Tudor Now Sells Movements to the Brands It Competes With

Tudor has brought back the North Flag, spelled Northflag this time, as a 40mm steel GMT at 5,525 dollars, sold only in stores. It is a good watch and I will come to it.

 

The more interesting subject is the company making it, because the Tudor of 2026 bears very little resemblance to the Tudor of fifteen years ago, and the change has been more thorough than most people following the brand have noticed.

Source: Hodinkee.com

The Cheaper Rolex

Hans Wilsdorf registered the Tudor name in 1926 and founded Montres Tudor S.A. in 1946, with a specific commercial idea behind it. Rolex cases, Rolex crowns, Rolex bracelets, and bought-in movements from suppliers like ETA. The customer got Rolex build quality at a price a working person could reach, and Wilsdorf said as much in his advertising.

 

It worked, and it worked hardest where it mattered. The French Navy issued Tudor Submariners to its divers, the US Navy bought them too, and the snowflake hands that Tudor collectors now chase were developed for military legibility, with style nowhere in the brief. These were tool watches sold to people who needed tools.

Then the brand faded. Tudor pulled out of the United States entirely in 1996 and stayed away for seventeen years. For most of that period it was a footnote, a name you saw in Europe and Asia on watches that looked like slightly plainer Rolexes.

One Watch Changed the Direction

The relaunch began around 2010 with the Heritage Chrono, followed by the Black Bay and the Pelagos in 2012, and those watches did well by being handsome and by costing sensible money. The movements were still bought in.

The break came in 2015, with the original North Flag. Tudor put its own calibre inside it, the MT5621, and that was the first movement the company had ever made for itself in nearly seventy years of existence.

 

Coverage at the time barely discussed the watch. Everyone wrote about the movement, because the implication was enormous. A company built on the idea of using other people's mechanics had decided to make its own, and the watch chosen to carry that announcement was a slightly awkward integrated-bracelet sports watch with a power reserve indicator that never found a large audience. It was discontinued after six years without a single update.

Source: Hodinkee.com

Then Tudor Started Supplying Everyone Else

The part that still surprises people is what happened next.

 

Tudor set up a movement manufacture called Kenissi in Le Locle, and Kenissi does not only build for Tudor. Chanel took a stake in the company in 2018 and uses its movements. So do Breitling, Norqain, Fortis and Bell & Ross, among others.

 

There is a neater example still. In 2017 Tudor and Breitling agreed to swap calibres. Breitling's B01 chronograph movement went into the Black Bay Chrono, and a Tudor movement went into Breitling's Superocean Heritage. Two direct competitors, in overlapping price brackets, deciding that each made something the other wanted. That deal would have been unimaginable when Tudor was assembling watches around ETA ébauches.

 

Selling movements to rivals is the clearest measure of what a manufacture has become. Brands do not buy calibres from a company they consider a junior sibling of somebody else.

The Certification Nobody Expected Them to Get

In 2021 Tudor put out the Black Bay Ceramic with METAS Master Chronometer certification, and it was the first watch from outside the Swatch Group to carry it.

 

That matters because METAS is Omega's standard in everything but name. Omega developed it with the Swiss federal metrology institute and has used it as a competitive weapon for a decade. Tudor walking in and meeting it, at Tudor prices, was not part of anyone's plan.

 

The requirements are stricter than COSC in ways that affect an owner. Timekeeping between zero and plus five seconds a day, tested with the movement inside its finished case instead of on its own. Resistance to magnetic fields of 15,000 gauss, which is more than any object in normal life will produce. Water resistance and power reserve are verified as well.

 

The Northflag's MT5652-U carries both COSC and METAS certification. On a 5,525 dollar watch, that is close to unmatched.

The Watch

The new one drops the power reserve indicator and adds a GMT hand with a 24-hour bezel, which is a straight upgrade in usefulness.

 

It is also the good kind of GMT. On a traveller or flyer GMT, the local hour hand jumps forward and back in one-hour steps on its own, so when you land you set the hour and the minutes and seconds keep running undisturbed. The cheaper approach moves the 24-hour hand instead, which forces you to reset the main time display every time you cross a border. Tudor fitted the version built for the person who travels.

 

The case stays 40mm and has been trimmed everywhere else, down to 12.7mm thick and 48.8mm lug to lug from 13.3mm and 50mm. On an integrated bracelet those numbers matter more than usual, since there is no strap to soften the transition onto your wrist, and reports from smaller wrists at the launch were mixed. The bracelet keeps the H-link pattern and adds T-Fit, Tudor's clasp adjustment that you operate with a fingernail while wearing the watch.

 

The dial is sunburst black with raised ceramic luminous markers and yellow accents, the Ranger II handset survives, and so does the tapered crown, which appears on no other Tudor.

Source: Hodinkee.com

What I Would Have Changed

The black ceramic bezel ring from the original is gone, and that ring was most of what gave the old North Flag its face. What replaced it is more conventional and easier to sell, and something specific has been lost.

 

Titanium was the obvious move and Tudor passed on it. A titanium Northflag would have stood apart in the catalogue instead of landing very close to the Black Bay Pro, which costs 800 dollars less and gives up METAS certification and about two millimetres of thickness to get there.

 

I would also gently question the hundredth anniversary that Tudor has been celebrating all year. The name was registered in 1926 and the company was founded in 1946, so the maths depends on which event you decide to count. The real milestone is that a brand once defined by what it borrowed now supplies mechanics to companies it competes against, and it took about eleven years. That deserves more attention than a trademark filing.