Rescapement: A fine newsletter about important watches.

Rescapement is dedicated to providing in-depth articles and unimportant opinions about important vintage and modern watches. It’s driven purely by by passion and dedicated to one thing: making you, the consumer a more informed enthusiast, and collector. Not brands, press releases, trade shows, or selling watches from our shop. We’re committed to fostering a community of enthusiasts, sharing knowledge and a passion for these mechanical wonders.

As we dove into the deep end of horology, we noticed a significant gap in the way watches are written and talked about online. Most sites have one of two business models, and neither put the collector first:

(1) Serve as extended P.R. departments of brands, regurgitating press releases without any real analysis or commentary. For example, this is what Watchville looked like when Omega launched the new “James Bond” Seamaster in December 2019:

But really, this shot could’ve been taken a few hours after any brand puts out a press release and lifts the press embargo on a new product.

(2) Create editorial content that, directly or indirectly, drives sales in the publication’s shop. In this model, publications create content related to brands the publication also happens to be selling in its affiliated shop. This is a more subtle but equally insidious publication model.

In either model, incentives are at best unclear to the reader–consumer, and at worst completely misaligned to their best interests. Readers are unclear if they’re reading genuine or paid content or unsure if they’re reading commentary that’s placed to drive traffic to an online shop. Add to this the fact that most sites are ill-equipped to discuss how technology is impacting the world of watches and how it may be leveraged to cover this world, and we saw an opportunity to add a different voice to the horological landscape.

Lost in the models is what’s most important: the enthusiast community. We love watches, but love the stories they tell and the people that wear them even more. So we’ve dedicated this website not to brands, trade shows or limited edition releases, but to the collector.

The mechanical watch industry is flourishing, but many sites still make information inaccessible for newcomers. Rescapement is changing that. We’re constantly creating simple, easy-to-understand guides to help newbies make their first new or vintage mechanical watch purchase.

Much like clocks moved from our walls to our pockets to our wrists as the technology required to tell time was reduced in size, computing is now in the midst of the same shift. In the span of just a generation, we’ve moved from each house having one family computer with a groaning AOL hookup to individuals having a number of personal computing devices, all of varying sizes. But there’s something uniquely intimate about strapping a gadget to your wrist: you’re constantly glancing down at it, begging it to tell you that boring meeting is almost over or that you’ve still got a few minutes to cram before that exam. Over the last century, mechanical watch makers have uniquely cultivated a love affair between their watches and the humans purchasing them. Now, as technology companies have seemingly crept into every aspect of our lives, they seek to conquer the final frontier: the human body itself. Meanwhile, mechanical watchmaking has experienced a resurgence, likely in part as a backlash to technology seeping into every aspect of our lives. Whatever the future has in store, we’ll be here to cover it.

Rescapement was started by me, Tony. I’m a young attorney in Chicago with a love for mechanical watches. If you’ve got questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to me.