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Where the data comes from

Dials has two layers, and they are sourced differently on purpose.

The catalogue: from the manufacturers

The reference layer (brands, series, models, calibres, complications) starts from what the watch houses publish about their own watches: official catalogues and specification sheets. That material arrives in as many formats as there are houses, so the work is normalisation: every model is rewritten into the one specification the whole catalogue shares, and the seams in each house's reference-number grammar are mapped so a reference can be resolved reliably.

Where a manufacturer's published data is incomplete or ambiguous, fields are filled from documented sources or left empty. An empty field is honest; a guessed one poisons every comparison that touches it.

The listings: from the market

The marketplace layer is collected from the dealers and platforms we track. Each listing keeps three things:

  • A link back to its source. The listing belongs to whoever published it; Dials always points at them.
  • What the seller said, verbatim. The brand, reference and title as the source stated them are stored unchanged, separately from anything Dials concludes about the watch.
  • Its market state. Listings are revisited regularly; when one disappears from its source it is marked delisted rather than deleted, so the record of what was asked, and when, survives.

Matching listings to models

A listing is linked to a catalogue model by brand plus reference number. Where the reference is unambiguous the match is automatic; where it is not, a person reviews it. An unmatched listing is never thrown away: it is kept and queued for reconciliation, because the listings that fail to match are frequently watches the catalogue was missing. The unmatched queue is one of the catalogue's best sources of growth.

Images

Studio photographs arrive from many sources against as many different backgrounds; lined up in a grid, the eye reads the backgrounds before it reads the watches. So every image is cut out, squared and re-hosted on the Dials CDN, and the site renders the processed version. Source images are never hotlinked; the same courtesy is asked of anyone building on the API.

Corrections

The pipeline is built to be corrected. If a field is wrong, say which model, which field, and what it should be: hello@dials.co.