The MING 37.02 Minimalist: A Medium-Term Review

The first non-limited edition MING watch wants to redefine the daily driver. Does it succeed?

The whole notion of a so-called daily driver is one that we accept in watch collecting without much examination or criticism, which I think stems in part from guilt over acquisitiveness, and partly from a sense of romance about having a single horological companion in life to see you through thick and thin. The phrase comes to us, obviously, from the automotive world and in bygone days stood in contrast to the Sunday driver, an inexpert motorist who only took the car out for a drive on Sunday afternoons (and who was therefore conspicuous by their incompetence as a driver). Watch enthusiasts and collectors often have a romantic notion of the daily driver watch – all the way back in 2013,

Jason Heaton

wrote what is, if not the definitive essay on the appeal of the daily driver, is certainly a fine example of the daily driver watch essay genre in his article, “Fantasies Of Being A One Watch Guy.”

A daily driver watch should ideally have certain characteristics. It should be sturdy and reliable but without feeling over-engineered for its duties – as fascinating as high spec dive watches are (for instance) wearing something water resistant to 500 meters can seem like a kind of functional ostentation, like buying a G-Wagon when your average drive is a grocery store run. At the same time, nobody wants to worry over wearing a relatively fragile watch on a daily basis, and a daily driver ought to be able to tolerate exposure to rain or even an occasional accidental immersion without raising any concerns (charming as the ritual of taking off a dress watch to wash your hands may seem in the abstract, it gets old fast in reality). It should also be fairly straightforward in design – an exercise in transgressive or disruptive design is not what’s called for, as attractive as such a thing might be under other circumstances – and a delicate complication or combination of complications is probably not wanted either; anything more complex than a chronograph with date or annual calendar may be too fragile or simply too busy. This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t wear complicated watches on a daily basis – Philippe Stern used to wear a Patek observatory tourbillon as his daily driver, but when you’re the boss of Patek Philippe conventional ideas about what is and is not a daily driver probably don’t apply. I also think there’s an argument to be made that a daily driver should not be so expensive that its loss might be not only emotionally, but also financially painful; and while gold and platinum aren’t in themselves contrary to the nature of a daily driver, stainless steel seems a more appropriate choice, at least symbolically if not practically. Finally, being a daily driver doesn’t have to mean a boring watch – I think there should be something about its design that offers visual variety and even intellectual excitement, albeit not in such an extroverted way that the watch calls too much attention to itself.

The first mechanical watch I wore as a daily driver was a Seiko 5, which I wore constantly in graduate school, then for four years as a stay-at-home dad – I wore the hell out of it and it was both a daily driver and a daily beater. It survived among other things, repeated dunkings in the ocean during (Coney Island) beach trips with the kids (I took the back off at one point and found that the water exposure had done almost no harm at all with the exception of a very small amount of rust just inside the stem tube). To this day it still starts running almost instantly when I pick it up. I could have simply stopped there but of course I didn’t and over the years, watches that I’ve worn as daily drivers for extended periods of time have included a Speedmaster, a couple of Seiko divers, a couple of Grand Seikos, and a G-Shock or two, as well as a platinum Datograph on long-term loan from Lange & Söhne (something which I think would be extremely unlikely to happen today). Most recently, I’ve been wearing a MING 37.02 Minimalist every day for the last six or so weeks.

The Minimalist is according to MING, the “spiritual successor” to the 17.01 and 27.01, both of which have the same underlying design philosophy – you can say that both watches are intended to overdeliver on value, although that would miss noting the unique design language of both watches (27.01 per MING is an “evolution” of the 17.01) and their many interesting technical features. Both are designed for everyday wear, and the 37.02 in its turn is an obvious descendant of both, albeit with its own identity. The Minimalist is a slim watch (38mm x 11mm) and MING said at its release, in part, “It feels just as at home on a leather strap as it does on the moulded rubber strap, under a suit cuff or at the beach. It is self-winding, always ready to go, quick to set, and can be dressed up or down for any occasion.”

I had not originally intended to wear the Minimalist to the exclusion of any other watch but that’s how it worked out, and, while it’s occasionally been paired with an Apple Watch, it has been on my wrist every day since I received it back in late November.

