TRADE SECRETS

Close out the year in watchmaking with some honest observations from us

- ASHOK SOMAN

What you are holding in your hands is a specialist magazine. It is all about watches, from cover to cover, all of the time. If you are a regular reader, you probably noticed that and it is probably why you stayed regular. It is certainly why I read specialist titles. WOW is also about the watch industry, broadly speaking, which means some might call it a trade title. Well, in our last gasp at real talk before the new watches of 2025 blow our minds, I wanted to get some things off my chest, the first of which has to do with the above claim on specialist versus trade. This is really a matter of semantics and I hope you will agree that it is irrelevant. I am simply glad that we still have an audience, whatever proportion of tradespeople and collectors it might be.

Luckily, people are still interested in what we have to say about watches and, believe it or not, it continues to surprise me that this interest extends beyond professional meetings.

This lightweight confession aside, this column is really about honest, well, asides. Originally, it was my editor’s note because this kind of story is hard to illustrate and the editor’s note does not need pictures. See, more facts and truth, all wrapped up in the concept of trade secrets! Well, I busted the word count for that note so that plan went south faster than the Harris-Walz ticket on election night. Of course, I had a lot of words that I had written and needed to use, and there were these four free pages…