Most power-reserve indicators whisper from a quiet corner of the dial. This one shouts. The SUPRA 42, the first watch from Dubai independent Cook & Re, parks its gauge at 6 o’clock in red-and-white hazard stripes and calls it Memento Mori, a dramatic name for a plain truth: the tank runs out, and the watch wants you watching it happen.
The brand comes from a career change. Founder Endre Szakacs spent two decades in international banking, then left to build the watch he actually wanted to wear. First releases from bankers usually play safe. His doesn’t.
Price: On request
Where to buy: Cook & Re
A dial drawn like a map
The dial is matte black and covered in topographic contour lines, the kind of map you’d read on a ridgeline instead of a wrist. Big Arabic numerals carry the hours, and the sword-shaped hands are filled with lume, the hour hand tipped in the same red as the stripes below it. Nothing on the face is decorative filler; every line either tells time or counts down what’s left of it.
This first edition is the Falcon Black, and the brand’s motto is ‘Challenge Over Comfort.’ The watch is built to argue for it.
Around that dial sits a case built like it expects weather, and the spec sheet backs the posture up.
The case is 42 mm of 316L marine-grade stainless steel, with crown guards and a unidirectional compass bezel on top. Water resistance runs to 200 meters, which puts this firmly in dive-watch territory even if the compass bezel points it at the hills instead. It’s a lot of case for a debut piece, and it wears its size openly.
Forty hours, counted in the open
Underneath is Sellita’s SW270-1, an automatic movement with the power-reserve complication that drives the striped gauge. Fully wound, it runs 40 hours before the watch stops.
Getting one is the catch. The brand sells by allocation, price on request, no retail listing anywhere, so the route in is an enquiry through Cook & Re’s own site. The brand has announced a run of 50 individually numbered pieces, which keeps the striped gauge a rare sight. And with no public price, there’s no quick value math: you write to the brand, you wait, you find out.
Price: On request
Where to buy: Cook & Re
I’d take the stripes over another silent subdial. The SUPRA 42 is for the collector who likes a debut with one loud idea executed cleanly, and who can live with allocation lists. Everyone else can admire the countdown from a distance.
