Meaningful Connections

Message from founder, Ed Margulies:

2025 was a challenging year. Wars continue to be fought, mental health is on the rise and the global rhetoric is trying to divide and conquer. We’re slap bang in the middle of a financial crisis and during all my time in the watch industry I’ve never seen so many people struggle. 

The one thing I believe is whatever the future holds it’s best approached as a collective. A collective that is encouraged to voice their honest thoughts and if challenged, not to be challenged in silence. 

I’ve been lucky enough to message, chat to and even meet many Split clients. Different age groups, living in different countries, working different jobs but there’s one thing that glues it all together. KINDNESS.  

Below is a message from a gentleman in the US who epitomises everything I hoped to achieve when setting up Split watches. Someone who through vulnerability has unlocked his superpower. A man who has inspired me more than he’ll ever know. 

Thank you Ryan. You’ve shaken me to the core and will forever be my guiding light and energy when days are long and dark.

Message from client, Ryan:

"A few weeks after we sold our last company, I picked up a Vacheron Traditionnelle — a longtime favorite, beautifully made, historic. I appreciated it, but in my collecting I had a growing sense that I was putting on a costume for a play I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in. I was finding myself in this quiet arms race of pedigree and complication, where the point stops being the object and becomes the status orbiting around it.

So I started poking around for something different — something unique with a pulse rather than a pedigree. Down that rabbit hole, I found a GQ article about new watch brands, and a line about Split caught my attention:“Transforming watches into a symbol of connection… to get people talking, sharing the stories that truly matter.” I read more about the brand, read more about Ed and his story, and just found it all resonating in a way I found happily surprising. Really fucking refreshing.

Ed’s story and journey in many ways mirrored mine: my last few years have been about rebuilding — from grief over the death of my son, from punishing myself with regret, from looking “fine” on the outside while feeling disemboweled on the inside. And one of the aching anchors in that resurrection has been connection: opening back up to the world and the people around me.

I got into it. Split felt sincere without being self-serious, well-crafted without the ego, Japanese in a way that signals quality and confidence instead of theatrics. Precise, genuine, not particularly performative. And because it’s not Swiss, it nudges the whole category a few inches off its axis. A little counter-culture. A little rebellion. I liked that.

So I ordered one. No overthinking — just a gut feeling that this was a brand operating on the wavelength I’d been trying to tune my life back to.

Only after placing the order did I hear from Ed. I told him what the watch would represent to me once it was personalized — “Do It Anyway” on the strap, my son Sloane’s tattooed credo reminding himself to live even when he knew he was inevitably dying from his brain tumor. I was going to wear that credo around my wrist every time I put that watch on. It was becoming part of my reconnecting to the world and reconciling my grief with my life looking forward. That deep conversation with Ed led to more conversations, and before long, we were having lunch in New York and discovering that the whole Split ethos wasn’t a marketing line — it was personal to him, too. Ed has become the rarest kind of friend. Connection.

As I reflect back on this, it started with a brand that wasn’t handing me another script to play out, but offering a small, beautifully made watch that asked nothing of me except to tell the truth about where I’ve been.

I’m proud to be Split’s first North American customer — not because it says anything about status, but because it says something about connection.

And really, that’s the magic here. Watches are just the excuse.

The point is everything that happens when someone asks, “Hey, what’s that on your wrist?”

And for once, instead of posturing an answer, you tell them something real."