Returning to Raketa

It seems like years ago that I updated the website and had something to post. We’ve missed a few releases and I haven’t added anything in the past six months. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to keep up this website myself while I start a small business and also grow my professional career in healthcare. I’m a busy guy but I still keep my finger on the pulse of the watch industry at large and have been following all the major releases and trends so far this year.

It’s no secret that the watch industry likes to crib each other in a circular fashion. One year it’s green dials and one year it’s blue dials. Fads are a bandwagon careening downhill with everyone attempting to jump on. Every year there is a new one that everyone rushes after and everyone is doing the same things over and over again. Quite frankly I’m getting quite fatigued with the whole affair. It’s a race to the bottom with price or a race to the top in features. Everything has to be new all the time or the best in its own class. Everything needs to be in-house.

One of the things that continuously draws me to Raketa year after year going on a decade now is their unwillingness to be boring. Even within the last year with the war going on it would have been easy to assume the brand would default to “safe mode” and produce really simple and inexpensive watches to pad their bottom line to ensure they survive not only the growing global economic downturn but the ever looming threat of a global consumer no longer interested in Russian goods as a result.

We’ve now seen proof that Raketa has doubled down; they’re perfectly happy to keep pushing the envelope with style and design during these uncertain times. Producing wildly avant-garde designs and pairing alongside tamer dials and cases with exotic materials. Raketa has produced a slew of great releases this year in what should’ve been their least exciting year on record. From my perspective, that’s a sign of things to come. I haven’t even done research into the factory’s newest venture, Imperial Peterhof Watches, which seems to be the luxury arm of the Petrodvorets Watch Factory. It’s a fascinating development which I will follow but is not at the core of my collection mission.

I’m going to start trying to hold myself to a once-per-week schedule of updates to the site, whether that is updating new releases, old releases, or longform content. I’m also going to keep the same cadence over on our Instagram channel that you totally should check out. It’s just photos of watches and no bullshit. Seriously. With all that said I hate emails with a passion so I’m going to limit updates to twice a month and we’ll see how that goes.

Last but not least a huge thank you to Avo Raup who has tremendously helped me locate watches over the years and I could not be more grateful as I enter my 11th year of collecting Raketa watches.

Thanks for reading,

Jacob