Vintage (PRS-35)

In the 1950s, while Smiths' instruments division grows around the Cheltenham plant, the brand offers in parallel a civilian catalog of wrist and pocket watches made entirely in England, marketed under names such as "De Luxe": simple, carefully made hand-wound watches, often in gold, designed for everyday use rather than for an audience of mechanical-watch enthusiasts alone. In an era when owning a single watch for all occasions was the norm rather than the exception, these models represented the British interpretation of the classic men's watch, elegant but without excess.

That tradition ends together with the rest of Smiths watch production at the close of the 1970s, when the quartz crisis and foreign competition lead the house to abandon the sector. When Timefactors takes over the Smiths name, it decides to dedicate a line to precisely this more discreet, "gentleman's" heritage, far from both the exploration imagery of the Everest line and the military one of the Military line: thus the Vintage line is born, marketed under the code PRS-35 (and its cushion-case sister PRS-36), explicitly inspired by a 1950s wristwatch design.

Since Smiths has not produced its own movements for decades, Timefactors chose for the PRS-35 a Swiss-made Peseux 7040 hand-wound caliber, a new-old-stock component dating from precisely that era, paired with a case and a dial made to specification for the model: a choice the company has asserted by declaring that every component, with the sole exception of the movement, is produced specifically for this watch. According to the information available on the manufacturer's website, the PRS-35 series also corresponds to the model's last production run.