Fears has introduced the Brunswick 39 Perpetual Calendar, the first perpetual-calendar wristwatch in the Bristol company’s 180-year history.
The stainless-steel watch costs £26,950 including UK VAT, or £22,458.33 before VAT. It joins the permanent collection rather than appearing as a numbered anniversary edition, with first deliveries currently expected in late October 2026.
Half of what makes it interesting is the complication. The other half is that Fears has not hidden how the thing is made: hand-built in Britain, on a Swiss case and movement architecture, with dial and hands out of Germany.
A high complication enters the regular collection
Fears was founded in Bristol in 1846 and revived in 2016, so the perpetual calendar lands on the 180th anniversary and on the tenth year of the modern company at the same time.
A numbered anniversary edition was the easy call. Cap it, concentrate demand, let scarcity carry half the story.
Instead it goes into the core collection. Assembly capacity and the complexity of the calibre will hold the numbers down anyway, but no edition number defines the model.
Which turns the Brunswick 39 into a test of sustained demand rather than launch-week allocation, and lets a collector judge the design without being told to hurry because only a handful will ever exist.
The 39 mm case controls the complication
Thirty-nine millimetres top to bottom, 37 across, 45.4 lug to lug.
The case is 9.4 mm thick before the domed sapphire, roughly 10.1 mm with it, and water resistance is 50 metres.
That is restrained for an automatic perpetual calendar built on a module. The short lug-to-lug ought to keep it compact on the wrist, though a cushion case distributes its width in ways that depend entirely on whose wrist it is sitting on.
It arrives on a blue-grey ostrich strap and will not take the existing Brunswick bracelet. Ask about a compatible steel option before you order, not after.
The dial has five pieces of calendar information to organise
Pure silver, in a colour Fears calls Silver Mink.
Day, date, month, leap-year cycle and moon phase, arranged across a balanced group of subdials, with applied numerals, polished hands and the warmth of the silver keeping the whole thing from reading as an instrument panel.
Perpetual calendars are hard to draw. The wearer needs several indications at once and every extra hand is another chance to confuse him.
Fears has kept the technical look out of it, and the watch still reads as part of the simpler Brunswick collection. That continuity matters for a company moving into a higher price and complication bracket for the first time.
Dial and hands come from Germany. Final assembly and testing happen in Britain.
The movement is collaborative rather than invented as a national object
The calendar is driven by the Dubois Dépraz 55115 module, developed for Fears and placed over a Sellita SW300 automatic base movement.
The complete calibre runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour and provides approximately 47 hours of power reserve. An 18-carat gold rotor carries the Fears cypher and can be seen through the sapphire caseback.
Nobody is calling that a British movement, and Fears makes no claim that every component came out of its own workshop.
This is simply how independent watch companies work. A specialist module maker, an established Swiss base calibre, a German dial producer, a Swiss case supplier and a British assembly team, each doing the part it is best at.
Saying so plainly beats stretching the word manufacture until it snaps. Judge the watch on the finished object and on whether Fears can service the whole system in fifteen years.
The calendar is mechanically prepared for the year 2100
Kept running and correctly set, it handles months of different lengths and the four-year leap cycle on its own.
It needs a correction in 2100, when the Gregorian calendar skips the leap year. Before that, time zones, daylight saving and a movement left to stop will all ask for your attention.
Four recessed correctors around the case reset the indications. Follow the instructions exactly: a calendar mechanism adjusted during the hours when the gears are already turning the date is a calendar mechanism heading back to Bristol.
A SwissKubik winder comes in the box. Keep the movement turning and you never have to rebuild five indications after the 47-hour reserve runs out.
£26,950 moves Fears into a different buying decision
The price sits far above anything else Fears makes.
At this level you are not buying extra indications. You are buying into movement service, production capacity, parts availability in twenty years, brand continuity, and the secondary-market depth of a small independent house.
The Brunswick 39 does not have to pretend it is a cheaper route to a large Swiss maison. Its argument is narrower and better: compact proportions, a British case design you can recognise across a room, permanent-collection status, and a company small enough to answer the telephone.
Scarcity will happen because Fears is small. No guaranteed annual number has been published, and no resale value either.
What a prospective owner should ask
- Delivery: whether the late-October timetable applies to the individual order.
- Servicing: who services the calendar module and the expected turnaround.
- Warranty: what is covered if a calendar indication falls out of synchronisation.
- Correctors: the safe operating window for manual adjustments.
- Straps: availability of alternative materials and colours.
- Water resistance: testing intervals if the watch is exposed regularly to water.
- Winder settings: the recommended direction and turns per day.
The winder makes ownership easier. It does not excuse you from understanding the mechanism.
Luxury.it perspective
The Brunswick 39 convinces because Fears refused to use its anniversary to manufacture artificial rarity.
Permanent collection, compact case, and an honest account of the international network that built it. The British identity here comes from design, assembly, 180 years of company history and judgement, not from a claim that every component was cut inside one Bristol postcode.
At £26,950, transparency is not a decorative virtue. It is part of the product.
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