Standards
Editorial policy
What we will and will not publish, how often we revisit it, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Independence
Spring & Dial accepts no paid placements, no sponsored rankings, and no free product in exchange for coverage. No manufacturer, retailer or distributor has any input into what appears on this site or where it ranks. Nobody outside the site sees a page before it publishes.
The site is funded entirely by affiliate commission on qualifying purchases — disclosed in full here. Commission rates are not a selection criterion and do not appear anywhere in the process set out on the methodology page.
If any of that changes, this page will say so before it takes effect, not after. A disclosure published retroactively is not a disclosure.
What we will not publish
- Any claim of hands-on testing.We do not handle, wear, time or measure these watches. No accuracy measurements, no lume timings, no comfort or wearability judgments, no “in our experience”
- Any credential Stephen V. does not hold. No tenure claims, no expertise claims, no invented qualifications, no implied editorial staff
- Testimonials or user reviews. We have none that are real, so there are none on the site — and a clean page beats a fabricated one
- Estimated specifications. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure, our tables say so rather than carrying a guess
- Hardcoded prices. Every price comes from the live data layer with a verification date, or no number appears at all
- Review or rating structured data. Our editorial scores are visible page content and never appear as product review markup, because we do not review products in the sense that markup asserts
Sourcing
Specifications come from manufacturer documentation. Standards claims reference the standard by number. Prices come from the retailer’s own data. Historical and contextual claims may cite established enthusiast press, but never for a specification.
We do not copy specifications from other watch sites. Where sources genuinely disagree — which happens most often on Japan-market references — the page says so and shows both figures rather than picking one silently.
We never cite a source we did not actually read.
Update cadence
| Trigger | Action |
|---|---|
| Continuous | Price refresh from the live data layer |
| 30 days | New releases folded into the relevant roundups |
| 90 days | Every commercial page reviewed and picks re-validated |
| Annually | Full specification re-verification against current documentation |
| On discontinuation | Reference marked discontinued; roundup pick replaced |
| On error report | Corrected promptly; material corrections dated on the page |
We do not churn dates
The “updated” date on a page reflects a real content change — a revised pick, a corrected figure, a rewritten section. It is not touched by a rebuild, a price refresh, or a deploy.
This matters because date-churning to fake freshness is exactly the manipulation our currency advantage is supposed to expose in competitors. A site that re-stamps every page on every deploy has made its own dates meaningless, and doing that here would undermine the one signal we have for saying a page genuinely changed.
Corrections
Errors get fixed. Email info@springanddial.com with:
- The page and the reference number
- The figure or claim you believe is wrong
- Where the correct information is published, if you know
A material correction— a specification, a price mechanism, a factual claim that would change a reader’s decision — is noted on the page with the date it was made. Typographical and formatting fixes are made silently.
We would rather be told than be wrong, and a correction from a reader is genuinely more useful than a compliment.
Who writes
Every page is written by Stephen V., framed accurately as an enthusiast — someone genuinely interested in the category, with no credential and no test bench. The full position is on the about page, and the process is on the methodology page.