I Review A Watch: The Serica 8315 Travel Chronometer Is A Vintage Watch From A Parallel Reality

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Serica operates in a parallel universe. It’s as if they are a product on the Truman Show, a modern watch from a history that never happened. How cool is that?

The Serica 8315 Travel Chronometer Is A Vintage Watch From A Parallel Reality

Full disclosure notice: No money has been exchanged in return for this review. Serica was kind enough to send the watch over for review before they released it to the public and Serica covered the shipping bill both ways. That’s it.

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We all know that a watch is much more than a sum of its parts. It’s a feeling it gives you when its on your wrist, it’s a symbol that projects to others around you and it’s, very often, a sublimation of memories that were formed while the watch was in their presence. We love making connections with our watches. But it’s always about the watch. Very rarely, if ever, do we form a bond with the brand itself. Hear me out. Not the watches that the brand makes, but the actual company. And yet… This is exactly what happened to me with Serica.

I saw them here, I saw them there, I saw Serica pretty much everywhere. People were fanning and gushing about their watches all over the internet, but I had a different reason why I was falling for them. I wasn’t falling for the watches, I was falling for everything around the watches. Do me a favour, click on over to their website and check out their “Content” tab. It started for me right there. I saw their Bulletin. Not only was the design spot on, the perfect mix of 50s and 60s typesetting with an undefined modern coolness, the Bulletin featured four things per issue of things they thought were cool. And there they were, everything I loved — North by Northwest, Hawaiian shirts, Endless Summer, Midnight Blue, Devil in a Blue Dress, negronis, the 75, Joyimbo… It was an eclectic combination of French, Japanese and Americana culture that was just cool. And kind of what I loved despite being utterly not cool.

Every now and again, I write for brands. Not just watch brands, but all industries. I do stuff like this Serica Bulletin, only I’ve never ever come this close to creating five posts that instantly transport you to a place where you instantly understand the brand, the people behind it and, ultimately, their product. But it doesn’t stop with the Bulletin. They made a few movies. Interviews with Serica owners. But most importantly, they created their own posters. They took Serica watches and placed them in era-appropriate advertisements. And that was the key, that’s when it all clicked for me and I got Serica.

Serica, as many people will tell you, doesn’t make retro-inspired watches with modern tech inside. Because if you look at them closely, while these designs feel retro, they are unlike anything else you’ve seen before. You see, Serica operates in a parallel universe. It’s as if they are a product within the Truman Show, a modern watch based on a history that never happened in our timeline and shared life, only in their constructed story. And, hell, in a world full of generic designs, homages that border on intellectual property theft and straight recreations of old designs, if that isn’t the best way to make and sell a watch, I don’t know what is.

So, I fell in love with them way before I got my hands on one of their watches. I built this whole story about the brand in my head, they had a lot to live up to. And they kind of did way before I even took the watch out of the box. That’s because the box itself is spectacular. Actually, let me pull back that superlative. The box is exactly what it needs to be. It looks like I just pulled it out of my grandfathers drawer that I shouldn’t be messing with. Like it held a watch once but is now used as a pencil case.

Briefly overwhelmed with the totality of the watch, it’s good to start focusing on the details. So lets start with what it actually is. It’s the Ref. 8315 (speaking of, I’m kind of annoyed with their insistence to use reference numbers instead of easily memorable model names, but it’s totally in line with the world they are operating in) Travel Chronometer in a color that they call Desert Red. They can call it Desert Red, but I will call it the most wonderful shade of brown. It reminds me of the chestnut color that Steve McQueen had on his brown Ferrari 250 GT Lusso. You’ll find the color on half of the bezel and the dial. But the rest of the case will be silver.

And what a case it is. You will instantly notice the lugs and think “what’s going on here”. They look like twisted lugs, just like you would find on an Omega Speedmaster. But if you own as Speedmaster and wear it regularly, you will see something is off. Those aren’t really twisted or lyre lugs. Those are a spectacular optical illusion. Look at them up close, and you’ll see that these lugs are missing the downward-sloping surfaces on the inside of the lugs that Omega says. Instead, you get regular curving lugs that have been heavily beveled from the outside. The way I’m describing it makes it sound like a bad thing. But oh no, it is so not a bad thing. It’s a completely ingenious way of using light and our misperceptions to create a lug that looks a thousand times more expensive to make than it actually is.

But speaking of the case, perhaps a few basic details? First, let me say that I have Shrek hands. When I told the folks over at Serica that I have a 21cm wrist, I was met with a few seconds of silence as they considered how to accommodate a mammoth. That’s why the sent two straps, but more on that later. So, on my tree trunk wrists, smaller watches do tend to look a bit silly. And likewise, anything over 30mm tends to look big on my wife’s wrist. The Serica measures 39mm, 12.3mm thick and has a 46.5mm lug-to-lug. So somewhere in the middle of sizes, and yet, it looked just fine on both me and, much more surprisingly, on her. On top of the watch is a beautifully retro crystal that’s raised above the bezel in a very gentle arc, but ends up taking about 2mm of the overall thickness. Oh, and water resistance is a hefty 200 meters.

