This Ultra-Minimalist Sports Watch Does Something No Other Watch Does

Here’s hoping this starts a trend.

By Johnny Brayson

Published October 23, 2024

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Updated October 23, 2024

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Pound for pound, MING might just be the most innovative watch brand today.

Founded in 2017 and with a small enough team that many still refer to it as a microbrand, MING has nonetheless proven to be a modern horological force with its outside-the-box thinking and technical prowess.

Last year, the brand’s LW.01 set a new record as the lightest mechanical watch ever made, and earlier this year the brand launched a dive watch featuring an entirely new type of bezel and a chronograph featuring a dial created via a brand-new laser fusing process.

Many of MING’s innovations are reserved for its high-end models, but today, the brand has launched its latest entry-level model — the MING 37.02 Minamilist — and it boasts what might just be the brand’s most exciting invention yet.

MING 37.02 Minimalist

Specs

Case Size	38mm
Movement	Sellita for MING Cal. SW300.M1 automatic
Water Resistance	100m

$3,250 at MING

White Night

Any sports watch worth its salt features lume. Whether it’s Swiss-made Super-LumiNova or a proprietary formula like Seiko’s Lumibrite, this luminous material will often appear white in light, but when the lights go out, it glows a different shade. Typically, white lume glows either green or blue — it never stays white. Well, not until now anyway.

The dial of the 37.02 Minimalist marks the debut of MING’s new proprietary lume, Polar White, which the brand describes as “one of the very few, if not the only” lume formulations to glow white. MING always seems hesitant to congratulate itself on its achievements, but I know I’ve never seen white-glowing lume anywhere else before.

a ming watch glows in the dark on a wrist — I can’t recall ever seeing another watch with lume that emits true white light.

The lume emits light in all wavelengths, which is how it appears white, and its creation had long been a passion project of brand founder and lead designer Ming Thein. Ming spent years working on the project with outside partners without success before taking development in-house and finally cracking the code.

The Polar White lume shows up on the new 37.02 Minimalist in MING’s trademark dial ring, where it was injected as a liquid into grooves on the underside of the sapphire dial. The watch’s hands are coated in blue-glowing Super-LumiNova X1 to increase the contrast and improve legibility.

The No-Wait MING

two ming watches lay side by side — The 37.02 Minimalist maintains its sleek and stylish appearance in light and darkness.

The 37.02 Minimalist marks another big first for MING, as it’s the Malaysian brand’s first watch to be designed, engineered and production managed internally at MING’s new facility in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland.

The brand has long utilized partners and production in Switzerland, but this new streamlining of development and production in the Central European nation has allowed MING to drastically reduce its lead times.

Instead of the headache-inducing lotteries and months-long wait times typically associated with buying a MING, the 37.02 Minimalist can be ordered on launch day — i.e., today — with product in stock and ready to ship.

ming watch on a rubber strap — The 37.02 Minimalist comes mounted on MING’s new curved-end FKM rubber strap.

The watch features MING’s usual 37-style stainless steel case, which features the brand’s signature flying lugs and measures a versatile 38mm across, 44.5mm lug-to-lug and 11mm thick.

The minimalist design is meant to be worn in any setting, and aiding that mission is a 100m water-resistance rating and the brand’s new FKM rubber strap featuring MING’s excellent tuck buckle with built-in micro-adjustment.

Powering the watch is a heavily customized Sellita SW300 automatic movement made exclusively for MING featuring skeletonized, anthracite-coated bridges and a custom open rotor. It’s a whole lot more interesting to look at than your typical SW300.

ming watch caseback showing a mechanical movement — The heavily customized Sellita SW300 powering the watch features skeletonized and anthracite-coated bridges.

I personally want to buy just about every new watch MING releases, but this one’s combination of versatility, affordability and innovation — that Polar White lume is so cool — has shot the 37.02 Minimalist to the top of my list.

As the latest entry-level watch from the brand, the MING 37.02 Minimalist is priced very reasonably at CHF 3,250 (~$3,747) and is available to purchase now from the brand’s website.