Tissot Shrinks Down The Gentleman To A More Manageable 38mm; Raymond Weil Celebrates 50 Years With A Vintage Valjoux Millesime; Formex's Forged Carbon Reef; Mr Jones Daydreams; Three New Credors

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Sorry for the super late release today, preparations for Watches and Wonders are in full tilt and I have meetings all day, every day. It will be an extremely fun show.

In this issue

• Tissot Shrinks Down Their Gentleman Collection To A More Managable 38mm

• Raymon Weil Places A 50-Year Old Vintage Valjoux Calibre 23-6 Into A Millesime

• Formex Releases Their 39.5mm Reef Diver In A Steel And Carbon Combination

• This New Mr Jones Watch Gives You Permission To Daydream As Much As You Want

• Credor Gets Ready For Their First Watches And Wonders With Three New Watches

👂What’s new

1/

Tissot Shrinks Down Their Gentleman Collection To A More Manageable 38mm

Tissot seems to still be looking for the smash hit that will take over a bit of the heavy lifting from the PRX. For a moment there, it seemed that they would want their simple Gentleman collection to take on that role, but the simplistic case that exaggerated it already substantial 40mm frame made it a difficult buy for some. “Make it 38mm and it’s an instant buy for me,” said the internet commentators. Well, time to put your money where your mouth is, because Tissot just released a 38mm variant of the Gentleman.

The case remains made out of stainless steel, only now 38mm wide and 11.53mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 45.70mm. The finishing mixes brushed surfaces with a polished sloping bezel and a polished bevel along the caseband sides. You get a sapphire crystal on the front, and an exhibition caseback. The crown is knurled and screws down. Water resistance is 100 meters.

Four dial options: silver, black, blue, and green, each with a sunray-brushed finish. Tissot has simplified the dial slightly versus the 40mm, dropping the crosshair motif, replaced by slight changes in the finishing to mimic the quarter segments of the dial. The package is completed with applied hour markers and hands with Super-LumiNova, a dotted minute flange around the edge, and a date window at three o'clock.

Inside is the Powermatic 80, beating at 21,600 vph with an 80-hour power reserve. This movement, unlike the one in the 40mm version, comes with a Nivachron hairspring which is more resistant to temperature swings and shocks. The watches come on a three-link stainless steel bracelet combining brushed outer and polished center links, with a folding clasp.

The Tissot Gentleman 38mm is priced at CHF 695 and is available now on the Tissot website.

2/

Raymon Weil Places A 50-Year Old Vintage Valjoux Calibre 23-6 Into A Millesime

Raymond Weil has been on a proper run since the Millesime Small Seconds landed in 2023 and took the Challenge Watch Prize. That watch turned a lot of heads towards a brand not on most people’s radar. Now, they’re doing something kind of cool with the collection. Raymond Weil was started in 1976, which means they are celebrating 50 years. A major celebratory watch is the new Millesime The Fifty, a limited edition chronograph built around a Valjoux calibre 23-6 produced in 1976, the same year Raymond Weil was founded in Geneva. Fifty years, 50 pieces.

The stainless steel case is 37mm wide and 10.75mm thick, with a white gold bezel and curved lugs — proportions that sit squarely in vintage manual-wind chronograph territory and are better for it. Piston-style pushers, a large fluted crown, and alternating brushed and polished surfaces round out the case. A glass-box sapphire crystal sits on top. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The silvery-grey sector dial pulls from the same design language as the rest of the Millesime family. Four distinct levels give it genuine depth: a snailed tachymeter flange with precision track, a grained chapter ring with baton indices in green Super-LumiNova, a central zone divided into quarters with alternating horizontal and vertical gadroons, and two recessed snailed sub-dials at nine and three o'clock for running seconds and 30-minute counter. The blued, polished sub-dial hands match the central chronograph seconds hand; the hour and minute hands are obelisk-shaped with Super-LumiNova inlays. It's a lot going on, and it works.

It’s all about the movement for this one. The Valjoux 23-6 inside was manufactured in 1976, fully restored and hand-decorated, with Côtes de Genève on the bridges and balance cock finished in black ruthenium against blued screws. You get a column wheel, horizontal clutch, a 21,600vph beat rate, a 40-hour power reserve, and a clearly legible nine-column wheel visible through the caseback. The movement is manual wind, which is the only appropriate choice for something like this. The watch ships on a grey calfskin strap with prong buckle.

Raymond Weil The Fifty is limited to 50 pieces and priced at CHF 8,650. See more on the Raymond Weil website.

