Rec Watches

REC Watches — short for Recover, Recycle, Reclaim — was founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2014 by Christian Mygh and Jonathan Kamstrup, built around a simple idea: rather than sell customers a manufactured 'brand heritage,' build each watch with an actual, physical piece of history inside it. The earliest pieces were modest quartz watches made from salvaged steel pulled from scrapped Morris Minis; the brand has since grown into a fully Swiss-made operation, designed in Denmark and assembled in Switzerland.

Growth came fast once REC moved to mechanical watches. The 2015 P51 Automatic, built from salvaged Ford Mustang parts, was funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised a then-record 3.2 million Danish kroner from backers in more than 30 countries — after the founders had already secured backing from four of five investors on Denmark's own version of Shark Tank. Delivered in 2016, the P51 was named one of the top five watches under $5,000 by the Wall Street Journal. Its follow-up, the Porsche 911-inspired 901 Collection, broke that Kickstarter record again in 2017, and the 2018 901-RS — built from an ultra-rare 1973 Porsche RS and sold out immediately — established the 'naturally limited' approach that has defined the brand since.

REC moved its entire production to Swiss-made movements in 2019, away from the Japanese Miyota calibres it had used until then. The years that followed brought a run of notable collaborations and materials: the 901 RWB Collection with cult Porsche restomodder Akira Nakai; the RNR Collection built from repurposed Land Rovers, including a piece made with UK restomod house Arkonik; the 2021 P51 Green Hornet and Little Red, both sourced from one-of-a-kind Shelby GT500 prototypes; the debut TTT motorcycle collection with its twist-open dual-case construction; and 901 pieces built with recycled carbon fibre supplied by California's Gunther Werks.

A more accessible Core Collection arrived in 2022, trading actual salvaged parts for design and material cues drawn from specific automotive eras — the TURBO range nodding to 1980s turbocars, the TOURER range to 1960s grand tourers. The limited-edition DNA line kept pushing into genuinely remarkable provenance that same year with the SPX DeLorean, built using real fragments from John Z. DeLorean's own personal DMC-12, which also sold out immediately. 2023 brought a fully Swiss-made Spitfire tribute, the X4009, sourced from a Battle-of-Britain-era Mk1a aircraft, and the TTT Knievel, built from Evel Knievel's final stunt motorcycle.

The current flagship is the Habu, a tribute to the SR-71 Blackbird built with titanium sourced directly from aircraft No. 61-7956 — a rare dual-cockpit B-model trainer that logged more flight hours than any other Blackbird before a later career flying high-speed research for NASA, its provenance verified through Daniel Freeman, Chief of Metals Technology for the U.S. Air Force's 9th Reconnaissance Wing. Its lower dial is forged from the aircraft's actual Grade 6 titanium engine-nacelle exhaust ejectors, set inside a 40mm Grade 2 titanium tonneau case running a manual Sellita SW270-1 M movement with 45 hours of reserve, its power-reserve indicator a nod to the jet's afterburner throttle system. Limited to 1,372 pieces, it is priced from 1,995 to 2,395 dollars.