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We would have been in on any project from John Reardon, who spent years working directly at Patek Philippe and Christie’s auction house before founding his site Collectability, dedicated to all things revolving around the beloved Swiss watchmaker. But his new collaboration with Dennison is even more exciting than we could have imagined. Not only is there a pair of very pretty new watches, but they also arrive at a very tempting sub-$1,000 price point. Reardon, who knows his way around the most high-end, elegant watches, applied all his expertise for a pair of watches with Dennison that cost just $690 each.
Reardon is a man of exquisite taste. He’s forgotten more things about Patek Philippe than I could ever hope to know. And Dennison, which was founded in America in 1874, hit it out of the park in late 2024 with the ALD, its new collection of tonneau-shaped dress watches with sunray or genuine stone dials. In fact, it was these watches that caught Reardon’s eye (which is accustomed to poring over details from six-figure 1463 chronographs and seven-figure 1518 perpetual calendar chronographs).
Reardon only met Dennison’s current stewards because he thought they were wearing vintage Pateks at last fall’s Geneva auctions. “I noticed there was a father and son in the front row wearing what I thought were Ellipse or Golden Circle Patek Philippe watches,” Reardon told me. “So I went up after the auction, introduced myself, and it turned out to be Stéphane Cheikh, the director of Dennison, and his son, both wearing Dennison ALD watches. I was like, ‘I would wear that and my kids would wear it and my wife would wear that,’ and I assumed it’d be a few thousand dollars.” When Reardon found out it wasn’t even a single thousand, he was determined to work together on a project.
Now, that project is available for pre-order in either gold or stainless steel on Dennison’s website. The watch sports a gorgeous bi-color sunray design that’s split into an outer graphite-blue area and an inner dark blue area. Reardon’s objective was to make the watch as pared-down as possible—there’s not even a logo on the dial. “This is something that I felt very strongly about: I wanted the design to speak on its own without a Denison logo or a Collectibility logo,” he said. “When I pitched that idea to the team, everyone questioned it. They were like, ‘I don’t understand—it should have some sort of branding on the dial, especially for a collaboration.’ But for me, this is a design-driven project. It’s a design from Emmanuel [Gueit, the man behind Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Offshore (among many other models)], and by having the extra element of the two-tone dial, it doesn’t need to have a signature on the dial. The watch itself is the signature.”
Meanwhile, the two-tone dial is inspired by the relatively rare Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse ref. 3862 with a similar aesthetic. “It’s an homage to something that I can’t even source for my own clients or for my own personal collection,” Reardon said. “So I don’t feel like we’re really taking anything from the world of Patek Philippe, and Emmanuel’s design is so different and actually I prefer it. It’s a little more elongated. The size and shape are much different than the original Patek Philippe. But the two-tone dial is inspired by it.”