About Dials

Dials is a reference catalogue of wristwatches. Its premise is narrow and, as far as we can tell, unmet elsewhere: describe every watch to the same specification, so that two of them can be compared without first translating between two houses' idea of what a spec sheet is.

The problem it exists to solve

Look up the same watch on three sites and you get three different documents. One gives you the case diameter but not the lug-to-lug. One lists the movement by name and never says its power reserve. One buries the water resistance in a paragraph of marketing. None of them agree on what a "reference number" is, or where the seams in it fall.

That is fine when you are reading about one watch. It falls apart the moment you want to answer a comparative question: which of these two is thinner, which movement is actually the same ébauche under two names, what does this reference cost today across the market. Every one of those questions requires the same fields, filled in the same way, for both watches. So that is what this catalogue is: the same fields, filled in the same way.

How it is built

Two layers sit on top of each other.

The catalogue is the reference layer: brands, the series inside them, and the models inside those, plus the movements (calibres) that power them and the complications they carry. A model is the unit of description. One watch, one specification: case material and dimensions, calibre and its properties, dial, bracelet, water resistance, production years.

The marketplace layer is what the watches are actually selling for. Listings are collected from the dealers and platforms we track, and matched to catalogue models by brand and reference number. The match is automatic where the reference is unambiguous and reviewed by hand where it is not; an unmatched listing is kept, queued, and reconciled rather than thrown away, because the listings that do not match are frequently watches the catalogue was missing.

Photographs are normalised too. Studio shots arrive from a dozen sources against a dozen different greys; lined up in a grid, the eye reads the backgrounds before it reads the watches. So every image is cut out and squared, and the site renders the processed version rather than hotlinking the source.

What it is not

It is not a marketplace: nothing here transacts, and we take no cut of anything. It is not a valuation service; prices shown are what listings ask, which is not the same as what watches are worth. It is not an authentication service, and no data here can tell you whether a specific physical watch is genuine. And it is not a forum; there is no community layer and none is planned.

For machines as well as people

The catalogue is available as a JSON API, documented at dials.co/developers, and every page of this site is also served as markdown to any client that asks for it with Accept: text/markdown. That is deliberate. A structured catalogue whose whole value is that its fields are consistent should not be locked behind a rendering of those fields; if you want to compare two watches programmatically, you should not have to scrape a page to do it.

Contact

Corrections, additions and questions: hello@dials.co. Catalogue corrections are the most useful thing you can send: say which model, which field, and what it should be.