3/

Formex Releases Their 39.5mm Reef Diver In A Steel And Carbon Combination

Formex has been covering a lot of ground lately, from ceramic to meteorite dials to field watches in titanium. During that expansion, the Reef, their compact 39.5mm diver, has remained a steady constant and most likely their best seller. It’s a really cool dive watch. Now, it’s getting a new variant with a bit of forged carbon on the dial and the bezel insert.

The case is 39.5mm wide, 11mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 45.5mm. Those are genuinely good proportions for a diver with serious credentials. I mean, the lug-to-lug is already impressive, but the 11mm thickness with 300 meters of water resistance is just fantastic. The case is steel with the usual mix of brushed and polished surfaces, and on top is a unidirectional rotating bezel that has numerals engraved with a femtosecond laser and hand-filled with BGW9 grade A Super-LumiNova under a microscope.

More of the same carbon can be found on the dial. Forged carbon works differently from woven carbon fiber in one important respect: because the short fibers are compressed rather than laid in sheets, every dial comes out with its own surface pattern. No two are identical, and the depth of the material is better suited to a dive watch than it might sound. Formex built the dial on a black galvanic brass base, and the bevelled date window at 6 o'clock, a Reef signature, is retained.

Inside is the Sellita SW300-1, COSC-certified, with a 56-hour power reserve. The slimmer profile of the SW300-1 (versus the more common SW200) contributes directly to that 11mm case height. Strap options include steel bracelet, rubber, leather, and nylon, all with Formex's quick-release system. The forged carbon bezel insert is interchangeable with the brand's ceramic and steel options if you want to vary the look.

The Reef 39.5 Forged Carbon is available for pre-order now, with the first batch limited to 100 pieces, guaranteeing you a delivery date that begins in May, priced at €‌2,650. See more on the Formex website.

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This New Mr Jones Watch Gives You Permission To Daydream As Much As You Want

The fact that you know exactly what to expect from Mr Jones is only a good thing: a British artist, a novel time-telling method, limited numbers, and a price that makes the whole thing feel like a no-brainer. The Daydreamer is their latest, designed by London-based illustrator Murugiah, whose candy-bright, South Asian-inflected work you may know from collaborations with Apple, Elton John, and the Stanley Kubrick Estate.

The case is stainless steel, 37mm wide with a 46mm lug-to-lug — the same dimensions Mr Jones used on the Monster Melter 1904 back in February. It's a more filled-out, conventional shape than their older spindly-lug cases, which is now becoming the norm. Sapphire crystal on top. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is where Murugiah's world takes over. A threaded mandala pattern rotates continuously across the background, surrounded by colourful clouds, and at the center is Muru, an illustrated character who recurs throughout the artist's work. Muru drifts around the dial with the minutes — his position tells you where you are in the hour. A red petal points to the hours. It reads like a daydream is supposed to: you have to slow down to figure it out. Inside is a single jewel quartz movement and the watch comes on an 18mm stainless steel strap.

The Daydreamer launched today, April 2nd, and it’s limited to 300 pieces. At the time of writing, it wasn’t sold out. Price is set at £225 / $295 / €285. See more on the Mr Jones website.

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Credor Gets Ready For Their First Watches And Wonders With Three New Watches

Credor is a brand I find genuinely fascinating because it occupies a position in the watch world that almost no one else does. Grand Seiko gets the attention, but Credor is where Seiko's real ambition lives — ultra-thin movements, hand-applied artisanal techniques, and a level of finish that can go toe-to-toe with anything Geneva produces. And yet, does it get the attention that the Swiss get? I’m not so sure. Well, it seems that Credor wants to fix that because they are exhibiting at the Palexpo, the venue of Watches and Wonders, which is quite the statmeent to make outright. And they’re coming out strong with three watches ranging from a sports-adjacent Genta design to a platinum tourbillon with €195,000 on the tag,

Let’s start with the most discreet of the three, the Credor Goldfeather Urushi Lacquer Dial Limited Edition GBBY967. The Goldfeather line goes back to 1960 as a slim dress watch family, and this version earns the name: 37.4mm wide, 8.1mm thick, hand-polished platinum, and a deep blue urushi dial that's genuinely beautiful. Blue in urushi lacquer is rare. Credor's artisans build the color in layers, each applied at a different pigment saturation and left to dry before the next goes on, which produces the gradient — nearly black at the edges, lighter in the center. The surface is then polished with whetstone until it's glassy. On top of that, the hour markers and inscriptions are built up using taka maki-e, a maki-e variant where gold powder is typically sprinkled into wet lacquer to create raised designs. Here, the appliqués are coated in platinum powder instead, which keeps the palette consistent. Inside, you’ll find the calibre 6890, an ultra-thin mechanical movement measuring 1.98mm thick, beating at 21,600 vph with a 37-hour power reserve. That power reserve is modest, but at 1.98mm, the tradeoff is obvious. The watch comes on a black crocodile strap, platinum buckle. The Credor Goldfeather Urushi Lacquer Dial GBBY967 is limited to 25 pieces and priced at €39,000. See it here.

