NH35A

All of our models feature mechanical movements. This means that your watch will be powered by you: either by wearing it (in the case of automatic/self-winding movements), or by winding it via the crown (handwound/manual-wind).

There are no batteries, but hundreds of miniature components working together. By nature, it's several magnitudes more expensive to manufacture compared to a typical battery-operated quartz watch, and it won't be as accurate in timekeeping (though accurate enough for every day), but there is a poetry to knowing that your watch will be ticking as long as you are.

This is why we choose to use the SII (Seiko Instruments Inc.) NH35A movement for all of our models: to make a watch that can truly go anywhere, one that is well-engineered, well-designed, and well-priced. It will require much less maintenance and will fail at much lower rates compared to any Swiss movement. Due to its relatively lower beat rate (6 beats per second), it will also last longer without servicing. The NH35A is also popular enough that any spare parts will be available for several decades. But most importantly, it can keep time just as well any entry-level Swiss mechanical. 

It boasts an outstanding heritage as well. Its predecessor, the Seiko 7S26, was used in the now-iconic Seiko SKX007, one of the most popular and reliable automatic watches in recent history. Better yet, the only real drawback to the 7S series was addressed with the NH35A: it hacks (the second hand stops when setting time), and handwinds (it can be manually wound using the crown, instead of only through the wearer's movement).

It's easy to dismiss the NH35A for its affordability and simplicity, but we believe that there's an elegance and ingenuity in its straightforward engineering. Its magic lever system is an exceptional case of doing more with less. For the person who places functionality above status, the NH35A is the obvious choice.