Episode 70: Is The Tudor North Flag The Most Discouraging Watch Ever?
By David Vaucher
The Tudor North Flag Is the Most Discouraging Watch of the Last Decade
“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity”.
You hear this quite frequently in certain circles, but personally I’m not a huge fan of this saying. It sounds very deliberate - do A, then B, then sit back for C - but to me it comes across as very circular and seems to be used in reverse by people who have already made it.
The hard truth is that in life, you can do absolutely everything right, take risks, outwork everyone, and still not have the same outcome as someone who just caught a break here and there.
Tudor DID do everything right with its North Flag, and yet this is a model that ended up a dead end. I’d go so far as to say that there is Tudor “pre-North Flag”, and Tudor “post-North Flag”, and the current trajectory that Tudor is on is almost entirely due to this model not taking off, when in fact it objectively had everything going for it.
Perhaps even the trajectory of the entire watch industry can be tied back to the failure of the North Flag.
Quite simply, the Tudor North Flag is the most discouraging watch of the past decade.
Let’s first set the scene by going way, way back to 2012.
As you get older, there’s some weird relativity effect whereby the more years you pick up, the faster they go by. If you’re pushing the big 4-0 like I am, this leads to many situations where you think to yourself “oh yea I remember that, it wasn’t so…”
“Oh no”...
“Wow, yea that was a long time ago”.
I can grasp intellectually that the older you get, the less a set interval of time makes up in your life than it did when you were younger so it feels shorter than it actually was.
Still, that doesn’t take the shock out of the math!
While 2012 might not seem so far away, it was over a DECADE ago and the watch industry was not what it is presently.
Consider the following from Baselworld 2012:
This was the year Tudor came roaring back onto the global stage with the Pelagos and the Black Bay. Today, no one is that surprised when Tudor releases yet another Black Bay (the 925 was out of left-field though, I’ll admit that), but back then this was a pretty seismic development.
Rolex released the Rainbow Daytona, and I remember thinking “WTF”. I clearly wasn’t the only one, here’s an extract from an article on Monochrome: “Let’s assume there’s a market for this new Daytona Rainbow. Especially now more and more women are wearing men’s watches and the Rolex Daytona appears to be a popular model among the ladies. Please take your sunglasses off again, I promise to show some models which are visually less loud.” I don’t mean to pick on Monochrome specifically because I’m sure other outlets shared this take (as did I!), but this paragraph is in no way reflective of the current market for that watch. In early 2023, flex culture still rules and the more expensive-looking your watch is, the better.
Also, just a general observation from me that in 2012, the watch market was a much less “mainstream” space, and the trend for Genta-designed (or inspired) watches specifically was still half a decade off.
Fast forwarding just 3 years to the launch of the North Flag in 2015, it’s clear Tudor landed on some awkward timing, right on the cusp of the watch industry’s trend cycles.
The timing aspect really is key, because it’s not as if the watch itself was a dud.
To me, the North Flag is one of those rare examples of both an exciting, contemporary model, which also happens to be a great example of building on, not just copying, heritage cues.
You could almost say that the North Flag was a “re-master” rather than a simple “re-issue”, but it can be hard to realize just how much Tudor re-worked the source material, given how obscure that material is.
Enough suspense, the North Flag draws heavily from a model called the Tudor Ranger 2.
To this day, I have never once heard it mentioned outside the context of the North Flag (compare that to the Rolex 1016, for which I seem to catch at least one mention a day).
Once you see a picture of the Ranger 2, you can clearly draw a line from this watch to the North Flag, but whereas that 2015 release is very cohesive, the inspirational Ranger 2 is, to me anyways, just…
Weird…
Like…
Really weird.
To my eyes, the Ranger 2 is a pastiche of design cues that were found in (or eventually showed up in) the Oysterquartz, the Explorer 1016 (with its 6-9-12 Arabics) and the Rolex Explorer II 1655. Even the integrated bracelet geometry is awkward looking, since on most watches of this nature the case and lugs are flared out before moving to the bracelet, whereas here there is a very, very sharp tapering to the bracelet.
Again, it just looks really weird.
The much more muscular North Flag fixes this issue, and indeed I want to spend a little more time talking about the fact that the Tudor North Flag contains its inspiration’s integrated bracelet design. I mean, the watch blogosphere was psyched about the fact that for the first time ever, Tudor had employed what was referred to as an “in-house” movement in one of its watches, but can you imagine what the reaction would have been if this watch had launched in 2018 or 2019, the early days of Royal Oak and 5711 fever?!
Tudor, the Tudor that is owned by Rolex, the hottest brand in the world that will likely never release another ‘70s style, integrated bracelet sports-watch…
Releasing its own integrated bracelet sports-watch, with absolutely legitimate historical heritage…
Built to be an actual, robust sports-watch…
With a non-ETA movement…
Priced well under $4,000 on a stainless steel bracelet.
This would break the watch internet!
Unfortunately, that is not what happened; after a booming entrance, the watch fizzled out to discontinuation.
What’s even stranger is that, if you’ll indulge me here for a moment, the vibes of this watch are very similar to another watch that did in fact manage to, if not fully break the watch internet, at least crack it a few years later.
