30 Aug
Unveiled BaselWorld Watches – Tag Heuer & Bulova
Just a while back the most exciting week for the watch industry ended, leaving in its wake a trail of enthusiasts simply itching for more. BaselWorld 2010 is the world’s largest jewelry and watch show with 1,952 exhibitors, representatives from 100+ nations and 3,000 journalists reporting it all. Located in the quiet town of Basel in Switzerland (go figure) people flock to the show in droves.
Watch makers from all four corners come together in March for, often, the busiest week of their year. Many brands cite BaselWorld as the single most important event or thing they do year around and conducting almost 50 percent of their sales during those seven days.
While those numbers are impressive, perhaps one of the most important and exciting aspects of BaselWorld are the “unveilings.” Often, BaselWorld becomes luxury watchmakers’ playground where they show off their new toys and creations.
One highly anticipated piece this year was Tag Heuer’s Concept Pendulum for its Grand Carrera line. This revolutionary timepiece’s unveiling coincides with Tag’s 150 year anniversary and is the first of its kind to ever be made. The Pendulum, a mechanical watch, was made without an essential part, the hairspring – instead the hairspring was replaced with four-high performance magnets. Again, it is the first mechanical watch to ever be made without a hairspring. The lack of hairspring also allows the watch better precision and stability as gravity no longer affects the watch‘s movements as severely.
Another anticipated watch unveiled at BaselWorld was Bulova’s Precisionist line for its quartz watches. Quartz watches are battery powered, allowing them to be more reasonably priced and accurate. While mechanical and automatic watches, like the Tag mentioned above, depend on winding the piece to get its hundreds of internal gears moving, quartz use battery power to accomplish the task. Most quartz watches are accurate to plus or minus 15 seconds per month. The Bulova Precisionist includes a third prong to the normal two prong quartz crystal which results to a watch that is accurate to +/- 10 seconds a year. For those interested, the collection will be available for retail in the fall and will have a suggested range of $299 to just under $1,000.
The author has a passion for high end items, which usually are well out of her price range. Instead she indulges her love of high end, specifically watches, at Opus Watch, an affordable yet high end watch retailer.
Interested in getting a Bulova? Try this Bulova Accutron for size. First used by NASA for the most accurate time measurements available, this piece would be a great edition to any wrist and won’t break the bank at just under $200.






