The trick is not to improve Gérald Genta’s design. It’s to mutilate it less.
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How to Build a Better Royal Oak for $315
The trick is not to improve Gérald Genta’s design. It’s to mutilate it less.
As we know, the Royal Oak is not only Gérald Genta’s first Holy Trinity integrated-bracelet design, but also his best. He should have dropped his pencil there, retired, and subsisted humbly on Campbell’s soup. But Genta didn’t fancy soup. He wanted to live larger, and so he kept peddling subsequent designs to Swiss brands until, eventually, they got so bad he had to hang his own shingle. And that leaves us with the Royal Oak: the archetype for essentially the entire integrated-bracelet sports-watch genre that followed. Just as Genta spent the rest of his career mutating his own designs in an effort to recapture the glory of his first and only truly great one, everyone else did, too. And since the watch-brain rot started during lockdown in 2020, there have been so many posers homaging the shit out of the Oak that the integrated-bracelet sports-watch segment now represents a greater GDP than Russia. There is, however, a problem. None of these homages can bring themselves to follow the proportions and styling of Genta’s Royal Oak too closely. That would be plagiarism. So they change things. They add things. They soften this, exaggerate that, invent a new bezel, screw around with the bracelet, and proudly announce the resulting collection of deviations as original design. Almost invariably, those deviations make the watch worse. That is the uncomfortable problem with the entire genre: nobody can admit that their original design contributions are mostly mutilations. Originality simply isn’t an asset here. The Royal Oak already solved the problem. So how do you make a better Oak? I give you this $315 watch. Buy it, take the other $79,685 you might have spent on a Jumbo on the secondary market, and put it in the S&P 500. In a couple of decades, you might even be able to retire. In the meantime, you have an openworked Oak that does a better job of being an Oak than any of the countless designs that have spent the last 50 years trying to improve upon one: the Girard-Perregaux Laureato, the IWC Ingenieur, the Nivada Grenchen F77, the Tissot PRX, and several dozen others I don’t have the patience to name. The trick, it turns out, is not to design a better Royal Oak. You can’t. The trick is to mutilate it less. And that brings us to Nomods. Participation Trophies for the Non-OaksHodinkee can’t publish this article. They have an industry to fluff. I’m just a guy with a pen name. So, in the interest of fairness, I don’t want the runners-up to feel overlooked. There will be participation trophies for all of the higher-quality compromise non-Oaks: the Laureato, the Ingenieur, the F77, the PRX, and whatever else has valiantly attempted to solve a design problem Gérald Genta finished solving in 1972. Some are beautifully made. Some have excellent movements. Some offer tremendous value. Some are genuinely interesting watches. All have made the courageous decision to not quite look like the watch they would probably look better if they looked more like. They will each receive the recognition they deserve. And then, at the end, we will remind ourselves that the entire category can be undercut by a Seiko mod. Why Nomods?So why buy the Nomods over another AliExpress Seikoak? Well, as watch knobs, we are brand-worshipping lemmings. We love a good value proposition, but give us the opportunity to pay a little more for the brand, too—for its reputation, its history, and the financial security of knowing it might still exist tomorrow—and we choose that option regularly. And Nomods is on the rise. The company earned a considerable amount of attention by bringing to market an all-steel case conversion for the Swatch Royal Pop. Those reels became difficult to avoid if Instagram’s algorithm had correctly diagnosed you with watches. Meanwhile, Delugs is now taking preorders for its plastic-fantastic Royal Pop solution. Is plastic more in keeping with the whimsy of Swatch? Absolutely. Do I want to wear one? No. Despite the notoriety Nomods received from those Royal Pop conversions, however, I think its most interesting product is actually the 37mm Seiko NH-compatible case and bracelet kit. The Sistem51 isn’t serviceable in any meaningful traditional sense, and it is large enough that the proportions of the resulting watch are compromised before you even begin. The NH platform solves both problems. NH movements are ubiquitous, cheap, and serviceable in the practical sense that, if one eventually dies, you can simply replace it. More importantly for our purposes, they allow Nomods to keep the proportions of the finished watch remarkably close to the thing we are all pretending this isn’t. You could install an NH35 beneath a tapisserie dial and simply embrace what you’re doing. I went with the skeletonized NH72. It is the more interesting option because it lets the watch play coy. There is no Seiko logo staring back at you. There is no fake AP branding. There is no attempt to counterfeit anything. It is simply an extremely faithful homage to a design we have already established should never have been messed with in the first place. Mine cost $315 after Nomods’ first-order discount. And then it arrived. The Watch Had One Last Chance to Make Me Look Like an IdiotI had written most of the argument for this article before actually receiving the watch. This created a small problem. The watch still had the opportunity to make me look like an idiot. It didn’t. The Nomods is almost precisely what I thought it would be from the photographs. The proportions are excellent. At 37mm, it wears considerably larger than the number suggests, which is exactly what I expected. Integrated-bracelet watches do that. The case stretches visually across the wrist, and the first links become part of the architecture rather than merely something attached to it. On my 7.25-inch wrist there is effectively no overhang, but I would not want the watch any larger. More importantly, there shouldn’t be. The bracelet is part of the visual appeal of a Royal Oak. You want to see it emerge from the case and fall around the wrist. Blow the case up until it consumes the entire top of the wrist and you have made the watch bigger while simultaneously displaying less of its design. The 37mm Nomods leaves just enough space on either side of the case for the bracelet to do its thing. That is exactly right.
