Issue 158: Everyone's Trying To Be Cool
AP's pop song; Urban Jurgensen's launch party; Chrono24's rebrand; Blancpain's Swatchification
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is going back to its roots and critiquing the week. I’ve been so busy with other projects like the podcast, the Independent Watchmaking Report (info below if you’ve missed it) and for my own sanity, I stepped away from reading literally all watch media every week in order to have Solemn Opinions about it all. But this week is a pick-and-mix buffet of reaction and analysis. For your delectation and edification we have:
Urban Jurgensen: are indie watches cool now? Chrono24’s awkward rebrand (with bonus Fratello content). Audemars Piguet commissions pop songs. Has Blancpain spent too much time with Swatch?
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
An Evening With Oris
Next Friday, June 20th, as part of London Watch Week, I am hosting a little event in Oris’s boutique. I’ll be speaking with CEO Rolf Studer about the recently-announced Holstein edition, the year so far, and, well, whatever else comes up. We will also be joined by watch customisation artist Chris Alexander, aka The Dial Artist, for reasons I cannot fully disclose and are therefore impossible to deduce! He’ll be doing a live demo, and we’ll have a chat about his work.
If you’re free, come along and say hi. You have to get a general access ticket for the overall event and then RSVP for the talk via London Watch Week, which you can do HERE. It’s all free - the jumping through hoops is to make sure we don’t have 500 people turn up. Or just five. I’d love it if any of you could come down - it starts at 6pm at the Oris boutique on South Molton St.
Available Now: The Independent Watchmaking Report 2025
Two weeks ago I announced this industry-first, a 6500 word, 25-page in-depth report on independent brands. It’s packed with data on everything from production volumes and commercial strategy to communication priorities and investment opportunities. If you work in the watch world, and want to know what’s really going on at the most dynamic and fast-moving segment of the industry, you need to read it.
Watch brands that have seen the report so far are saying it's "fantastic", "a valuable report" and "extremely insightful" with "a wealth of relevant and valuable information".
The report can be purchased now: paying subscribers to TFW get a 50% discount. Please email fourthwheelmedialtd@gmail.com to order your copy.
Chrono24-Hour Party People
A few days ago, Chrono24 started teasing “something big” on its social channels. “Three days to go! Are you as excited as we are?” it asked breathlessly, under a big white number 3. In a comment - now deleted, one assumes by Chrono24 - one follower had written bluntly ‘how can we be excited when we have no idea what you’re talking about?’
I’m not saying I’m psychic, but at this point I knew whatever this was would be bullshit. At the very least, it would underwhelm. The rest of the comments (apart from the strings of emojis) will have made for awkward reading, at least if whoever’s manning C24’s socials has any self-awareness, as they listed all the legitimately interesting things the marketplace platform could be about to announce. Bricks and mortar retail! Auction listings! Reduced fees! One user, presumably in the spirit of not letting expectations get out of hand, simply wanted a ‘dark mode’ for the app.
Instead we got a rebrand: a new logo, and an ad campaign that can only really be described as ‘sub-Jaguar’. Titled ‘Time Is Our Thing’ it shows a group of mostly twenty-somethings in highly stylised pseudo-real life situations against soft, pastel, featureless backdrops. As they play chess1, or pool, or ride their imaginary metro with no carriage, they conspicuously flaunt Royal Oaks, Monacos and Rolexes. But most online reaction has - inevitably, in 2025 - centred on the people themselves.
Simply casting an ethnically diverse, gender-balanced group of models for an advert shouldn’t necessarily take us straight into identity politics and culture wars - but such was the reaction to Jaguar’s re-brand advert that this lives in its shadow. For what it’s worth, I think the watch world could stand to be a lot more diverse, but it would be nice to see that in the actual businesses, initiatives and institutions, rather than just in the advertising.
Whether you think diverse casting is long overdue or insufferably tokenistic, the real strike against Chrono24’s ad was that it was bland and devoid of substance. I’ve watched it half a dozen times and it’s just exactly the kind of empty blather about buying time that everyone should avoid like the devil2. (I mean, even taken at face value, if you’re spending your disposable income on watches you’re not spending it on experiences and good times, you’re spending it on a selfish habit.) So, absent any real message, the audience has fixated on the aesthetics instead. Apparently it’s meant to be about ‘community’, but no-one thought to tell the copywriter.
On that note, there’s a bit in the ad where it says “At Chrono24, you can take your time, be on time, forget the time, be on time, or be ahead of the times” and for ‘ahead of the times’ it cuts to a man kneeling down, proposing to his partner. I like how it’s apparently super-woke and diverse (in the eyes of its critics in particular) and simultaneously not brave enough to show anything other than the most traditional proposal scene between a heterosexual couple. Oh, wait, he’s using a watch to propose! So modern.
Anyway, it could have been so much better, and all you’d need to do would be talk to some real life, actual members of ‘the watch community’. Weirdly Chrono24 did exactly that, reaching out to Kristian Haagen, Scarlett Baker, Justin Hast and Shamila Bertin, but made nothing of that expertise.
However, this is my opinion as someone deeply embedded in the watch world, and the tension here is that if Chrono24 is to succeed it needs to appeal to an audience that doesn’t know any of those four names. I still think it’s a bland and empty campaign, but if you consider its purpose as acquiring mainstream market share rather than addressing the faithful, it takes on a new dimension. Personally, I’d have gone for something much more direct and to the point, focussing on really hammering brand recognition rather than going down the wishy-washy emotional route, but all the watch geeks laying into it need to remember that it’s not really aimed at them; the problem with that is that a) they’re the most likely to see it and b) its their opinion that will influence the casual consumer.
In the last three years Chrono24 has seen its billion-dollar IPO hopes dashed on the altar of falling prices, appointed new management and made at least two substantial rounds of redundancies, the most recent in January for around a quarter of all staff. It has set itself the target of being the biggest pre-owned watch seller in every market in the world by 2029, so while this rebrand might seem like fluff, and poking fun at it might seem a) easy and b) inconsequential 3, it is the first step of a very ambitious strategy.
Bonus Fratello content: as it’s owned by the same company as Chrono24, Fratello was under a three-line whip to post a dull, PR-generated ‘news’ story about the rebrand. The big mistake was a) forgetting - again! - to add a disclaimer about the corporate relationship and b) leaving the comments on, so the culture-war bots can argue with each other. D’oh! Robert-Jan Broer, editor of Fratello, promptly added a line at the end of the article but honestly, guys, come on. At the time of writing, Fratello’s ‘Pre-Owned Picks’ articles, which haven’t been added to since March, are still full of recommended Chrono24 listings without a single disclaimer between them. It’s bad enough being Omega’s unofficial media department; as one comment succinctly put it, this is the kind of thing that eroded trust in Hodinkee.
Patrons Of The Arts
So Audemars Piguet is moonlighting as a record label now? Well, sort of. It appears to have basically commissioned a track from its ambassador Mark Ronson and singer Raye (introducing her as an ambassador at the same time). You can read a little bit about it here, by Esquire.
I can’t figure out exactly how I feel about this one. My knee-jerk reaction is that it’s daft, and that corporate art is inherently bogus and soulless. I don’t understand in what meaningful sense AP is actually involved - if it paid them to write a song in its honour, does that mean someone at a watch company actually had a degree of sign-off on a piece of pop music?
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