A new era of mechanical watchmaking and the Grand Seiko Style

1998 was a monumental year for Grand Seiko. It saw the release of two high-precision movements, Caliber 9S55 and 9S51, launching a movement family that to this day remains the beating heart of traditionally mechanical Grand Seiko watches. With the advent of Caliber 9S came a new Grand Seiko Standard, going further than the chronometer standard and the original Standard set in 1966. With this new specification, the average daily discrepancy was set to +5 to -3 seconds a day with a maximum allowed average variation in daily error up to 1.8 seconds, beating the chronometer rating of +6 to -4 seconds and the average variation in daily error of 2 seconds. Additionally, the current Grand Seiko Standard tests 6 positions versus the Chronometer standard’s 5, and all testing is done for 17 days versus 15 days. Today, Grand Seiko movements are tested under three different temperatures, with a secondary test performed on temperature. Any movement that experiences deviations beyond the stipulated ranges cannot be used in a Grand Seiko watch.

“Excellence without pretension”

With a new era of movements, the design team at Grand Seiko was tasked with creating watches that could house these engines. The brief was to provide an eternal aesthetic appeal, a prompt not too dissimilar from the one that resulted in the Grand Seiko Style of the late ‘60s.

Lead designer Nobuhiro Kosugi set to work, pulling inspiration from the past without being entirely tethered to it. The first watch in this modern era of Grand Seiko, reference SBGR001, embodied this new design philosophy. It featured accented edges between flat and angled faces, razor-edged hour and minute hands and markers, a bracelet in place of a leather strap (and lug holes to easily swap it out), and a new font for the date numerals disc to maximize legibility. Today, this design remains emblematic of the watches in our ever-popular Heritage Collection.