Hey y’all, Nick here.
We are officially at 100 days since Microbrand Atlas became real. I KNOW y’all have joked but my wallet is indeed suffering. Mightily. I’ve bought five different watches since taking on this venture… 🫣
Terranova’s Auto ‘91 in Brazil (the white/orange got me)
a preorder for Castor’s copper watches in Chile (seems they’ve sold out since)
a preorder of the snappy new Jugbitten in Finland
a 611 by Hong Kong’s Sunrex (going through an automotive phase I guess)
and Mu;n’s beautiful moonphase in cobalt, out of France.
I know what you’re thinking and yes my wife has called for an embargo. So while I devise a way around that (more housework as a bribe? some sort of deal with the cartel?), here are few things on where this thing is heading:
A smarter helper bot is coming. The AI is dumb as hell right now, no argument. That's partly by design: I trained it only on the data in our own database, not on the marketing copy that brands with big budgets have blanketed the internet with. (You'll notice that when you search on any channel online, the same 25 brands pop up.) Clean data is a smaller pile to learn from, so it's learning slower, but it's learning right.
By-model prices and availability are… tough. I know it's a pain to fall for a model, click, and find it's out of stock. 5,000+ models, plus the smaller guys not being great at updating their own inventory, equals… what we have. I'm editing by hand as fast as I can, and any corrections y'all send are emailed right to me. But here's a real question: would any of y'all want to pitch in as contributors, wiki-style? If enough hands go up, that could fix this a whole lot faster than the 3–4 months I'm otherwise expecting. No pressure either way!
A few other microbrand maps have popped up! The ones I know of are also on this email list (👋), so I suspect some of y'all are reading this right now. While I have you: I welcome more transparency, more provenance, and more voices! Just… please stop scraping without asking.
A couple of housekeeping notes: owners, if you haven't verified your page with Lineage yet, I'd love to hear from you. Browsers, we're up to 673 brands… go poke around, have fun, guard your wallet, and call out anything that looks off. I'm always an email away.
And finally, the thing I most want your vote on:
I'm debating adding two regular emails:
Weekly: a "brand you (probably) didn't know" spotlight
Daily: one watch, one place, and what a day wearing it there would feel like
If either sounds good, just hit reply with WEEKLY, DAILY, or BOTH.
Alright, that's that for that.
As always, thanks for your support.
-Nick @ MBA