Please hear me out when I say that the Tudor North Flag is the original Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time Everest
While I have an appreciation for the “Holy Trinity” and haute-horlogerie in general, I’ve long since given up the desire to own this type of watch. Sure, there might be just a teeny, tiny bit of sour grapes at play, but being completely honest, my opinion is that hype has for far too long infested the upper reaches of the watch world, and just the thought of trying to keep up with it is not much fun.
There is one exception, and that’s the Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time Everest.
Released at the end of 2021, then several years into the watch buying public’s appetite for integrated bracelet sports watches, this version of the Overseas started its life as a prototype two years earlier, strapped to the wrist of photographer and explorer Cory Richards.
From the moment I saw the first prototype of the Dual Time (not the chronograph model that was eventually released beside it, I’m ice-cold on that one), I was totally smitten; killer looks, titanium, just the right splashes of orange popping against the cool grey theme of the dial and strap, what was not to love?!
Unfortunately, it was a limited edition, therefore preventing any chance I might have realistically had to own the watch (go ahead and laugh…), but as I was writing this script though, I took comfort in the fact that I own a very, very close approximation in the Tudor North Flag!
Just compare how both watches were marketed: the Tudor North Flag was clearly positioned as a tool for adventurers, with mountain climbing in particular being the point of focus, and you might even recall that watch being frozen in a block of ice at Salon QP.
Now, consider that the Vacheron Constantin Everest started out on the wrist of a mountain climber.
So, to me the spirit of both watches is identical, and the specifics are really close as well:
Integrated bracelet sports watches…
Both with “citrus”-colored accents…
Both with straps that play off the dial colors (I’ll admit one difference here, the Vacheron Constantin looks awesome on the strap, the North Flag, to me, not so much)…
Both with “in-house” movements (Note to Rob: I know, it’s “in-house”-ish in Tudor’s case, but perhaps it’s too much trying to work that in here?).
Look, I’m not saying that people at Vacheron Constantin sat around a table and said “you know that Tudor North Flag, well, it’s such a success that we have to make our own version”, but I am saying that the two companies ended up doing very similar things, but only one was very successful.
So, what happened?
The Tudor North Flag was a much more affordable, non-limited watch from one of the industry’s mega-brands, marketed in the exact same way as the Holy Trinity offering, which went on to generate a frenzy years after.
The Tudor North Flag should have been a smash.
Instead, it got smashed.
The VC was a slam dunk, the Tudor got dunked, and the data I can find does support these strong terms.
According to price data from Chrono24, the Tudor North Flag, which launched in 2015 for $3,675, was trading well under that all the way through 2020. The watch’s value started picking up some steam on the secondary market towards the end of 2021, presumably when rumors of discontinuation started brewing.
Consider that even now, if you run a search on Chrono24 and compare those prices with the results of an inflation calculator, the watch is only just about where it should be. In other words, the Tudor North Flag is all nominal inflation, there is no “hype” premium associated with it.
What gives?
I thought hard about what to title this article, and at one point I was thinking of going with “The Tudor North Flag is the Most Disappointing Watch of the Last Decade”, but that’s only partially true.
The Tudor North Flag is categorically not a disappointing watch, it is in fact an excellent watch that balances technical achievements with bold styling, that wouldn’t look out of place with a pair of board shorts in Hawaii or indeed with some climbing gear while setting off from base camp.
The watch is, however, disappointing in the sense it represented Tudor’s willingness to take a risk and try a different direction than the path it set itself on with the launch of the Black Bay. Nevertheless, the watch community, occasionally a bit too quick to decry brands’ lack of originality, still ended up putting their chips on the more conventional Black Bay line.
Even today, it seems to me that a lot of the debates happening in watch circles have to do with quite marginal aspects of watch design, rather than encouraging wholesale attempts at new ideas. Tudor is actually the perfect example of this: look at how much fanfare accompanied the company’s two latest, major releases, the Tudor Ranger and the Tudor Pelagos.
Both of these watches were sized down to 39 mm and watch lovers’ minds exploded. I’m not saying that the new Pelagos isn’t tempting, but is it really that much more interesting than the North Flag (also think about how much of a dud the Tudor P01 seems to have been)?
The North Flag came up prior to those releases as a rumored re-boot, and the fact that Tudor has not done anything new with this watch, while favoring its other, far more conventional model lines, tells you everything you need to know about what consumers ultimately value. It’s a shame, because at one point years ago, deep down the rabbit hole of a message board thread, I remember someone speculating Tudor would release a North Flag with a second time zone replacing the power reserve indicator. That, my friends, would have been awesome.
We are now in a time where the “hype” watches are pretty boring (either the usual sports-watch suspects or blinged-out versions of them), and the general releases are, well, pretty boring. That’s not to say they’re categorically bad, but they’re not the Tudor North Flag, and we are a long way from the Tudor of old, with the Heritage Advisor, or hell, even a red Tudor Black Bay.
With all this in mind, I settled on using the word “discouraging” rather than “disappointing” to describe the North Flag. The North Flag is discouraging because it’s a taste of what the watch industry could have been, and a reminder that no matter how hard you try, sometimes success really does come down to nothing more than luck and timing.