Hands-On: the Bernhardt Captain
Bernhardt’s Captain collection is a new range of dress watches that I think loosely falls in the Calatrave-esque trend that has been emerging, most notably through a variety of Japanese indies and micros, over the last few years. As interest in chunky divers and sports watches appears to wane a bit, enthusiasts are (finally) willing to look at watches in other genres, and brands are delivering with a variety of takes on the dress watch format.
This is a fundamentally good thing for the community, but it’s not easy to make a dress watch. It is, conversely, very easy to attempt to make a dress watch and actually make a regular old daily driver, the type of watch that most people who had any desire to wear any watch at all would have owned in the middle part of the 20th century.
Hands-On: the Bernhardt Captain
Stainless steel
Miyota 9039
Silver
None
Sapphire
leather
50
38 x 45mm
9.55mm
20mm
Push/pull
yes
$749
A dress watch, to me, is a very specific thing. If it’s mechanical, it’s manually wound. It’s more likely to not have a seconds hand, and indices and other markings should be minimal. It obviously should be quite thin and relatively small in size, and if I were really being a snob about it, I’d insist it should be in a precious metal, but I’m not a snob and that’s ridiculous. It does speak, though, to the idea that when you use the word “dress” in this way it implies certain rules, which I think is an idea worth embracing, or at least considering as we argue about what is and is not a dress watch.
This is all to say, I don’t think the Captain really meets the definition of a traditional dress watch if we were to apply even a handful of the normal rules about these things to it. But over the course of the last few weeks I’ve come to think it’s a perfectly nice everyday watch that is not a sports watch.
Dial
The dial is where interest in the Captain will be won or lost. There are three variants in total at launch. The one sent to me is the Fog, or silver dial. Bernhardt also offers the Captain in Cove (blue) and Cypress (green). Interestingly, they do not offer a black dial variant at this time, which is by far the most traditional color for a dress watch, and reveals that the brand is perhaps not really interested in being slaves to dress watch tradition at all.
That said, this is a fairly conservative dial execution, with an interior sector with stamped guilloche radiating outward to a ring of silver, applied Breguet style numerals. These numerals look very nice, and have a nice substance to them, adding depth to the dial. They’re polished, so they play with light in a nice way, along with the guilloche section in the dial’s inner sector. The numerals themselves are set against a silver satin finished base. It’s a lot of similar coloring but there’s plenty of contrast thanks to the polished finish (and height) of the numerals.
There’s also an outer railroad minute track in black with five minute intervals clearly demarcated in black. This aids greatly in overall legibility, but to me puts this watch squarely into “everyday use” and not “dress watch” mode. It just feels a little too technical, on this dial at least. The hands are very nicely done, heat blued, and long and thin. The “Bernhardt” wordmark, in an attractive cursive script, appears under the 6:00 marker and is my second favorite detail on the dial, right after the numerals themselves.
Case
The Captain’s case is polished stainless steel and measures 38mm in diameter, 9.55mm tall, and 45mm from lug to lug. It has a simple knurled crown at 3:00 that allows for handwinding, and a straightforward case construction with a curved polished bezel.
The case is honestly fairly generic and serves mainly as a vessel for the dial, which is as it should be for a watch like this. It wears perfectly well on my wrist, which is about 7.25 inches. It has a bit of a slab sided thing happening thanks to the way the bezel meets the midcase, but it’s thin enough that this doesn’t really count as a serious mark against the Captain, in my opinion.
I appreciate Bernhardt’s decision to polish every surface, which matches the energy of the dial and also contrasts a bit with what we expect from Bernhardt, a brand known primarily for more tool oriented and sporty designs. That design choice is probably the single most dress watch oriented decision on the Captain, and might limit its versatility somewhat, but if you’re inclined to wear dressier watches more casually anyway, it shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Movement
The Captain runs on a Miyota 9039 automatic movement, which is a caliber that at this point is well understood by anyone who dabbles in microbrands. These movements are thin, which allows for a brand to be quite flexible in the types of watches that they’re used in (extremely thin dress watches, big divers, and everything in between) and they’re also quite reliable. It doesn’t hurt that they are also relatively affordable, which certainly helps keep the overall cost of the Captain competitive (which we’ll get to in more depth in a moment).
The movement is covered by a solid caseback with an engraving of a ship’s wheel, a nod to Bernhardt’s nautical sensibilities that run through many of their designs, including the Captain to some degree. I’m completely fine with a closed caseback here. The Miyota caliber is not particularly attractive to look at, and adding an exhibition caseback often comes at the expense of additional case height or reduced water resistance, neither of which are tradeoffs worth making in my opinion.
Straps & Wearability
The Captain sample I had a chance to review came on a blue leather strap that is not really my style but a fairly nice, comfortable strap with a pebbled texture. With a dial like this, you could of course wear the Captain on a strap of virtually any color to dress it up or down as appropriate. The dressiest possible version would be a simple black leather or maybe a Milanese style mesh bracelet with straight endlinks. But I think it would also make sense on a more casual suede strap. Bright colored straps like the blue Bernhardt ships this watch with are probably the most casual and off-script option for anything dress watch adjacent, which reinforces the idea that the Captain is meant more as a riff on the genre than an attempt to make something that’s a dress watch under any super strict definition of the term.
Value
The Bernhardt Captain retails for $749. In 2026, it’s honestly hard to get mad at a watch that is reasonably well executed and priced under $1,000, but it would be silly not to address that four or five years ago a watch with this movement in this style would likely be $500 or less.
Last year I wrote about the debut release from Kiwame Tokyo, which the Captain reminded me of in some ways. There are differences of course, but they are both basically in a dress/casual style, running on Miyota movements, and trade on similar classic dress watch design tropes. The Captain’s dial, with its stamped guilloche, is a little more complicated, and perhaps explains its retail price being $100 higher. But also, do we really need to search for justification for this watch being $749, while another similar watch is $650, and yet another, like the Baltic MR watches, sell for around $620?
There’s a lot of hair splitting that can happen at these price points, but I think we’re finding that there’s a maturing category of watches under $1,000 that represents the new vanguard of “value” as most collectors define it. For those of us who have been around for a while, that $1,000 price point might replace one at $500 or even less, which I think accounts for at least some of the eye rolling at certain watches approaching or just exceeding this four digit number. But time, as they say, marches on, and watches are no longer a purely niche pursuit. The cost of the hobby growing, with more brands and people being involved, interested, and invested is a higher entry price point.
The critical thing is that with higher prices, we should also expect higher quality. We don’t always get it. The Bernhardt Captain is not going to blow you away with its finishing, timekeeping, or its ergonomics, but it’s a perfectly serviceable and nice looking watch. Aesthetics are subjective so if you have fallen in love with the way this watch looks, I don’t think you should hesitate about spending $749 on it if it speaks to you. But it’s also not a deeply impressive or obvious value oriented gamechanger. Bernhardt
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