Hello fellow watch nerds! It’s Chris Rovzar, editor of Bloomberg Pursuits, here with another movement-based missive. 

Today the Wind Up Watch Fair begins in Chicago, where dozens of international watchmaking brands will showcase their wares to thousands of enthusiasts. I won’t be there, but I hope some of you are planning to go check it out. Did you know that the greater Chicago area was once one of the world’s great watchmaking hubs? Elgin National Watch Co., an early leading producer of wristwatches, was founded there before moving to nearby Elgin, Illinois, and many other important companies were in operation in the region around a century ago.

For this newsletter, I chatted with a guy who is thoughtfully trying to help bring that tradition of watchmaking back to America—and Chicago in particular. John Warren and his wife, Chrissy, launched Cornell Watch Co. just over a year ago, based on the defunct Gilded Age pocket watch maker of the same name. They are thinking a lot about establishing a reputation for American timepieces—and they are not alone.

The Hampden Sullivan ($1,800) has a removable casecap that can be personalized, or stowed away in case you’d rather admire the Swiss movement inside. Source: Hampden

I’ve spoken to a lot of watch startups based in the US over the years, and the range of what people are trying to do is wide. Also in Chicago, Hampden Watch is a fourth-generation family business that’s showing a new line of wares this week at Wind Up. (You can read a bit more about what they do here in an article I recently wrote about personalization.) In California, J.N. Shapiro is making some incredible watches almost entirely in his own workshop; it’s an insanely ambitious proposition, and it’s growing. In St. Louis, Monta is using Swiss suppliers to create watches for an American market that look and feel like the best of the land of chocolate and cheese.

The Papar Anillo, a re-imagined GMT, in steel. ($750) Source: Papar Watch Co.

In the Berkshires in Massachusetts, Josh and Emily Blank are trying to re-invent the GMT with the Papar Anillo. (Click back to this old newsletter and scroll down to read my chat with Josh.) RGM makes custom watches in Pennsylvania and are a pioneer in this space. Colorado’s Vortic is crafting wonderful wristwatches out of old American pocket watches. And of course there is the behemoth Shinola, which assembles watches in Detroit in a complex that’s fun to visit and even has a chic hotel. After the Apple Watch, Shinola has probably done the most to get watches back on American wrists. 

Nobody makes their watches entirely in the US, not even the $100,000 Trump tourbillon, although J.N. Shapiro comes very very close—about 99% of their Resurgence pieces are “Made in America.” But all of these companies, and many more, are beginning to chip away at the idea that if you want to buy a great watch stateside, it has to be fundamentally Swiss. And I think that’s very fun. 

Behind Cornell Watch Co.

John Warren got into watch collecting while in college—but not wristwatches, because he couldn’t really afford the good ones. Instead, he devoted himself to collecting less coveted (and therefore cheaper) pocket watches. Specifically, ones made by the Cornell Watch Co., which had been founded in 1870 just a few miles south from his alma mater, the University of Chicago. Eventually, he and Chrissy amassed what they believe to be the largest collection of Cornell pocket watches in the world.

John Warren. Source: Cornell Watch Co.

“Fast forward to 2021, during Covid, we were like, ‘It'd be really cool if we could create a wristwatch version of this,’” Warren told me in an interview earlier this week. “So we partnered up with RGM in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we created the 1870, our first model. It took almost two years of prototyping, but we got it out last May.”

They sold a few handfuls of the $11,950 watches to friends, family and folks on the internet—and got a good response. So Chrissy and John decided to get even more ambitious with their second model, Lozier, which will roll out later this year. “This model represents us trying to figure out how do we manufacture a watch in the US that meets or exceeds Swiss quality in this price range,” John says. “That was an enormous challenge.”

They used Kern five-axis CNC machines located in Columbus, Ohio to make the case and dial, and had custom typography and numerals drawn up in Europe. The result is a slim, 37.4mm time-only watch which uses a Sellita SW-300-1 b movement with a 56-hour power reserve and will retail for $6,200. The for-sale window is narrow—you can only register to buy one on the website from now until July 16.

The $6,200 Lozier by Cornell Watch Co. has an elegant dial layout. I like the custom numeral font, but the logo lettering is too tiny to be legible. Photographer: Chris Rovzar/Bloomberg

Here’s more of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Are you happy with where the price point ended up?

I’m happy with it. It’s complicated because we don’t run typical watch company margins, which can be 300% to 20,000%. For cooling electricity to run the machines—not even tooling or labor—we’re running between $200 and $300 in an hour. So I think the price point makes a lot of sense.

A lot of people are like, “How does a steel watch from Chopard cost $25,000?” Well, I can tell you machining the cases alone costs a thousand bucks. I like the idea that we can deliver a $6,200 watch with finishings and machining that you would see only in a really high-end watch.

How are sales going? Orders have been open for three weeks.

