The smartphone and the smartwatch were both supposed to unwind the mechanical watch. So why has Seiko (TSE:8050) roughly quadrupled in a year?

⌚ The cultural shift: Why Gen Z is slapping mechanical watches onto their wrists in 2026. 

📊 Tick, tick, boom: Seiko Group has benefited as Grand Seiko goes global.

I'm a bit of a tech guy. When Apple launched its first watch in 2015, I thought it was a marvel and had to have one, and I've worn a few iterations since. So it surprised even me when I slowly found myself drawn to mechanical watches. They can't track my sleep, push a notification, or tell me the UV index, but that's kind of the point.

Recently I bought an entry-level Seiko, and I enjoy it for reasons that have nothing to do with function. Turns out I'm not alone. This thing was made obsolete multiple times: first by quartz, then by the smartphone, and last by the smartwatch. And yet Seiko has roughly quadrupled in about a year, with Grand Seiko outgrowing the big Swiss names among buyers in their 20s and 30s.

There’s a lesson in this, and it isn't "old things come back." It's timing of a narrative. Somewhere along the way the watch stopped being a way to tell the time and became a way to say something. That shift in what it means happened years before the market stopped pricing it as a relic. That gap, between a thing earning a new kind of value and the crowd still writing it off as a fossil, is paydirt for investors. By the time "actually, it's back" is the norm, the re-rating has already happened. 

What's being written off as a relic today that you think has already found its new purpose?