It's About Time. Or is it?

In case you haven’t noticed, watches are having a pretty big cultural moment. Not just any watches, though. Statement pieces. Expensive, rare, IYKYK watches. Once you dial in, you can’t not notice—they’re everywhere: movies, television shows and celebrity wrists. 

Watches have become such a personal bellwether that costume designers for shows like “The White Lotus” spend weeks—even months—identifying and choosing very specific, and sometimes obscure, watches for characters to wear, to help tell the viewer precisely who they are. A couple of great examples: In the recent season, Parker Posey’s character, the wealthy Southern matriarch Victoria Ratliff, wears the classic Rolex Day-Date President, as does her husband Tim (played by Jason Isaacs). The matching watches, hers the more expensive version ($65K) and his a bit less so (around $50K), symbolize the couple’s wealth, exalted self-perception and ruthless unity.  

In another series, “Your Friends and Neighbors,” watches are used to amplify the flagrant desperation of fired hedge fund manager Andrew “Coop” Cooper, played by Jon Hamm, who solves his cash flow problem by stealing new-money, look-at-me, crazy expensive watches from his wealthy neighbors who happen to collect them. First up is a Patek Philippe Nautilus ($169K on the resale market). Next, he swipes another neighbor’s $225K Richard Mille Felipe Massa. What’s interesting, though, is that as he’s bagging his quarry, he tells the audience in great detail what makes these timepieces so spectacular, from the latter’s “signature rose-gold and titanium skeleton and flyback function,” to the former’s “white-gold blue sunburst dial, water resistance up to 30 meters and 2.3-millimeter thickness.” 

Valerie Naifeh—jewelry designer and founder of Naifeh Fine Jewelry, with locations in Oklahoma City and Sun Valley, Idaho—is aware of all of this. And she’s recently expanded both locations to include watch boutiques, with pieces for men and women. But it feels more like a coincidence that she’s brought timepieces into her boutiques during the height of watch-mania. Naifeh is a savvy businesswoman, yes, but first and foremost she’s an artist who holds every item in her shops to a high standard. She’s selective, and unyielding in her commitment to beauty, uniqueness and quality. This is why it’s only now that she’s delving into watches. 

“Over the 27-year history of the company, men have come in and said, ‘Well, do you carry watches? What watches do you have?’ And there are other companies in Oklahoma City who have done an extraordinarily fine job of providing lots of different watch brands to customers, and that’s just not been my background,” she says. Watches weren’t her milieu, and choosing which lines to carry felt uncomfortable. “It wasn’t until last year that we hired an extraordinary young man. His name is Brian Pates, and Brian is our manager for our Sun Valley store. Brian is about 53 years old, and his entire professional career has been in luxury retail, everything from Valentino to Eton and then managing Betteridge Jewelers in Vail, Colorado.”

Naifeh has expanded both locations to include exquisite watch boutiques, and in so doing has become wonderfully well educated in the world of watches and fine timepieces. 

“Timepieces, obviously are utilitarian because they serve an important purpose—telling time—but they also say a lot about the individual who wears them,” Naifeh says. “Most of our customers are leaders; they’re not followers. Most of our patrons are individuals who like to make statements about who they are.”

As a designer and artist herself, Naifeh’s appreciation for and love of every tiny detail of the watches she offers is exciting to her. She’s enamored, and as she speaks, it’s impossible not to become a little smitten, also, with these tiny machines that tell us the time and telegraph who we think we are and how we want to be perceived.

But as we said, she’s a savvy businesswoman, and that side of Naifeh was in on the decision, too. Frankly, she’s trying to woo the fellas. “We’ve really never had anything ‘for men,’ and most men, traditionally, especially in the South and the Midwest, don’t wear a lot of jewelry. But men do love to wear a timepiece. Women will wear diamond studs or a beautiful colored gemstone on the right hand, or an important necklace. Men don’t really have a way to show off their individuality and also wealth, for lack of a better word, in the jewelry category, other than timepieces.”   

Funny fact: Some of the younger people working in Naifeh’s shops have had to learn how to tell time. “In our Sun Valley store, we have three young ladies who are under the age of 25, and when we introduced these two watch brands, none of them knew how to tell time on a watch. They’ve grown up with digital time on a phone, and so we have had to teach them how to read [chronometric] time.”