Where $315 Starts Looking Like $315The finishing is also legitimately good. Not “good for $315” in the sense that I spotted seventeen obvious defects and have decided to forgive them because the watch costs less than a nice dinner. I don’t see obvious flaws. The brushing is clean. The polished surfaces catch light as they should. The case-to-bracelet transition works. The taper looks right. My initial suspicion was that the bracelet studs would be where the impersonation collapsed.
Those are the small articulated pieces joining the larger links—the bits that help give a Royal Oak bracelet its peculiar suppleness and those little flashes of polished metal against the predominantly brushed surfaces. Looking at the Nomods in isolation, I thought the studs appeared slightly crude. At some angles, their polished ends seemed to protrude unevenly, and the progression from link to link looked a little stepped rather than like two perfectly coherent rails running from case to clasp. I was prepared to call this the place where $315 finally looked like $315. Then I put it next to a real Royal Oak. I was mostly wrong. But before we get there, there is the movement. Because the movement definitely knows this is a $315 watch. The NH72 is basic. Spartan, if we’re being generous. It is also lighter in color than I expected from Nomods’ photographs. I think the watch would look better if the movement were darker, allowing the skeletonized architecture to recede slightly and leaving the bezel, case and bracelet to dominate. Up close, nobody is confusing this with an openworked AP caliber. But it isn’t offensively crude. There are wheels and bridges and springs moving around. It is mechanically interesting enough to look at, and from normal conversational distance all of that detail collapses into texture. From a few feet away, this thing looks alarmingly like an openworked Royal Oak. More importantly, it just looks right.
The Gotham Watch Club TestThen I wore it to Gotham Watch Club. The September meeting was billed as the “new member meeting,” although the club is still new enough that, having attended since April, I’m not entirely sure what qualifies anyone as a new member. Whatever. Everyone showed up. Before the meeting, I put a message in the group chat asking whether anyone could bring a 37mm Royal Oak so I could photograph it next to the Nomods. Ideally an openworked example, although I wasn’t going to be precious about it. Nobody responded. It turned out I didn’t need to manufacture interest. The Nomods was a watch-guy magnet. People kept asking what it was. A couple of them took it in hand and began turning it over, apparently searching for the AP logo, until I explained that there wasn’t one. Restaurateur and collector @Jaysbrooklyn, himself wearing an openworked Speake Marin that evening, wanted to know the story behind it. Then I ran into a member I had spoken with at the previous meeting. He owns a 37mm Royal Oak. He thought the Nomods was real. Not “that resembles an AP.” He thought it was an AP. Once he handled it and understood what it actually was, he became even more interested.
His reaction to the bracelet was essentially disbelief. “It’s just like mine.” He was particularly struck by the brushing, the tolerances and the execution. Every so often I had to remind people who Nomods was by referencing the Royal Pop conversions that have been circulating around Instagram. Then the recognition kicked in. And here is the best part. The owner of the 37mm Royal Oak—the guy who had just mistaken my Nomods for the genuine article—has a reel on his own page in which he throws his AP in the trash in reaction to the Royal Pop conversion. That reel has more than 8,500 likes. Damn. By the end of the night, I had a wrist shot with him, Jay and the Nomods. The Royal Oak owner happened to be wearing a Rolex Deep Sea that evening. Jay had the Speake Marin. My $315 Seiko mod sat there with them looking completely unembarrassed. Jay later reshared the photo. Fine. Let’s Put It Next to the Real Thing.
