Tim and Bart Grönefeld
One of my favorite meetings three years now attending Baselworld has to be with Grönefeld. These two Dutch brothers from Oldenzaal, are cool and warm and always have a cold beer ready to offer you, while discussing some of most interesting independent watches anywhere, in the most relax settings.
The GPHG 2016 winner for best men's watch, the Grönefeld 1941 Remontroire is an 8 seconds constant force escapement movement, intricately hand-finished with mirror-polishing and gold chatons; using a beautifully and classically crafted case, standing at 39.5 mm wide and 10.5 mm high. The dressy two-hander with seconds subdial at 6 o'clock comes in a variation of dial color combinations.
While the Grönefelds will take your bespoke order for the dial and the stitching on the strap to match, the watch is limited overall to 188, as the horological brothers have caped the movement production.
During this visit, the brothers showed me two exemplars. First a bespoke, here using a hand guilloché red dial in white gold case. You pick your color and order your watch and the brothers will work with Kary Voutilainen to produce a unique dial and watch for you.
And second, part of the Grönefeld 1941 main collection, and one of my dream dress watches: the salmon dial, which is silver blasted with brass on white gold with blue alligator strap.
The brothers make less than 20 watches a year and the basic 1941 starts at just around € 50,000 in white gold or red gold and just below € 45,000 in stainless steel. gronefeld.com
One of the winners in the 2019 GPHG awards in the first week of November was a two year old upstart watch brand from Kuala Lumpur named MING Watches. The young brand won best watch in the Challenge category at the Geneva show to the delight of its founder and watch aficionados who have regularly helped sell out the brand’s 11 prior releases since its debut of the 17.01 watch.
MING watches are not limited per we but are produced in small batches of a few hundreds, which in effect make them limited. A quick perusal to their web site shows that all models, except for the two new 2019 models have sold out. Interestingly the new models are also priced much higher than the previous ones. However, before getting ahead of ourselves, how does one go about seeing or trying on a MING watch?