Editorial
Roger W. Smith makes watches the way George Daniels did: by hand, one at a time, on the Isle of Man. The Series 2 is a 38mm manual-wind with a co-axial escapement, built substantially by a single person from raw material to finished movement.
Production runs to roughly ten watches a year across the entire workshop.
Roger Smith trained under George Daniels and is one of the very few watchmakers alive who can legitimately claim that lineage. The original Series 1 established the format; the Series 2, introduced in 2011, expanded the case to 38mm and added complications depending on the specification. Each watch is substantively the work of one person, a philosophy Smith inherited directly from Daniels and has never abandoned.
Steel and gold case variants exist, and the co-axial escapement is made in-house rather than sourced from ETA. The waiting list is long and the annual output is counted in single digits per reference.
The secondary market for Roger W. Smith is thin and authenticity verification is genuinely difficult for buyers unfamiliar with the work. Provenance documentation matters more here than for almost any other brand: request the original paperwork and confirm the serial with the workshop before purchasing.
Condition is critical because cosmetic restoration on these dials and cases is not something most watchmakers can competently handle. Be wary of unverified complications or non-standard configurations that do not match the known production variants. A watch described as a Series 2 with a dial type or complication not documented in Smith's output history warrants deep skepticism.
