In The Shop – Shop Spotlight: One Watch In The Shop I Can’t Stop Thinking About
Why, hello there! It’s nice to meet you – I’m Cait, and you may have noticed my byline starting to pop up in the HODINKEE shop beginning last October. While I may be a relatively new voice here, I’ve been around the industry for almost a decade at half a dozen publications, both digital and print.
As one of the few female voices in watches, I’ve often found myself tasked with writing about ladies’ watches, and in those instances, I was encouraged to embrace my female perspective – to give a woman’s take on a woman’s product. Makes sense, right? But today, inspired by my colleague Cara’s astute and poignant essay earlier this week, I’m here to wax poetic about a model that’s tugged at my heartstrings ever since a lecture at the Horological Society of New York in 2019 – spoiler alert, it’s considered a “men’s watch” and one with technical prowess to boot – The Grand Seiko Spring Drive.
At the time I attended the lecture, I hadn’t written much about Grand Seiko and, candidly, wasn’t too familiar, but afterward, I was smitten. A man named Joseph Kirk (who holds the very impressive title of Brand Curator and National Trainer for Grand Seiko Corporation of America) guided us through the development of Spring Drive from a technical perspective – ushering me into the complex yet poetic world of this incredible hybrid movement.
The clincher came in the final portion of the lecture when Kazunori Hoshino (Product Planner and Designer of Seiko Epson Corporation) drove home the Japanese ethos found in Spring Drive’s design, all led by the guiding principle: There must be beauty in functionality.
Complex, Yet Poetic
High-frequency mechanical watches, as well as quartz watches, first began to rise in popularity in the 1970s. A benefit of a well-crafted, high-frequency watch is stability, which can help reduce the margin of error and the impact of outside factors, like shock or temperature. However, the downside of high-frequency mechanical watches is the added wear-and-tear and, with quartz, the limitations of the battery. So, a Grand Seiko engineer named Yoshikazu Akahane set out to, in essence, create the “perfect watch,” combining the best of both worlds – the never-ending power source of a mechanical watch with a unidirectional regulation system using …read more
