Greetings from the first day of the BaselWorld show. Though things are just getting started, there is quite a bit of excitement about all the new watches. Here are some of the good things I've seen so far:
Corum: Michael Wunderman, Severin's son, is doing great things with Corum. I was really impressed with the Admiral's Cup 48mm series, particularly attractive was the red gold version. The new Romulus collection, which will become one of the five pillars of the brand, was an attractive piece, as well as the new limited edition Bubble Gangster.


Admirals Cup by Corum

TAG Heuer is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its popular Link collection, with three new watches - the Caliber 16 (automatic chronograph), the Caliber 5 (automatic) and the Caliber S (a quartz watch with 230 moving parts, a kind of combination between quartz and mechanical movements). The Caliber S is a chronograph that times to 1/100th of a second and displays the chronograph time in a very innovative way - like the regular hands of a watch (hour, minutes, seconds). It's a very intuitive way of displaying chronograph time and, instead of sub dials that you can barely read, you can read the elapsed time immediately.

TAG also showed me the pre-series of the Monaco V4, the concept watch introduced in 2004 that many people said could never be made to work. Well, TAG has certainly shown everyone because design director Stefan Linder had a working pre-series model on. According to Linder, the watch is probably two years away from production and still has to be rigorously tested, but it's all a step in the right direction.

Maurice Lacroix has a great new skeleton watch and they have introduced their manufacture movement in a steel, regular line watch. They also added new watches in the Masterpiece and Pontos collections, including the Pontos Chrono Valgrange, which at 47mm is the largest size the company has ever had.
Milus is doing really great things with the line, relaunched several years ago, with the Merea Tri Retrograde Seconds Skeleton and Zetios Chronograph leading the way. The attention to detail is incredible and the watches are very attractive.


Masterpiece Squelette by Maurice Lacroix


Merea Tri Retrograde by Milus

I stopped in to see Festina and saw two great new watches, the Road Warrior and the ShockWave. The Road Warrior is a steel chronograph with carbon fibre inserts, while the ShockWave is an intriguing collection of contemporary, edgy, sportier gold watches, perfect for younger customers.

Tutima is celebrating 80 years this year and they have a beautiful automatic UTC watch in a special red color that is very striking. They also are offering a yacht timer titanium watch with interesting dial treatments.

My last meeting of the day was with Carl F. Bucherer, where I saw the Patravi Chronograde, a very nice watch, and the TravelTec 4X prototype (a mixture of palladium, ceramic, rubber and titanium). This year's limited edition piece is a tribute to Max Bucherer, called the MaBu, which features a vintage Valjoux column wheel chronograph movement that the company has refurbished and decorated. Also stunning was the Alacria Fancy Diva Wildcat, which is hand set with just 963 diamonds, all hand set - a portion of the proceeds will go to the Wildlife Fund.

More to come tomorrow…