Review: The First Pitzmann

Some people are very reserved, take no risks, want to play life on easy mode. Others live at the bleeding edge, taking whatever opportunity comes their way. These are the kinds of people who bought the first DVD players or OLED TVs. Funnily enough, one of the most accomplished countries in the world in making those things now is Korea, so it stands to reason that Korea could also give watchmaking a good old go as well. And here it is: the First Pitzmann, and it’s priced at $845. Risk or opportunity?

The Brand

Seoul Special City, the capital of South Korea—and now home to the Pitzmann watchmaking company. Whatever your preconceptions of Seoul, they’re most likely wrong. It’s a blend of cutting-edge city-living with tradition and natural beauty, basking in the shadows of the surrounding mountains. It’s rich in culture, both past and present, and with the export boom in class-leading technology, cars and cinema, it stands to reason that the people there would be pretty good at watchmaking too.

As the name of this watch suggests, this is the first one the Pitzmann team have created, but it’s far from the first time we’ve seen a microbrand from Asia. So how does Pitzmann cut through the noise to find a point of differentiation? First is the price. At $845, you’ll have to take my word on the value for now, because the second point is the simplicity. This watch doesn’t look like much. Many of the other Asian microbrands have grabbed eyeballs with crazy materials, designs and complications, and the Pitzmann does absolutely nothing to compete here. It doesn’t even have a date.

What the Korean outfit has chosen as its modus operandi instead is to—how do I put this—do it properly. Start simple, do it right. They’ve not overburdened themselves by machining cases from sapphire, fitting tourbillons or making a watch that looks like it came from space. Simple, classic design, well executed. Let’s see if they’ve achieved it.

The Design

When wristwatches first came on song in the 1930s, the go-to look and feel was one based on the watches that had come before: pocket watches. With the first watches small enough to fit in a pocket arriving sometime in the 14th century, by the time wristwatches like the Patek Philippe Calatrava came about, the processes used to make a pocket watch had been refined to the extreme. Clean enamel dials, sub-seconds, blued hands.

All of that stuff existed for reasons beyond simple good looks: the enamel dial provided a durable, chemically resistant, high-contrast surface smooth enough to accept pad printed markings, a process itself chosen over fiddly applied numerals for its ability to quickly produce large batches of dials.

Sub seconds, again, was chosen for simplicity, feeding straight from the fourth wheel behind the dial without requiring any extra parts. By comparison, central seconds requires a whole extra mechanism to transfer the seconds from the fourth wheel to the centre.

And then the blued hands, heat-treated to provide a layer of corrosion resistance without having to add heavy coatings which could hamper the performance of the watch. The dial could withstand enamelling, but the hands needed to stay light and agile so as not to overburden the movement.

So, it turns out that the typical pocket watch look came from both a need to manufacture high volumes efficiently and provide longevity, and it’s from those origins that Pitzmann draws. What that leaves on the table is the part of design that I consider the hardest to accomplish: proportions. If you’ve ever browsed pocket watches for sale, you’ll know what I mean. In a sea of white enamel dials with printed markers, sub-seconds and blued hands, some look right and some look wrong.

That’s what Patek Philippe Calatrava designer David Penney got so right, and it’s one of the pillars Pitzmann hopes to achieve with its first watch. Design on the whole comes down to subjectivity, but when it gets as simple as this, I personally believe there’s an undisputable truth to what works and what doesn’t.

It’s all in the micro-decisions: how thick to make the crown, how deep to make the knurling, how deep the bevel to cap it off. Get one of those things wrong and the rest of the watch suffers. Lug depth, width, taper, bevel, tip; bezel thickness, step, finish, height; the list goes on and on and on. Suffice to say, I think Pitzmann have made every one of those decisions with pinpoint precision. Within the 39 by 10mm perimeter of its steel case, it’s hard to find fault. No nibbled numbers, short hands or centre-weighted sub-dials here. Honestly, it’s a bit of a triumph.

The Quality

But we’ve got a problem. When the decision is taken to rely on very simple, very careful design, each part undergoes far more intense scrutiny. Take a Richard Mille for example, an overwhelming display of parts that leaves the viewers unable to focus attention on any one component without quickly being distracted by another. That’s far from the case here, the part number of the external components numbering less than ten.

That means cutting corners is completely off the table. So far, Pitzmann’s plan has seemed far simpler than the alternative, but this is the point where it could switch into becoming a complete pain in the backside. With all eyes lingering on the few components there actually are, we, the potential buyers, are going to want to see a lot to make that $845 worthwhile.

Now, you might be thinking that, hey, if they could make pocket watches like this hundreds of years ago and that the reasoning for doing it that way was to be more cost-effective, then it should be no problem now? Well, difference is that manufacturing techniques and materials have drastically evolved, and so the processes for producing components like this don’t exist in the volume they did even as recently as the 1950s.

So, Pitzmann has had to be a little creative. Some parts, like the blued steel hands, have to be done the old-fashioned way. They could have chosen painting or chemical bluing, but the results are far inferior. The real difficulty comes from the fact that no set of heat-blued hands are exactly the same, requiring uniform heating and pinpoint timing to achieve, so many are discarded—all adding to the cost.

For the enamelling, however, technology has moved on enough that the vitreous enamelling of old—a very delicate process with a high failure rate that involves firing up to ten layers of powdered glass—can be replaced by cold enamelling. Now, make no mistake, cold enamelling is still a skilful, labour-intensive process—just not to the same degree. Resin and hardener is carefully applied, and once cured, gives a glassy, semi-translucent appearance almost identical to vitreous.

You also get a double-domed sapphire with anti-reflective coating on the inside and anti-fingerprint coating on the outside, crafted to mimic the Perspex crystals of old whilst maintaining the scratch resistance of sapphire. There’s 100m of water-resistance, too, plus you can add a bracelet for another $70.

And what about the movement? The case back is solid, which seems like a bad sign. But instead of opting for a Chinese-made movement or similar, Pitzmann has played it safe and splashed out on a Swiss-made Sellita SW261 instead, chosen for its sub-dial placement. It’s an automatic with 38hrs of power reserve, hacking seconds and—well, it’s supposed to have a date, but of course Pitzmann have chosen not to use it.

Here’s a detail that tells you a little something about Pitzmann and about this watch: the date was ditched for true pocket watch aesthetic, so rather than leave all that functionality in the movement and just have no way to see it, Pitzmann chose to remove the date disc and mechanism, and modify the setting lever so there’s so crown position for the date anymore. That way you don’t get the horological equivalent of the blank button cover in a car that’s missing an optional extra.

Add all this up and what you get is a watch that’s doing a pretty good job for $845. To give you a bit of a comparison, the Swiss made Louis Erard Émail Grand Feu with blued steel hands, enamel dial—vitreous enamelling, this time—and the same Sellita movement costs $4,000. Choose that watch with a standard, non-enamel dial and you’re still looking at $1,500. So, it seems Pitzmann have put in an enormous amount of effort and consideration to convince you and me that Korean watchmaking should be taken seriously, whilst also throwing in a surprisingly tempting price to boot. So, what do you think? Risk or opportunity?