Intersect, Switzerland, and Meeting More People

This is a super-short update, so here goes.

Cheap tickets for short flights rock. I found a sub-$100 ticket to go down to Los Angeles for the day and jumped on it. Why? Intersect Los Angeles, of course.

I love watch shows. They’re the ultimate nerd meetups; I hung out on the couches in the back for a half hour and ended up talking about everything from watch movements to real-world dive testing with three different people.

This time though, I had a more specific motive. I wanted to meet with the reps from two brands who have ateliers in Switzerland.

Why? Well, I’m headed for Zurich on Saturday and while this is a vacation with my lovely wife, I fully intend to get away with some watch-related activities.

My wife said I could. Love you babes.

So I wanted to arrange some conversations while I’m there. I’ll be going to Bienne, will swing by the Musée international d'horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds, visit the Oris factory in Holstein, and maybe hit up a couple of other places. It would be great to have those meetings with certain people scheduled while I’m there.

Possible? We shall see. The map above has my bucket list, but my wife only has so much patience for waylaying our one vacation a year.

Also, I do have a bigger update coming from Intersect, but here’s something very interesting I learned from James Mulvale of Farer.

We were chatting about the Elaboré-grade Sellita SW536 M MP movement movement in their new monopusher GMT watches and I was marveling at the decoration of the movement. That kinda led into this conversation about the breadth and depth of variety when it comes to the skills involved in watch manufacturing in Switzerland.

“You might have this one shop in Switzerland that’s really good at making dials,” James told me. “But then you might have this other place that’s really good at painting the dials and so the dial maker might go, ‘Hey, I’ll send you my dials to paint.’ And then there might be this other place that’s amazing at putting lume on so you want to send the dials on to that person. There’s this depth of singular skills you find in Switzerland that you can’t find anywhere else.”

It is, I realized, a geographically spread-out assembly line that stretches across maybe a hundred or more miles. In fact, there’s this region in Switzerland called the “Watch Valley” - some of the towns in the map above are in that zone - that houses probably the single greatest concentration of watch know-how in the world.

This is the sort of thing you can expect to see more of in the coming months on I&M. I hope you’re as excited about it as I am.