MICROBRAND
Seals Watch Company Keeps the American Tool Watch Close to Home
Designed in the Sierra Nevada foothills and assembled to order in Sacramento, Seals builds tank-tough automatics with a short chain between maker and wearer.
A Seals Watch Company wristwatch. Image: Seals Watch Company
Built by Michael Seals
Michael Seals founded Seals Watch Company in 2014 in El Dorado Hills, California, after a career in digital marketing. The spark was personal: the birth of his first daughter, and a night of sketching armored tanks whose turret and hull mapped neatly onto a bezel and case. A Kickstarter campaign funded the first Model A, and the tank motif still runs through the catalog.
Why it stands out
Seals stays small on purpose. Watches are designed in California and assembled on demand in Sacramento, so built-to-order pieces ship within about a week rather than sitting in a warehouse. The lineup covers a field watch (Model C), divers and sport watches (Sea Storm, Dark Seal), the tank-derived Model A.5, and the new 38mm Model B Land // Sea, whose GMT version runs Miyota’s 9075 true GMT caliber. Most models land between roughly $600 and $900.
The one to know
Start with the Model C Field Explorer: a 40.5mm steel tonneau case with wire lugs, a Swiss Sellita SW200-1 automatic, sapphire crystal, and 200 meters of water resistance behind a screw-down crown, at $655. Launch-era examples used the STP1-11; current builds carry the Sellita. It is a field watch built like the tanks that inspired it.
Why this watch, on this wrist?
And at Spot.Watch — that’s always worth noticing.