The gold lettering on the new Mara’s dial is not printed on. Each brass dial is electroplated in gold first. The minute track, logos, and lettering are then masked with a chemical resist, and the dial goes into a galvanic bath that turns every exposed surface matte black. When the resist comes off, what you read on the dial is the gold underneath, showing through.
That slow, failure-prone process is the center of the Paulin Mara Limited Edition for Hodinkee, announced this week. Paulin, the Glasgow watchmaker founded in 2013 and run alongside its sister brand anOrdain, built the Mara as its first dive watch. The limited edition reworks it as a mid-century skin diver: 250 individually numbered pieces at $1,000, open for pre-order now through Hodinkee and Watches of Switzerland, with deliveries set to begin in mid-November 2026. For a reader putting together a first serious watch collection, the interest is where the money went. It went into the dial.
A Dial Made the Slow Way
Gilt was standard practice on tool watches in the 1950s and early 1960s, before makers moved to cheaper printed text. Most modern watches that borrow the look fake it with gold-colored print on a black surface. Paulin and Hodinkee did the slower thing, and the details around the dial keep the same discipline. The hour markers are hand-painted in an aged tone of Super-LumiNova, matched to the hands and the bezel scale. The depth rating reads meters first, the period order, and a gilt Hodinkee signature sits at 4 o’clock, where the standard Mara prints the word Glasgow. The typeface is Wim, designed by Paulin’s creative director, Imogen Ayres.
“We didn’t want an impression of a gilt dial; we wanted the real thing, made the way it was in the 1950s,” said Sarah Reid, Hodinkee’s director of limited editions. The standard Mara leans playful, with geometric markers in bright color. This one wears black and gold, and it is better for the restraint.
Slimmer, and Honest About the Trade
The collaboration swaps the Swiss La Joux-Perret movement in the standard Mara for a Japanese Miyota 9039 automatic, with a 42-hour power reserve. The trade is stated plainly by both brands: the less expensive movement freed budget for the gilt dial and a double-domed sapphire bezel insert, and its thinner profile let the 39.7mm stainless steel cushion case drop from 13.5mm thick to 11.8mm. Water resistance falls from 300 meters to 100 meters in exchange. A dark grey 120-click unidirectional bezel and a black-and-grey striped NATO strap with a Hodinkee-signed buckle finish the watch.
One hundred meters is more water than most wrists will ever meet. What the wearer gets daily is the thinner case, which slides under a cuff the way the vintage divers this watch admires once did.
Where It Sits for a New Collector
A design-led limited edition at $1,000 occupies useful ground. It costs a fraction of the Swiss sports watches that anchor most collections, and its appeal rests on a verifiable craft process rather than a waiting list. Our readers already spend on luxury with intention, a pattern documented in our coverage of Black luxury travel spending. The Mara asks for the same kind of intention at a watch counter: know how the thing was made, then decide.
Reporting from Hypebeast and Hodinkee’s own edition notes agree on the essentials, and the essentials are strong. Pre-orders are open now, the run stops at 250 numbered pieces, and the first watches ship in mid-November, each dial made one galvanic bath at a time.
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