Welcome to Brand Breakdown, a series of comprehensive yet easy-to-digest guides to your favorite companies, with insights and information you won’t find on the average About page.
Over its long history, Bulova has earned a place as one of the great American watch companies and left its cultural mark. Having outfitted soldiers and astronauts, the brand today might be quieter than in its heyday but is still going strong — and it offers plenty of interest and value for watch collectors and newbies alike.
Bulova history and collector perception
Bulova is a brand with significant historical presence and a number of notable watches in its back catalog. Founded in 1875 in New York by Bohemian immigrant Joseph Bulova, it played a part in the United States status as a watchmaking powerhouse in decades past, alongside brands like Hamilton, Waltham, Elgin and others. The brand is also well known for innovation like its 1960 Accutron tuning fork-based (the origin of Bulova’s logo) technology, and high-accuracy quartz movements have continued to be part of its persona.
Bulova today turns out watches in considerable volume, often aimed at a relatively budget market. Although the brand’s many watches with quartz and basic mechanical movements from (Citizen sister brand) Miyota seem more mass-market- than collector-oriented, it also offers a number of models that tug at enthusiasts’ heartstrings. Remakes of legacy models like the Lunar Pilot, Oceanographer and those made for the military are still fun for collectors, but its own quartz technology such as that found in the Precisionist and Curv collections is also interesting and impressive.
Where are Bulova watches made?
Bulova was founded in New York and maintains its headquarters there, but like most modern companies, the picture is a little more complicated than those facts would suggest. Despite its American origin, it doesn’t produce watches in the United States (almost no one does). Owned by the Japanese conglomerate Citizen since 2007, you’ll find some models produced in Japan or Hong Kong while higher-end models have the Swiss-made designation.
Which Bulova models are “best?”
You’ll have to decide for yourself which is your favorite. Below, however, we’ve gathered some of the most notable and representative models, broken down by collection, so you’ll have the context to do just that.
Archive Series
The Archive Series is exactly what it sounds like: it focuses on bringing back popular or notable watches from the brand’s catalog. Like many reissue watches popular today, the majority hail from the 1960s and ’70s, and there are some damn cool ones. Watches in this collection can range from relatively affordable at a few hundred bucks to some of Bulova’s most expensive models.
