Author Archive for Norma Buchanan
Norma Buchanan is a senior editor at WatchTime magazine. She has been a reporter and editor for 30 years and has specialized in writing about watches and the watch industry for 18 of them. She is also the author of "The Watch Buff's Book of Trivia."
Executive Sweep
September was a tough month for watch executives, and not just because of the continuing slump in sales. A small army of top executives – three worldwide CEOs, and five U.S. ones – resigned or were fired.
The Decade that Was
You can’t see us, but we’ve got our party hats on. This September, WatchTime magazine celebrates its 10th birthday. To mark the event, we’re publishing in our September-October issue (on newsstands now) a 38-page special section on the wild, wacky watch decade that just ended. The bulk of the section is a rundown of the top 10 watch-related stories from 1999 until now. Here’s a glimpse at that top 10 (for a fuller view, you’ll have to read the magazine).
A Boom for the Budget-Minded: Watches Under $1000
Times are tough. But, contrary to what you might think, a tight watch budget doesn’t mean taking a pass on a mechanical movement. With the fall selling season dawning, there’s a fresh crop of under-$1,000 mechanical watches now in stores or soon to be there: the biggest batch, at least it seems to us, since the mechanical revival began.
First-Half Swiss Watch Sales Plummet
The half-year figures for Swiss watch exports are in, and they’re not pretty. The value of watches that Switzerland exported to the rest of the world between January and June declined 26.4 percent from the same period last year. They weighed in at 6.1 billion Swiss francs ($5.7 billion). Of Switzerland’s top 15 export markets, all but one showed a decline for the period. The winner was South Korea, the 12th-biggest export market, which grew a rather amazing 44.1 percent.
Just Say the Word: Pronouncing Tough Watch Terms
Parlay voo fransay? If not, you may be having a helluva time pronouncing many common watch terms. That’s because French isn’t just the language of lovemaking, it’s also the language of watchmaking. Here’s a pronunciation guide for some hard-to-say watch terms (two of them, “tachymeter” and “telemeter” aren’t French, but they’re so often mispronounced they may as well be).
Speak Easy
Not long ago, Lynn Miner, a reader of WatchTime magazine, wrote with a request: would we publish a guide on how to pronounce all those nettlesome watch-brand names? We hope the following brand list, with phonetic spellings on the right, helps Miner and tongue-twisted watch fans everywhere.
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Bell & Ross Launches Vintage Collection
Hamilton Khaki Team Earth
New Manufacture Movement Powers Calibre de Cartier
Breitling's Chronomat B01 With Manufacture Movement
Celebrity Watches by Vincent Daveau: Tracking Trendsetters Through Time
Switzerland Mourns Its Watch “Messiah”
Panerai Launches iPhone App
Timex to Close Vincent Bérard