The Minimalist lives up to its name and the design is simple but not simplistic. The signature horned lugs present on all MING watches are there, and the domed crystal and deep black dial create the contrast as well as the inversion effects for which MING watches are known. The crown is large and easy to manipulate. The hour and minute hands are physically the same length, although the minute hand has lume along its edges all the way to the tip, while the hour hand has lume fill extending about 3/4 of the way along its length. This sounds as if it could create legibility problems but in practice it does not since the contrast between the two hands is immediately obvious. There’s no seconds hand, center or otherwise, and the dial markers seem straightforward at first but are in fact quite unusual. There are three concentric layers of lumed dial markers of varying lengths, with the shortest spanning 30 degrees and the longest, 60 degrees and they are arranged so that each of the hours is indicated by a break in at least two of the markers. The arrangement for each hour clearly delineates one hour from the next without the use of conventional dial markers, numbers, or indexes and is somewhat irregularly regular. Overall what you end up with is a very easy-to-read watch, but with some underlying complexity in the design that keeps the whole thing interesting.

The movement is a modified Sellita SW300, semi-skeletonized and with an anthracite finish and custom rotor. It’s unobtrusive but attractive (which is true of the entire watch). The caseback is held in place by four Torx/star-head screws, which offer better resistance to driver slippage than Phillips or slot-headed screws. Water resistance thanks to a double-gasket system at the crown is 100M and the crown does not screw down, which makes the watch easier to wind and set if you happen to pick it up and find out it’s run through its 45 hour power reserve.

As with all MING watches, the Mnimalist really comes to life in motion on the wrist, where shifting ambient light gives it a changing appearance from one moment to the next. Although there are relatively few design elements, they work together harmoniously to such an extent that you hardly notice them as individual design decisions at all. Any MING watch is to some extent really all about light, and the spare design of the Minimalist really highlights that aspect of the watch, giving it not only a constantly changing appearance, but also a sense of constant fluid connection to its environment.

One among several of the Minimalist’s interesting features is the lume. The hands are coated with standard blue-green Super-LumiNovaX1 – the brightest type of SLN and also the brightest color – but the dial indexes are filled with MING’s custom Polar White lume. SLN is available from Tritec in just about any color of the spectrum but one color the company does not offer is white, so MING experimented with mixing various colored SLN pigments until a pure white glow resulted. There is a very slight grain to the Polar White pigment but it’s essentially invisible to the naked eye – I needed a 20x Loupe System loupe to even begin to make it out. The white glow is uniform, albeit slightly less bright than the glow from the hands, which is probably thanks to the combination of pigments necessary to produce a wide enough spectrum of light to produce a white effect overall.

The Minimalist comes on an FKM rubber strap, which tapers slightly from 20mm at the lugs, to 18mm and which also tapers in thickness; there are two shallow cut-outs in the thickest part of the strap in order to give it some flexibility, while at the same time giving those parts of the strap a natural curve. The pin buckle is a tuck-under design – you tuck the end of the strap under the end of the buckle, where it slides comfortably between the strap and the wrist. (Apple does something similar with the pin-and-tuck closure on its elastomer Watch straps). It’s one of the most comfortable straps I’ve ever worn and the attention to detail in the watch head and strap is found in the buckle as well, which has a very elegant elongated S-curve, and which is skeletonized on its flank. There’s a second inner set of holes for the spring bar holding the buckle onto the strap should you need it.

After several decades of wearing, for varying lengths of time, an enormous variety of watches, I’ve more or less given up on the idea of a single ideal everyday watch or ideal daily driver, but the Minimalist is the closest thing to it that I’ve had on in a very long time. It’s light enough and fits well enough on the wrist that you can easily forget it’s there – heavier watches, with their constantly shifting centers of gravity, have a tendency to remind you constantly of their presence, like eager dogs tugging to be off the leash. It’s also classically proportioned enough to not call attention to itself unnecessarily, but sophisticated enough in design and responsive enough to the ambient light that you can have a different visual experience every time you look at it. It is instantly legible, but it achieves that legibility through a very original and laudably unobtrusive set of design decisions and its overall construction, including the choice of a robust and easy-to-service movement and 100M water resistance, makes it a worry-free watch to wear as well. Even the absence of a date and small seconds is a feature, not a bug, making the watch easy to set, visually uncluttered, and unlikely to become a focus for a precision-lover’s anxiety about how many seconds a day you might be gaining or losing. It is in short, both relaxing and rewarding to wear, and while it may not be the perfect daily driver, it is very close to being a perfect daily driver. In its comfort, reliability, and unique design identity, it offers a sleek elegance that’s proof that a watch really can be more than the sum of its parts – if the parts are designed with enough care and thought. In some respects, it’s the quintessential MING watch, and the result of a process of refinement which has been going on since MING launched its first watch in 2017. And it’s the closest thing to a real daily driver I’ve worn in a very long time – pragmatic and practical technically, and full of constant surprises aesthetically. I hadn’t planned on wearing it every day for a month, but I don’t plan on taking it off any time soon either.

Full specs, pricing, and info at MING.