Speaking of the bezel, we really should talk about it. While the case keeps the sides relatively plain, the bezel is anything but. Sure, I assume that in black and white, the other colorway you can get the watch in, it’s not as wild and eye catching as this choco-brown. But here… it’s parallel-universe vintage perfection. The bezel has a wonderful coined edge that’s a delight to spin, even though it requires a bit of effort to get it moving. The bezel moves both ways and has a ceramic insert in two colors — white and brown. The white part denotes the day, while the brown is for the night. And here we see the tiny attention to detail that make this such a cool watch. The bezel is not split exactly in half, with day starting at 6 AM and ending at 6 PM. No, Serica gives a slight advantage to the day, starting it at 5:30 AM and ending it at 6:30PM. Why? Because they can. And the day is more important, right? Oh, and remember how I told you that Serica must have been constructed in the past of a parallel universe and was then just thrown into our present? Yeah, look at those time scales on the bezel. Pretty much every single GMT watch out there uses a 24-hour scale. And here come these cool cats with two 12-hour scales, with dramatic “Ante Meridiem” and “Post Meridiem” text above the 12 o’clock dots on either side of the bezel.

For a watch that just made me write three quite long paragraphs on just the case and bezel, one would expect a wild dial, right? Well, no. It’s actually quite a subdued thing. Let’s get the obvious out of the way — it’s brown enamel, meaning it will give you a bit of a shimmer when the light hits it just right. It’s delightfully retro, with a simple white minute track printed on the perimeter and applied Super-LumiNova C3 in dots and rectangles acting as markers for the hours. The hands are wonderfully dramatic — not only are they lacquered white and then filled with a lume that has a slightly darker tone, they are also have a very extreme version of arrow shaped hands. There’s also a fourth hand, along with the thin white seconds hand. It’s the lollipop tipped GMT hand that has a brown fill, which does the job just fine I love the hands. But what I love even more is the fact that it’s almost a completely sterile dial. There’s minimal writing on the dial — just to note the depth of water resistance and “chronometre” — and absolutely no logo on the dial. Imagine the sheer guts it took to not put your name on the dial when you are a small brand. Good on them!

Moving on inside. The movement that powers all of this is the Soprod C125 movement. I’ll be honest and say I don’t know much about these — it beats at 4Hz, has a decent 40 hour power reserve and has 23 jewels. There are, however, two things you should know about this movement. First, it’s certified by the COSC as a chronometer, which means it will be super accurate. And you know what? It really was. But second, and perhaps more important at this moment, is to point out that this movement has a caller-style GMT. You will hear online that this is not a true GMT, that the only true GMT is a flyer-style GMT. But what’s the difference? A caller lets you adjust the GMT hand independently so that it points to a time zone somewhere far from you, like a place you might be calling (ha, see what I did there) for business. A flyer-style lets you adjust the primary hour hand independently, making it useful when you travel, especially when you’re hopping from time zone to time zone, spending as little time there as possible. So, to settle this dispute once and for all: yes, the flyer GMT is more difficult to produce and hence more premium and expensive. But you don’t judge quality based on price, that’s tacky. You judge usefulness for a particular task. Each has its place, and for me, give me a more practical caller-type movement any day of the week.

Finally, the strap(s). The watch originally comes on a strap that they call Serica Sport in vanilla white. Apart from the fact that that the shade of light beige is just spectacular, it’s one of the best tricks the watch has pulled. The strap mimics the feel and look of leather. Only when you touch the strap for the first time do you realise it’s a rubber strap. So, it’s a great looking strap, with an incredible feel to it and also very easy to use, thank to the quick release mechanism on it. The one major issue with this wonderful strap is that it’s on the short side. The Serica folks were worried that I couldn’t strap it to my 21cm wrist — I actually did, the last two holes — so they sent over a backup plan, their bonklip-style bracelet. You know what this is, it’s one of those ladder-type bracelet that pulls through and than secures it. It gives the entire watch an even more mid-century modern look. It’s also the only thing on this entire watch that I can think of to criticise. Not because it’s bad — because it isn’t and takes out surprisingly few hairs — it’s because the lack of a more secure way to close the bracelet which opened up on me randomly a few times, was the only think I didn’t like about this watch.

Now that I covered the straps, I should also cover perhaps Serica’s best invention to date. Instead of spending thousands on research and development to create the perfect link between a rubber strap and their case, which is always a bit of an unsightly scene when you have straight spring bars and rubber straps, Serica had the genius idea of just covering the gap. They do so with what they call their “black tie” kit which holds a couple of pin buckles and guilloché removable end links. What? Yeah, you read that right. You get two tiny pieces of metal that you can push agains the case as you’re placing a strap on and it will hold in place, creating a super dramatic, almost art-deco, transition between the case and the strap. Freaking genius and easily the best €200 you can spend. Sure, it’s important, but it elevates the look of the watch by way more than €200.

Which leads us right to the end and to the price. The Serica Ref. 8315 Travel Chronometer in Desert Red is priced at €1,890, with taxes. Initially, that number might rub you the wrong way. It did me. But wearing the watch for a few weeks, I can tell you that it’s a steal at under €2k. It’s a steal under €4k. And if it weren’t for the fact that I promised my wife no more watches for a while, I would already be living in Serica’s spectacular parallel-universe dreamland. See more on the Serica website.

-Vuk