That left one obvious problem. I still needed the photograph. My plan was to go to the Audemars Piguet boutique on 57th Street, walk in with my Seiko mod, and conduct what I imagined would be a highly dignified comparison. The building had other plans. The corner is under substantial renovation, so instead I went to Bucherer to see what they had among the pre-owned inventory. This turned out to be better. They had a two-tone 37mm Royal Oak from 2020. Before I even explained what I was doing, the salesperson looked at my wrist and assumed I was wearing an AP. He wasn’t being cute about it. Once I told him it was a Seiko mod, he wanted to inspect it. So now we have two people in two different watch-heavy environments—one of whom actually owns a 37mm Royal Oak—who initially read this $315 thing as genuine. Then I put the Nomods next to the AP. This is where the whole premise of the article became slightly uncomfortable. The bracelets are almost the same.
Not “similar in concept.” Almost the same. The taper is right. The proportions are right. The articulation is right. The visual rhythm of the links and studs is right. And those studs I had expected to expose the Nomods? In person, side by side, they are remarkably comparable. The AP is better. Of course it is. But the difference is far more incremental than categorical. There are tells. The Nomods clasp pushers are larger and protrude farther. The final screws near the clasp—where the two halves of the bracelet meet—are noticeably rougher-looking than the equivalent hardware on the AP. That may be the most obvious quality difference when examining the bracelet as a whole.
The bezel screws on the Nomods also appear slightly larger. There is a visible dark line beneath the Nomods bezel that appears related to its construction and gives the transition between case and bezel a slightly different appearance from the AP. And if you sit there under bright lights deliberately hunting for differences, yes, the AP reveals greater refinement. It had damn well better. But these are details. That is the problem. I expected a direct comparison between a $315 Seiko mod and a genuine Royal Oak to produce some enormous gulf in execution. Instead, most of the gulf is hiding in the margins. The AP’s finishing is better. Its movement is from another universe. Its heritage, handwork, movement architecture and status are not even participating in the same conversation. But the more interesting question is how much of the Royal Oak’s visual identity actually depends on any of those things. Nomods gets the architecture so right that the AP’s superiority is forced into the margins. The Product Is More Mature Than the LogisticsThere was one weak point in the experience. Shipping took longer than I expected. I followed up with Nomods several times before the watch finally moved, and my impression is that the company may still be experiencing some growing pains around fulfillment and logistics. That is only my impression, and I’m not going to pretend I know the internal operation of their factory or shipping process. But if a young watch company has to have a weak point, let it be there. The product itself arrived exactly as hoped. I can forgive waiting longer for a watch more easily than I can forgive finally receiving one that disappoints.
So What Exactly Did Nomods Accomplish?Nomods has not built a $315 Royal Oak. That would be an idiotic thing to claim. It has built a $315 object that reproduces an absurd percentage of what makes a Royal Oak visually persuasive. The movement gives the game away. The clasp hardware gives the game away. A few screws give the game away. The last increments of tolerance and finishing give the game away if you know exactly where to look. But “if you know exactly where to look” is doing an enormous amount of work there. At normal distance, on the wrist, in a room full of watch collectors, this thing fooled people who own and sell the real watch. Then I put it directly beside a genuine 37mm Royal Oak and discovered that the comparison didn’t make the Nomods look ridiculous. Quite the opposite. That is the achievement. The Swiss watch industry spends a great deal of money convincing us that visual identity, manufacturing quality, mechanical sophistication, history, scarcity and prestige all belong together in one indivisible package. Usually, they do. Nomods has rather inconveniently separated one of those things from the others. It has reproduced an astonishing amount of the perception of a Royal Oak without reproducing the craftsmanship, movement or provenance that justify an actual Royal Oak’s price. And perception, inconveniently for the Swiss watch industry, is a very expensive part of what it sells. The trick was never to design a better Royal Oak. Genta already did that. The trick was to mutilate it less. You're currently a free subscriber to watchoutwithj's Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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