Armin Strom’s Tribute³ Au750 Makes Gold Part of the Movement

Gold watches often keep their most expensive material on the outside. The Armin Strom Tribute³ Au750, reference RG26-TRI.AU, takes a more demanding route: 18K rose gold forms the case, off-centre dial, small-seconds subdial and all three movement bridges. The result is not simply a gold version of an existing watch. It asks whether the material can explain the calibre as clearly as it signals luxury.

Announced on 2 October 2026, the watch is limited to eight pieces and priced at CHF 69,000. Its collector value cannot be reduced to that scarcity. The more useful question is what the gold is made to do—and whether the finishing lets each component keep a distinct visual role.

Gold is doing mechanical work

On the dial side, a mirror-polished finger bridge holds the visible barrel. Turn the watch over and a solid-gold three-quarter bridge carries clou de Paris guilloché above a grey PVD-coated mainplate. This is important because the expensive material is not hidden behind a generic display: it maps the calibre’s architecture.

Three guilloché patterns prevent the watch from becoming one uninterrupted gold surface. Soleil radiates across the off-centre hours-and-minutes dial, grain d’orge marks the seconds, and clou de Paris gives the back its own geometry. Grey PVD steel hands and the dark plate provide necessary separation.

A compact case keeps the material disciplined

The case is 38 mm wide and 9.38 mm thick, with sapphire crystals front and back, 5 ATM water resistance and a grey nubuck strap. Those proportions make the gold feel concentrated rather than expansive. Horomag has not handled the watch, so wrist comfort and the real-world legibility of the highly textured dial remain in-person questions.

AMW21 matters beyond the metal

Inside, the manual-winding AMW21 runs at 3.5 Hz, uses 21 jewels and 135 components, and stores 100 hours of power. Its motor-barrel reverses the usual arrangement so the arbor winds the mainspring inside a fixed drum. Armin Strom states that 97 percent of the components are produced in-house.

The official technical sheet labels an 18 mm dimension as “lug-to-lug”, which is not credible for a 38 mm case and is likely the strap or lug width. Horomag therefore excludes that measurement instead of converting a probable label error into published fact.

The eight-piece collector question

For the right collector, the Tribute³ Au750 succeeds because the precious metal is assigned to the parts that tell the mechanical story. For everyone else, the eight-piece limit and CHF 69,000 price make admiration easier than ownership. Its lasting argument is not that it contains more gold, but that the gold has a clear job.