Collecting: Why I Chose the Zeitwinkel 273° Saphir Fumé

Since I picked up the Zeitwinkel 273° Saphir Fumé in the fall of last year, I’ve been meaning to write something about it. It’s an incredible watch, probably the best I’ve owned, and I feel lucky to have it. That’s a strange thing to say, I know. I’m sure Zeitwinkel would happily sell this watch to anyone who was willing to provide the agreed upon amount of money – luck doesn’t really have that much to do with it. But there are things about this watch that are special and set it apart from other watches I’ve owned that make having it in my watch box and on my wrist a unique pleasure. 

This isn’t an owner’s review, because what I really want to talk about with respect to the 273° aren’t the specs, or the finishing, or even the experience of wearing it (all are great, by the way). What I want to talk about is the strange route I took to focusing on Zeitwinkel and picking the 273°. It echoes, I think, the piece I wrote at the end of last year for our “My Year in Watches” series, where I talked about a renewed focus on independent brands. Zeitwinkel is about as independent as it gets, and that’s a big reason why this watch resonates with me – it reflects the very specific interests of the brand founders, and represents a certain no-compromises approach to watchmaking that can’t easily be found with brands owned by big luxury groups, and certainly not at the price point of the 273°. 

I’ll be honest here and admit that I was largely unfamiliar with Zeitwinkel at the beginning of 2024. I had written an article about their collaboration with CronotempVs back in 2022, but they had not been a brand that was on my radar in a major way until I really began to start researching indies I was less familiar with in the last year. Founded in 2006 by a trio of watch enthusiast friends, they have been plugging along now for nearly twenty years. What ultimately drew me to the 273°, beyond, of course, just liking the watch, was the unique way that Zeitwinkel seems to position themselves in the watch world. They have a unique point of view that tends to line up with my own and made me want to buy into the brand once I fully understood it. 

What resonated with me most strongly was hearing brand co-founder Albert Edelmann on the A Blog to Watch podcast discussing Zeitwinkel’s attitude towards updating models within the Zeitwinkel catalog. Simply put, they tend not to do it – Zeitwinkel is not on an annual cycle of product refreshes and new releases as just about every brand we cover is. Don’t get me wrong here: I don’t fault brands or begrudge them the right to update products and introduce new watches at whatever pace they see fit. But Zeitwinkel’s attitude, which is that annual or frequent updates do not equal a better product, falls in line with an idea I’ve had about watches as long as I’ve been involved in the hobby, which is that if a great watch is meant to be something that lasts for your entire life and could even be an heirloom, the idea of constantly introducing new versions to your customer base, or even asking them to buy more than one, seems deeply strange. 

I realize there’s a certain inherent conflict here, being a person who writes about new releases every week and covers new products like news. As someone who is interested in the industry I’m always curious about the latest and greatest from any brand I admire, and we’ll always be happy to share that information with readers on Worn & Wound. It’s refreshing, though, that the team at Zeitwinkel seems to have an understanding that a good watch is a good watch, and that reintroducing endless variants with splashy campaigns might have diminishing returns. There are other examples where the Zeitwinkel philosophy lines up with my own way of thinking about watchmaking, including transparency on how their watches are made, using traditional manufacturing methods when possible and augmenting their processes with new tech where it makes the most sense, and keeping production only as high as those processes allow without the need to take shortcuts.

Anyway, as I was absorbing this information about Zeitwinkel and learning more about their watches, I found myself looking at my own watchbox and wondering if the pieces sitting there still represented what I valued in a watch. I began the process of culling the herd, marking some watches I really enjoyed as expendable for something else, still yet to be determined, that would better reflect my own taste and outlook now. 

Getting the chance to meet Albert at Geneva Watch Days last summer was the point at which I knew I wanted to add a Zeitwinkel, the 273° specifically, to my own collection. This was not a meeting in a fancy hotel suite along the lake in Geneva, but an impromptu meetup at the one restaurant where we could find a table (outdoors) to lay down some watches. Albert took me through the entire collection – it was, I think, my first time seeing any Zeitwinkel in person, let alone virtually all of them at once. Albert explained not just the brand philosophy, which I had already acquainted myself with, but many of the craft elements that set Zeitwinkel’s watches apart. The use of German silver in the movement, for example, which takes special care by the watchmaker as the material is so easily tarnished, and the intricate dial work across the collection, including the colorful laser engraved dials in the 188° MAKS line. 

It was the 273° Saphir Fumé, though, that really won me over. The manufacturing of the dial is a complex twenty step process, and because it’s made of sapphire, there are many very real challenges involved in bringing it all together. The hardness of the sapphire material, for example, means that indices and appliques cannot be applied in the way they would on a traditional dial, so Zeitwinkel uses a lithographic electroplating process for all of the dial text, hour, and minute markers. This is similar to the process used in the manufacturing of semiconductors, essentially applying and bonding layers of metal to the surface in a highly precise way. 

Visually, I found the watch to be immediately stunning in the way that it changes in appearance depending on the lighting and angle from which you view it. The sapphire dial is playing a big role here, but so is the unique tone of the German silver movement. Viewed from the dial side, it can have either a cool gray or warm brown appearance depending on a host of outside factors. Seeing it shift is not something I’ve grown tired of yet, and it’s a real treat to be able to see the expert level movement finishing from both sides of the case. 

And that case is also the watch’s secret weapon. It’s commanding at 42.5mm in diameter, a number that initially had me a little concerned. But it’s also surprisingly ergonomic. The lugs angle down at a fairly sharp angle, reducing what would otherwise be an ungainly lug to lug experience, even on large wrists. The finishing of the case is very well done, with a bead blasted section at the midcase, flanked by high polished accents up and down. It’s a classic idea that’s executed in a contemporary way. 

Owning the 273° Saphir Fumé to this point has represented a peak in my experience in watch collecting. That might sound like hyperbole, but I can’t recall a time when I was more satisfied with a watch purchase this deep into ownership. It’s not just owning the 273°, though, that’s special. It’s seeing it alongside other watches in my collection, from the likes of Louis Erard, Arcanaut, Paulin, and Christopher Ward – all independent brands where, for me, the pride of ownership is very real and a big part of the experience.

I’m sure, at some point, there will be a watch from a big luxury group that I’ll want to own and eventually add to my collection. I’m not committing to indies and micros entirely by any means. But owning and wearing the Zeitwinkel and a handful of other watches has unlocked something for me: an understanding that watch collecting is more meaningful when your own outlook on the hobby is mirrored by the people who made your watch. Zeitwinkel