The Story Behind Unimatic's New Dive Watch, Which Sold Out in Under a Minute
It’s a well-known saying in the watch market that “the true collector cries when he buys.” That's usually in reference to the flood of emotion triggered by the prospect of owning a much-desired timepiece. Today, though, I’ll wager it was a more apt description of the many folks who were sobbing into their Corn Flakes because they didn’t manage to snap up one of the tiny 99-piece run of Unimatic’s latest special edition—the Modello Uno U1-ML6—created with watch guru William Massena. It sold out in less than a minute.
Unimatic is the product of Giovanni Moro and Simone Nunziato, two young guys from Milan who like watches. In just five years, it has become one of those rare watch brands that manages to combine authentic design and impressively accessible prices. Most of Unimatic’s watches sell in the region of $600-700 new, but frequently reach far higher in the secondary market—as good a sign of value as anything. Limited numbers for sure help achieve that cachet, but fans of Unimatic are as into wearing the watches themselves as they are into their rare-as-hen's-teeth scarcity.
Unimatics are heavy. There’s a lot of steel in there, which means you have an immediate sense of value the moment you slap one on your wrist. But it's about more than heft. “Their design is amazing” says Massena. “If you look at Unimatic, they did something that is really very hard to do: They took existing elements of watch design and they incorporated them into their own new watches. They did it very well, and it's very tasteful."
“They really took a minimalist approach to an idea of watches, and they really worked out as much what to leave out as what to put in," Massena says. "It reminds me of Swatch 30 years ago, when I first started collecting watches. Swatch came out and started a collector’s mania for watches that only cost 30 Swiss Francs. Unimatic are doing the same thing, albeit in their own price rage. They have their own community of collectors.”
Massena got into the watch industry—like many a collector-turned-watch-entrepreneur—from banking. Having run Timezone (one of the earliest online watch communities) and later Antiquorum (the first auction house to specialize in vintage watches), Massena has an omniscient view of the watch industry. Massena Lab is his current passion, creating tiny batches of watches for himself and his friends. Having designed a couple of watches for little known Austrian brand Habring that were a little shy of $6,000, Massena turned to the much more accessible Unimatic to offer the Modello Uno U1-ML6 for just $850.
“I can tell you, as a guy who comes from expensive watches, the quality is really there," he says. "The bezel is solid. The click when you turn it is good. The cases are great. It doesn’t look or feel like a cheaply made watch.” And from the outset, Massena and the Unimatic boys were clear about what this new watch would feel like.
“The idea was to do a watch that would look and feel like a watch made if Unimatic existed in the '50s, as if Giovanni and Simone’s grandparents had started the company," Massena says. "The watch is inspired by the Rolex dive watch Sean Connery wore in Dr. No. I was looking at diving watches from that period, and some of them have developed a unique, natural, dark brown patina that watch collectors refer to as 'tropical' over time." The galvanized dials of the ML6 are the product of an accelerated aging process that creates a unique patina so that no one dial is like another.
Unimatic’s growing following is proof that you don’t have to make six figure tourbillons to build an enthusiastic and knowledgeable fan base. “I think, increasingly, you have little clusters of like-minded individuals who are very interested in very particular watches and we need to feed that enthusiasm," says Massena. "Brands need to adapt to feed those communities. Right now, 'limited edition' is a tone-deaf response to the market from a lot of big brands who just pump out limited editions of everything. Design and authenticity are more and more important."
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