It was the well-pedigreed manager of Naifeh’s Sun Valley shop who helped her navigate the world of luxury timepieces. “He has a wealth of knowledge about a lot of extraordinary brands that are all limited production,” she says. The two started a conversation, which turned into an evaluation of potential brands to bring into the store.

The winners are Bovet and HYT, two remarkable companies. “Bovet is Swiss,” Naifeh says, and while many watchmakers describe their wares as Swiss, there’s a loophole. Watches assembled in Switzerland from parts produced elsewhere call themselves Swiss-made. Naifeh said luxury brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe fall into this category. “Bovet is more than Swiss-made. It’s 95% all made in-house in Neuchatel, Switzerland. And so we actually can say that Bovet is Swiss hand-crafted,” she says. Bovet produces a mere 1,000 timepieces a year; Rolex produces around a million. There are precisely three of Bovet’s newest watch, the Récital 30, in the world. You’ll find one-third of them at Naifeh Fine Jewelry.  

HYT is a horse of another color entirely. “HYT stands for hydro technical,” Naifeh says. “This is a very, very new company. It’s only been in existence since 2012, although the technology for the watch was being developed prior to HYT being formed as a company. They only make about 150 watches a year.” Reader, are you ready for this? HYT is the first watch to tell time with liquid. There is no hour hand. You tell the hour by the advance of the liquid as it moves in the watch, through a little tube.

Naifeh, who by now is quite the horological expert, explained that with HYT it’s all about the cool factor, although it’s a precisely engineered feat of near-magic. “There are two parts to the movement, whereas most watches are strictly just an automatic or mechanical movement, or you can force movement. The HYT has a mechanical movement with the main screen, but then at the base, it has a liquid module, and the liquid module is two-part. There are two baffles, which regulate the flow of the liquid, and they also regulate the expansion or contraction based on temperature,” she says. HYT, like Bovet, is 95% Swiss hand-crafted. The only thing made outside of Switzerland is the strap.

The two inaugural watchmakers Naifeh has teamed up with could not be more visually or philosophically different, but they also have something very important in common. “I’m a small, independent company, and I want to partner with like-minded people,” Naifeh says. “I like partnering with smaller companies that are working at a very, very high level and innovating beyond what anyone else is seeing. We push ourselves in our design lab in Oklahoma City to make the finest jewelry possible. We’re pushing ourselves every day to get better and better at everything we do. And that’s what I look for.”  

The Luxiere List: Who are you calling horological? 

Naifeh Fine Jewelry’s two locations offer timepieces for men and women. You’ll find rarities from Bovet and HYT ranging in price from $31K to $466K. The perfect stocking stuffer.

Oklahoma is home to jewelers offering the finest watch brands in the world, ranging from the accessible to the wildly aspirational. Oklahoma City’s BC Clark offers Rolex, Tudor, Breitling, OMEGA, Grand Seiko, Longines, TAG Heuer, NOMOS Glahütte, Shinola and Montblanc.  

Tulsa’s Diamond Cellar offers Rolex, Patek Philippe, Chanel, Tudar, Grand Seiko, Baume & Mercier, Gucci, Hermes, Frederique Constant and more.

Sotheby’s is a phenomenal resource for watches—via private sales and auctions. If you’re quick, you can pick up a limited-edition pink gold Cartier Crash watch at auction right about now. It’s estimated to close at 3,200,000 HKD, or $384K USD.

Watch fans love the ’gram. Follow @dailywatch, which showcases the latest in luxury watches from top brands, including Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe; @watchanish, the brainchild of Anish Bhatt, a global luxury influencer who takes a more editorial approach; and @hodinkee, which goes deeper, offering a blend of hands-on reviews, technical data, the latest industry news and in-depth analysis of the world’s leading watch brands.  

OKC Thunder player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander presented Rolex watches to his teammates after winning the 2024-25 NBA MVP award, fulfilling a promise he made last season. Models given included the Rolex Submariner Date, Datejust 36 (Jubilee and Oyster bracelet models), Sky-Dweller and Sea-Dweller.