Moving on to the Credor Locomotive Dawn Blue GCCR995 which just keeps chugging along. The grey limited edition came first in 2024, then the green permanent model last year. Now there's a "dawn blue" version which gets the same hexagonal titanium case. The Locomotive is a faithful recreation of Gérald Genta's 1978 sketch, commissioned when Genta's regular visits to Japan led to a friendship with Seiko's Reijiro Hattori. It was ahead of its time when it launched in 1979 and it still looks unlike anything else.

The case is 38.8mm wide and 8.9mm thick, high-intensity titanium throughout. The hexagonal bezel is secured by six hexagonal screws. The crown sits at 4 o’clock with a ribbed hexagonal motif. Water resistance is 100 meters, sapphire crystal up top, closed caseback. The dial texture — small hexagons with a striped, woven finish that creates a honeycomb shimmer — carries over from the green version, but now in blue. The effect that the mixed shades of blue produce is great. There's a framed date at 3 o'clock. Inside is the calibre CR01, built on the Seiko 6L35 architecture, beating at 28,800 vph, with a 45-hour power reserve. The integrated titanium bracelet mirrors the case geometry with hexagonal mid-links and tapers to a three-fold clasp. Available June 2026 as a permanent collection piece, priced at JPY 1,980,000. International pricing is not confirmed yet, but a direct conversion from yen would put it at @10,750. More on the Credor website.

Last, we have the Credor Goldfeather Tourbillon Engraved Limited Edition GBCF997, which replaces the lacquer dial Goldfeather Tourbillon of last year with a completely new look that’s achieved with a radial grinding technique. The 38.6mm platinum case is 8.6mm thick, hand-polished throughout, and fitted with a flat sapphire crystal. On the dial, the radial grinding technique covers the surface in fine grooves that shift light rather than reflect it. The Roman numerals, engraved by hand, sit on a peripheral chapter ring. The minute track uses nanako engraving, the traditional Japanese technique of individually placed dots made with a round-tipped chisel. The tourbillon sits at 9 o'clock under a blued openworked bridge. The reverse is even more elaborate: a radiating linear engraving flows across four separate movement components, punctuated with nanako dots and an arashi pattern of individually stamped hexagonal dots. It is flamboyant in the best way. The movement is the calibre 6850 with a 60 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a black crocodile strap with a platinum buckle.The Credor Goldfeather Tourbillon Engraved Limited Edition GBCF997 is limited to 25 pieces and priced at €195,000. See more on the Credor 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

• Charles Bethea charts the cultural ascent of the “alpha male” and scrutinizes the bootcamps that promise to help men rise by beating them down. Those camps include RISE, a retreat held in the Blue Ridge Mountains where, according to promotional copy, “men come to fight for the life they crave,” and the short-lived Modern Day Knight Project, whose offshoot, the Squire Program, brings in fathers and sons for weight training, bizarre speeches, and tandem cold plunges. For a few of the young men in attendance, it’s a hellish weekend just to please dad. For some of the fathers, it seems to work. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

• Brendan I. Koerner’s dramatic profile of Rafael Concepcion—creator of DEICER, an app that enables its users to “report ICE locations and access resources”—explores the considerable costs of hypervigilance. Concepcion, a child of immigrants and a former teaching professor at Syracuse University, has spent much of the past year developing apps to help safeguard immigrants from sweeping immigration raids. In that time, he also lost his job, racked up a range of tech costs, and suffered through hacks and harassment, all stressors on his mental health. “He doesn’t have a moderate switch,” one source tells Koerner about Concepcion. “It’s either all in or all out.”

• In this piece for Aeon, historian Sadiah Qureshi discusses de-extinction technologies, from cloning the last Pyrenean ibex to gene-editing gray wolves to resemble dire wolves. The de-extinction industry, Qureshi writes, is quietly yet profoundly reshaping what it means for a species to be alive, extinct, or somewhere in between. In recent years, there’s been a growing movement of people who suggest that a species is not truly lost if their genetic material remains—they are simply “evolutionarily torpid,” frozen in a lab somewhere and stuck in a liminal state. Qureshi explores how this thinking “transforms extinction from a permanent loss into a temporary inconvenience we can choose to address later,” diverting attention and funding away from protecting species that are still alive. Instead, Qureshi argues, we need to rethink how we treat life on Earth now.

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Thanks for reading,
Vuk