Seiko's Grand Plan

The Japanese watchmaker once nearly destroyed the luxury watch industry. Now its extraordinary dials and mechanical innovation are earning it cult status.

- Paige Reddinge

In many ways, Japan does things differently. In place of the mere four seasons that make up a year in much of the world, Japan has measured the passage of time since the sixth century with 24 annual seasons, which are then subdivided into some 72 micro seasons. They are nuanced and observational: uo kori o izuru, a five-day window when fish emerge from the ice in February, or kawazu hajimete naku, when frogs start singing in the early days of May. Time operates by a different set of rules here. Einstein be damned.

“It’s unique, the feeling of how we perceive time, because we don’t try to manage or control it,” says Shuji Takahashi, Seiko Holdings’ president, COO and CMO. “It’s more that we live together with time. We try to harmonize ourselves to the flow of time that exists.”

The Japanese may be onto something. Seiko Holdings’ Grand Seiko, along with its ultra-high-end sister brand, Credor, is increasingly gaining a worldwide cult status thanks to its dials and movements, many inspired by the island nation’s perennially changing landscape.

It’s certainly not the kind of romanticism you would imagine from two names born under the shadow of Seiko, the company that nearly killed the entire high-end watch industry with its cheap, battery-powered and ultraprecise quartz movements in the 1970s. But these two small-batch brands have been steadily building prestige beyond their borders as the digital age lifted the veil on Seiko’s best-kept secrets. Buoyed by its increasing popularity, Grand Seiko, founded in 1960, began selling outside Japan in 2010 and was spun off from the Seiko brand in 2017. It has since had massive growth and hype on a scale that many Swiss watchmakers can only dream of.