Latest Review
As a journalist in the watch industry for over a decade, I’ve received dozens upon dozens of emails, DMs, LinkedIn messages, and even WhatsApps from unknown numbers pitching me on new watches and brands. I remember the thrill of these messages early in my career, but after twelve years and thousands of timekeepers later, it’s hard not to become a bit jaded.
A couple months ago, one of these messages popped up in my inbox about a new brand coming to market and the model that would be their debut offering. After a few weeks of writing back and forth, I begrudgingly relented and agreed to get together over drinks to see what the brand and watch were all about.
Admittedly, I walked into the meeting ready to be thoroughly underwhelmed with the arrogance that I’ve already seen it all, and it would take a lot to really blow my socks off. I was prepared to politely nod and smile, provide a few encouraging words welcoming the brand to the community, and be on my way to the event I had later that evening. But after just a few minutes with Josh Blank, founder of Papar and creator of the Anillo, the brand’s inaugural timepiece, I was eating my words.
Josh’s watch story and approach to watchmaking is anything but ordinary. He’s a lawyer who splits his time between his home in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico—a lifestyle he and his wife/business partner Emily have built for their daughters to be bilingual. These elements of place and family, combined with Josh’s personal love of timepieces, gave way to Papar and the Anillo, a functional sector dial with a GMT function and a decidedly brutalist design.
“The GMT has a particular significance to me,” Josh shares. “For my 35th birthday, which was also our wedding anniversary, Em bought me a Rolex from my birth year, the GMT 1675 with a Pepsi dial. No one needs a GMT watch today,” he continues. “We have our phones that change the time for us based on our location, but being able to look at my wrist and see the visual representation of where Em and my daughters are when I’m traveling became special to me.”
Josh’s love of the GMT morphing into the creation of his own was happenstance. Last year while he and his family were in their Mexico base, he began dreaming up and sketching a model combining a sector dial with GMT functionality.
“I’ve always liked sector dial watches,” Josh confesses. “They’re obviously a classic design, and visually, I think they’re really beautiful. And this thought just kind of came to me: why isn’t there a functional sector dial? So, I started playing around with it, taking the inner ring and dividing it into 24 sectors. Then I thought, let’s laser cut it out and have something underneath that’s rotating around where you read the time. That design felt really good, but then I thought: how can we take it a little bit further? And that’s where the idea of laser cutting the moon and putting the gradient color wheel behind it came in—we already had the disc, so I wanted to do as much with it as possible.”
This patent-pending design is the foundation of the Anillo, a fitting name which means “ring.” This numbered limited edition marks Papar’s first foray into the watch world. The model comes in two iterations, one in a classic stainless steel and the other with a rose gold PVD coating (both produced in just 100 pieces each for this initial run). You’ll immediately notice the unusual brutalist inspired octagonal case shape—a geometric and expressive style from the 1950s that’s been having a resurgence among watchmakers from Audemars Piguet to Citizen. Because of the Anillo’s modest 36mm proportions, it appears quite bulky at 12.1mm thick. However, I’m happy to report that even on my petite 5.75 inch wrist, the model fits absolutely beautifully.
Still, what I appreciate most about the Anillo and Papar’s approach to watchmaking is the obsessive and poetic attention to detail. Every element of this watch holds meaning. For Josh, the brutalist style wasn’t an attempt to be on trend. “Mexico has a really rich collection of brutalist architecture,” he explains. “And that was definitely a big source of inspiration when I was creating the watch.”
Moving into details like the bezel—which is also patent pending—you’ll notice subtle folds, overlapping with peaked corners at twelve, three, six, and nine. “One day, Em was making paper planes with our daughters and throwing them around,” Josh recounts. “That became the inspiration not only for the bezel design but also for the name of the brand Papar, which is a combination of ‘papel,’ meaning ‘paper’ in Spanish and ‘doblar,’ meaning ‘to fold’ in Spanish.”
Next, we make our way to the dial. Here, we have the crescent moon, which practically serves as a uniquely playful day-night indicator, but of course, the meaning goes deeper. “In San Miguel de Allende, because of the latitude, the crescent moon appears as a smiley face—it’s so charming—but for us, the smiley face also has double meaning,” Josh continues. “Em and I wanted matching tattoos but could never decide what to get. One day she came to me and said, ‘I can’t get a serious tattoo—can we just get smiley faces and call it a day?’ So, we did, and if you flip the watch over, there’s a smiley face engraved on the back along with the word ‘eon,’ which, of course, means an indefinite period of time, but it’s also the initials of Emily and our daughters Olivia and Noah—that felt like a really fun confluence of terms.”
I think by now it should be abundantly clear why I had to eat my words upon discovering Papar. This is not your typical new-to-market brand, and its first watch is bold, disruptive, and perhaps even polarizing.
We see a lot of new brands (understandably) playing it safe—easing into the wild world of horology with a crowd pleaser and working their way up to something more expressive and avant-garde once they’ve so-called “paid their dues” to push the bounds. But Josh Blank had the balls to go big or go home with the Anillo, and I think this level of creativity and gumption is something that perhaps can only come from someone without deep roots in the watch industry, a place where many people can easily fall in the trap of being confined and restricted by the pressure to uphold tradition and do things the way they’ve always been done.
Certainly, the Anillo isn’t a watch for everyone, and at its highly accessible price point of $750, it tows an interesting line in the realm of entry-level timekeepers. The term “entry level” is often equated with “first timepiece.” Even Josh himself admits the Anillo is unlikely to be someone’s first watch purchase. This is a model for any collector who appreciates a fresh, quirky, and thoughtful approach to the art of watchmaking.
However, if you find yourself resonating with the story of Papar but the Anillo is not quite your speed, keep an eye on the brand. I had the privilege of getting a sneak peek at some early renderings of what Papar has in store for 2025, and the Anillo is merely the first chapter in what’s sure to be a very cool book. Papar
