What Happens When a Fashion Watch Brand Makes a Watch for Enthusiasts?

“I hope I’m not going to hurt your feelings,” I began my interview with Jack Mason co-founder and designer Peter Cho, “but I never really considered Jack Mason watches before the Strat-o-timer came along.”

I’m a watch enthusiast. I like watches that are made with enthusiasts in mind. That means I have certain expectations regarding specs, fit and finish, movement, and functions, in addition to how a watch looks. From its conception in 2015 until recently, Jack Mason was what’s known as a fashion watch brand. It should be stated that there is nothing inherently wrong with being a fashion watch, but among watch enthusiasts, a fashion watch is objectum non grata.

Fashion watches are designed primarily for aesthetics and aimed at consumers who really only care about how a watch looks. They tend to be affordable — sometimes disposable — and can be found at your local mall or department store. Dallas-based Jack Mason made a lot of good-looking, quartz-powered fashion watches sold at retailers across the country for affordable prices, and they had a lot of success doing it.

But times have changed, and so has Jack Mason. The brand launched the Strat-o-timer GMT in October of 2022, and it caught my attention immediately. While the watch snob side of me tried to dismiss the watch when it first began making the rounds on the watch blogs and YouTube — It’s a Jack Mason. They’re a mall brand. How good can it be? — the design and the lengthy spec sheet began to pique my curiosity.

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A True GMT for the Rest of Us

A 40mm case. A classic and handsome GMT design that wasn’t too derivative of Rolex. A bidirectional two-tone bezel with a fully-lumed sapphire insert. 200m water resistance. A tool-free bracelet with an on-the-go quick-adjust clasp. Sapphire crystals on the front and back. And then there was the silver bullet: the Miyota 9075 automatic movement powering the watch.

Photo by Johnny Brayson

A brand-new movement at the time, the 9075 would quickly revolutionize the industry by bringing an automatic “true” GMT — one with an hour hand that can be operated independently without stopping the movement, a handy feature when changing time zones — to the masses for the first time outside the pricey luxury watch space. Jack Mason’s Strat-o-timer was one of the first watches to feature the movement and was arguably the most desirable from both a looks and specs perspective. (The movement debuted on the Wilton GMT from Miyota’s sister brand Bulova a few months earlier, but the oversized and confusingly styled watch failed to excite many.)

I’ve spent the past month wearing the Strat-o-timer GMT, and the watch has not only met my expectations — it has exceeded them. The watch is beautiful, with the “Espresso” colorway’s black and brown bezel and dark yellow accents offering something different and unexpected. I also love the box sapphire crystal, which gives just the right mix of old-school charm and modern luxury. The sapphire on the bezel is a nice touch too, as is the liberal use of a mix of blue-glowing BGW9 and Old Radium Super-LumiNova on the hands and indices and the bezel’s numerals, respectively.

Johnny Brayson

The jubilee bracelet is surprisingly well crafted, as is the optional Tropic rubber strap. Both are flexible and easy to adjust — and can be swapped without the use of a spring bar tool – plus the bracelet features an on-the-fly micro-adjust clasp that offers about 3/4″ of adjustability. The bezel action (48 clicks, bidirectional) is crisp, exact and satisfying, and the movement is even better than advertised. My example keeps time within COSC specs (Jack Mason regulates the watches in-house to +/- 5 seconds per day), the crown pops out confidently with no wiggle and winding the watch is as smooth as butter. The movement even looks decent, with some nice striping and a custom rotor all visible through a sapphire caseback.

If I were to nitpick, I think the finishing on the case is just OK — the lines aren’t very sharp and I’d like to see some beveling somewhere — but corners had to be cut somewhere to keep this spec monster under a grand. Also, the clasp on the bracelet is very long — I’d probably sacrifice some of the adjustability for a more compact clasp. But overall, the watch feels premium and extremely well thought-out. Compared to comparably-priced GMTs I’ve owned before that housed Swiss-made movements — the Lorier Hyperion, Zelos Horizons, Mk II Key West and Zodiac Sea Wolf GMT — the Jack Mason feels like the best-made watch of the bunch, with the best movement to boot.

