Say the name “Weiss” to a watch enthusiast, and field watches will likely come to mind. Since its founding around a decade ago, the Los Angeles-based brand’s exclusive focus has been high-quality, traditional and largely handmade field watches. Now, all of a sudden, they’ve made a dive watch.
Weiss is well known to the watch enthusiast community. Many have been impressed with the quality of its products and intrigued by its American-made mission — though the brand also courted controversy regarding its use of terms like “made in America” and “in-house.” Producing many components themselves, however, Weiss excited collectors with the type of quiet attention to details, sober design and solid build that seems to harken to small-scale watchmaking of bygone eras.
Just like its flagship Standard Issue Field Watch models, those qualities can also be expected of the new Weiss Standard Issue Dive Watch. The design is also traditional, with a 42mm-wide case and hyper-legible dial in any color variant of white, black, blue or yellow. The steel bezel helps it not look too much like the most familiar dive watch designs, and it’s rated water-resistant to a standard 300m.
Inside, it’s powered by a Soprod M100 automatic movement which has been jeweled, finished, plated and reassembled by hand at Weiss. It’s also notable that Weiss produces many components itself, from hand-painted dials and in-house-machined cases to the stainless steel bracelet option, and assembles the watches by hand also, of course. While the base movement is sourced, this level of treatment and production is well beyond what many brands are offering — outsourcing many components and labor being common practice.
Weiss
WeissWill branching out from its bread-and-butter fare of field watches dilute the Weiss brand and message? The approach and aesthetic doesn’t feel inconsistent, and we think it’s cool to see Weiss experiment and evolve. After all, every brand kind of needs a dive watch collection as easily the most popular modern watch category. It’ll be cool to see even more dive watch variants and perhaps other watch collections from Weiss in the future.