I would say that over 50% of the orders right now are from Chicago. People really love the Chicago part of it. We are forecasting around a hundred timepieces, and we’re trending towards that right now.

Tell me about Chicago’s watchmaking history.

So Chicago as a watchmaking hub wasn’t exactly downtown; there weren’t a ton of companies that were located in the business district. However, in the suburbs and the surrounding communities like Hyde Park, you had like the Cornell Watch Co.—they made only 18,000 watches or so, they weren’t a global player—and you also had companies like Elgin, the biggest watch company in the world for years. You had Rockford, which is only an hour away. You had the Illinois Watch Company down South; you had the South Bend Watch Company in Indiana. Illinois made more watches for a period of time in the late 1800s than anywhere in the world.

The Lozier is slim, at 8.5mm tall, and is made from a steel three-piece construction. It’s hand-finished. Photographer: Chris Rovzar/Bloomberg

Chicago was a connector to the rest of the country. The rail lines were critical to the industrial force of Chicago. On the rail lines, pocket watches were a necessity. And so you saw a lot of high-end watchmaking being done in Illinois to service that need. Precision was critical.

Why did watchmaking leave Chicago for the most part?

Elgin, Hamilton, Waltham—they were the big players in American watchmaking. They all kind of went away together. And that was because they effectively priced each other out. The Swiss said, “Okay, we’re gonna adopt the American system of manufacturing so that we can automate and have interchangeable parts, but we’re gonna put our own spin on it and make it higher-end and keep doing Swiss finishing and decorating.” 

That meant lower volume, but higher quality. That ultimately ended up being the right move because the American brand was, “We’re about value.” And so the Americans kept undercutting each other. Margins got razor thin and that ultimately put them out of business. That and the fact that during the wars, they committed all their efforts to the war, where the Swiss were neutral, and they basically got a stronghold in the American market.

Do you see a future where Chicago returns as a watchmaking hub?

Chicago represents an interesting intersection of this industrial past, but also this sophistication in art and culture that you see in architecture, that you see in our art museums, that you see in our institutions like Northwestern and U of C. And that you even see in the pride around the city, like with our sports teams. I think that feeds into supporting Chicago businesses and especially Chicago businesses that embrace the industrial—yet more culturally significant—past. And so I think the future of watchmaking in Chicago can be really bright. 

The Lozier has a proportions that are easily scaled up and down, so it feels very unisex, say the company founders. To me, the size is already perfect. Photographer: Chris Rovzar/Bloomberg

What’s the long-term vision for Cornell? What’s a company that you would admire that you’d like to be like in terms of size and scope and price point?

The German brands like Glashütte Original provide a nice case study and framework. Also a brand like Grand Seiko is an inspiration. These guys are kind of fighting the same fight. They’re fighting against years and years of goodwill about what the phrase “Swiss Made” means.

So this is your full-time job, but Chrissy, your wife and co-founder, is still working as an investment banker. How do you work as a team? 

First of all, Lozier is Chrissy’s maiden name. Also, I think a lot of Swiss watch brands are weighed down with their legacy male-centric models. With Chrissy doing this together with me, we have the perspective that we should be creating unisex legacy models, which I think is an advantage.

Women make up 40% of luxury watch sales now. We are not beholden to the Submariner or the Rolex Explorer or the Daytona or the Moonwatch. Those are all really male-centric achievements. Other brands must keep making watches that look and feel like that. You can’t really downsize those watches for different wrists—it doesn’t look right. We don’t have a legacy portfolio yet, so all of our watches will have a unisex quality to them.

What is it about the Lozier that’s unisex?

The proportions. So the Lozier is 37.4mm. The lug to lug is 46.8mm. The lug width is 22mm. It has very similar proportions to early Calatravas; not just Patek, but like Omega, Hamilton. This watch is actually the bigger version; a smaller version with the same proportions is coming. The proportions need to be able to be scaled up and scaled down and still keep symmetry and look good.

This month’s reader watch is a sister watch to one of my own. When cheeky British microbrand Studi0 Underd0g announced that they were launching a limited series of Av0cado and Guacam0le timepieces, based on some copycats they’d spotted of their previous fruit watches, my old college friend and I immediately started texting.

“You get the avocado, I’ll get the guacamole,” said my pal, the Hollywood actor/director Satya Bhabha. We counted down to the watch drop together, even though we live on other sides of the country, and pounced when they went live—each securing our desired snack-based watch.

The Studi0 Underd0g Guacam0le chronograph. Source: Satya Bhabha/Bloomberg

Whenever someone compliments my own Av0cado, I think of Satya and get to talk about this silly little fruit adventure we went on together. (Here’s mine, by the way. I absolutely love it.)

The Studi0 Underd0g Av0cado. Photographer: Chris Rovzar/Bloomberg

That’s it for this week! Please send us your questions and your own reader watches at watchclub@bloomberg.net.