Jack Mason

Best Overall GMT Watch Under $1,000

Jack Mason Strat-o-timer GMT

• $999.00 at jackmasonbrand.com

Jack Mason Meets Lady Luck

Going back to my opening line to Jack Mason’s founder: Thankfully, I did not hurt his feelings. Peter Cho’s decision to pivot Jack Mason from being a fashion watch brand to one aimed at enthusiasts was a conscious one. And it required a pair of lucky breaks to pull off. The first was Cho’s decision to pull out of wholesale and sell Jack Mason watches exclusively through the brand’s own website.

“The reason why we did that was because the most important thing to me was having full control of my brand,” Cho says. “When you’re in stores, you start to lose that quite a bit. You don’t have control. You’re relying on a store associate to sell the product, and they’re just not going to have the intimacy with the brand and probably won’t tell the story. And that really kind of bothered me. I am a designer. I want to make a good product, and I want to be able to tell the story of that product: The ‘why,’ my thought process and that sort of thing.”

The decision to pull out of wholesale, while risky, wasn’t lucky. But the timing certainly was. Cho pulled Jack Mason from stores in January 2020. Just a few weeks later, retail shopping — and the world at large — was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. “If we had not done that, then we probably wouldn’t be around today, to be honest with you,” Cho says.

After taking the brand in-house, Cho invested heavily in the website and began telling the sort of brand story he always wanted to. But Jack Mason wasn’t an enthusiast brand yet. It required one more lucky break, which arrived in the form of the Miyota 9075 movement.

Johnny Brayson

Cho, who prior to founding Jack Mason worked as a watch designer at Movado Group, had a years-long relationship with Miyota already — the Japanese brand, a subsidiary of Citizen, is a huge supplier of quartz movements to fashion brands. So when Miyota was looking for brands to showcase their hot new movement, they wanted to go with someone they knew could create a worthy flagship product.

“Since day one of Jack Mason, Miyota really loved the product that we had to offer,” Cho says. “They were used to selling to the big fashion brand groups like Fossil and Movado — obviously, they could provide the most business — but they saw Jack Mason doing something different. Miyota’s strategy was they didn’t want the 9075 to have that type of mass appeal. They knew what they had in terms of the movement and were being highly selective. So they trusted us at the end of the day to do the movement, and it kind of fell into my lap.”

With the secret weapon of an industry-shaking movement now in his arsenal, Cho knew that he would have to create a special watch to house it if he would have any shot at winning over the notoriously picky watch enthusiast market.

“I thought, ‘This is a serious movement and it cannot be lost in translation through the product that we had made before for a different type of customer,'” Cho says. “I’ve got to go all in on this watch particularly.”

So he did what any self-respecting watch nerd would do: He hit the forums and talked to other enthusiasts.

“There was a lot of searching on forums, being a part of forums, engaging with the people on the forums,” Cho says. “I was deliberately asking questions like, ‘Hey, what do you like to see in X, Y, Z?’ A particular platform that was really good for us is Watch Crunch. I signed up for that while the GMT was being designed, as myself, and was asking questions and doing the proper market research … Then I just tried to filter all of that — from a spec sheet point of view — into one product before really unleashing all the design qualities that I love about a watch personally. Ultimately, I’ll make a product that I like to wear.”

It’s safe to say that the Strat-o-timer has been a success. It’s drawn praise throughout the watch world while also changing the perception of Jack Mason among the enthusiast community. The brand has quickly become a mainstay at trade shows like Windup Watch Fair and even hosted the first Dallas edition of LA microbrand Nodus’s Intersect event in 2023. Last spring, it launched the Hydrotimer — a 200m automatic dive watch with a ceramic bezel — and in 2024, it plans on making over much of its existing catalog through an enthusiast lens, with launches like its first Swiss-made watch and other exciting models.

“2024 will be kind of a statement here for us,” Cho says. “We’re really showing, ‘Hey, this is where we are now.’ It’s bold, it’s a little risky, but those are my aspirations.”

Jack Mason

Best Overall GMT Watch Under $1,000

Jack Mason Strat-o-timer GMT

• $999.00 at jackmasonbrand.com

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