The Series A Rambler is $2,500, available now through The Armoury's shops in New York and Hong Kong and on their website. See it here.

4/

Hermès Reworks The Cape Cod In Bead-Blasted Titanium And It’s A Fantastic Summer Watch

The Cape Cod has spent most of its 35 years on this Earth being a slightly dressy watch, often stepping far into jewelry territory. Henri d'Origny designed it in 1991 around a square-within-a-rectangle case borrowed from anchor-chain links, and since then we’ve seen them in steel, all manner of gold, and with plenty of precious stones of them. What we didn’t see is this bead blasted titanium version that turns it into something way more interesting. Even if you don’t consider it a bona fide sports watch, which would be a mistake, it still might be the perfect summer watch. If you use summer as a verb and you do it on Cape Cod.

The case is 33mm wide with a flatter profile than the usual Cape Cod. Satin brushing takes the place of polish, and the flanks are bead-blasted for texture, which pushes the whole thing toward brutalist rather than pebble-smooth. The case keeps a slight curve to wrap around the wrist. Out back is a circular sapphire aperture and water resistance is 100 meters, which surprised me positively.

The dial really works with the whole sporty look. The base has a recessed Charmilles-textured center, framed by a vertically brushed black outer ring that holds the applied Arabic numerals. The rhodium-plated markers repeat the chain-link motif of the lugs, right down to the counterweight on the seconds hand, which is contrasting with the dial in bright orange. The markers, numerals, and rounded baton hands are filled with lume. The date is at 6 o’clock.

Inside is the automatic H1912, built by Vaucher, with a 45-hour power reserve. Straps are rubber with quick-release spring bars, in black, Bleu Abysse, Jaune de Naples, and orange.

The Hermès Cape Cod Titanium is available now, priced at $7,900. See more on the Hermès website.

5/

Bulgari Turns Its Record-Breaking Titanium Perpetual Calendar Blue

Bulgari has spent the last decade using the Octo Finissimo to break thinness records, so it was only natural that the perpetual calendar released in 2021 did the same. At 5.80mm thick, it’s still the thinnest QP on the market. This latest iteration keeps the thin titanium case, but renders the entire thing in a beautiful blue color over the dial and the case.

The case is the same sandblasted titanium we’ve seen before, measuring 40mm wide and 5.8mm thick, only now it’s coated in blue PVD over the entire dial. This watch looks so good in color it’s unbelievable. The polished steel crown keeps its black ceramic insert,, the caseback is transparent and water resistance is a paltry 30 meters. But what would you expect from a watch this thin?

The blue continues onto a varnished blue dial, matched with grey rhodium-plated hands and silvered indexes. The retrograde date sweeps across the top half, day and month sit below, flanking the leap-year indicator at 6 o'clock.

Inside is the manufacture calibre BVL 305, an automatic based on the Octo Finissimo Automatic's BVL 138. It's 2.75mm thick, beats at 3 Hz, and runs 60 hours. A blue alligator strap finishes the monochrome theme.

The new Bulgari Octo Finisimmo Perpetual Calendar Blue Pvd Titanium is available now, limited to 50 pieces and priced at €76,000. See more on the Bulgari 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

• Eleven people dead. Dozens more injured. When a bomb exploded in a public locker in LaGuardia on a December night in 1975, tearing a hole through eight-inch-thick concrete, it became the biggest act of terrorism in New York City in more than 50 years. Yet, another 50 years later, the tragedy has been all but forgotten. No one was ever charged, despite there being indications that it was perpetrated by Croatian terrorist Zvonko Busic. Nothing at the airport acknowledges the event. For Slate, Elon Green tracks down those who were there—and those who investigated—to figure out why, exactly, the bombing has slipped from the city’s memory.

• Kulsoom Ijaz volunteers with the Wild Bird Fund in New York City, both as labor of love and a practice of gratitude, washing bowls and cleaning enclosures for the avian residents. In this, her debut essay for Guernica Magazine, she recounts what birds have to teach us about adversity as she remembers how their beauty and their songs lifted her spirits during a lengthy illness.

• In Indonesia, keeping songbirds as caged pets is a centuries-old practice, and singing competitions—where prizes can include cash, goats, and motorcycles—have turned that tradition into a lucrative pastime. Sandy Ong offers a vivid, unsettling look at how the demand for prize-winning songbirds is fueling massive bird smuggling, decimating species and emptying forests across Southeast Asia.

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One video you have to watch today

The price of this Bizzarrini 5300 Aperta Lusso hasn’t been announced, but people are speculating anywhere between 1 and 3 million euros. So, does anyone maybe want to buy this newsletter for €3 million?

Thanks for reading,
Vuk