Independent watchmakers — the Philippe Dufours, Kari Voutilainens and François-Paul Journes of the industry — have been getting a lot of attention in the last few years. Their distinctive watches, produced in small quantities and without corporate involvement, have loyal groups of watch enthusiasts lining up to buy.
But what of such watchmakers entering the market now?
“Post-Covid we have seen a major surge in young, independent talent,” said Christian Bangert, a watch collector in Connecticut known by his Instagram handle @onlybuyingtime. “And there is heavy interest from the collector crew that really like wearing mechanical art on our wrists.”
At a time of rising labor and material costs, supply chain issues and global economic uncertainty, what compelled these new makers to establish brands? And what kinds of challenges have they faced in bringing their first designs to market?
The six watchmakers behind four brands, all of which completed their first timepieces in the last few months, have been selling through watch fairs, Instagram and word of mouth. Here are their stories.
School’s Out
Hazemann & Monnin was established in 2024 by Alexandre Hazemann and Victor Monnin, who met eight years ago when they entered the Lycée Edgar Faure, the well-known watchmaking school in Morteau, France. (Mr. Hazemann is now 25; Mr. Monnin, 26.)
It has a surprisingly large operation for a brand that just delivered the first of the 20 watches it has sold, with the founders and their 11 employees occupying two modest 19th-century buildings in the Swiss town of La Grande-Béroche, on Lake Neuchâtel.
The workshop has five CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machines, lathes, cutters, milling machines, a decorating department and more, an array that Mr. Monnin said was possible because their production director “knows how to repair and renovate all kinds of machines, so we could get them for next to nothing.”
They also invested the 20,000 Swiss francs (now $24,820) that Mr. Hazemann won in the 2023 F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition. The men had worked together on the two watches they entered in the competition, but a contest representative said there could be only one winner — so Mr. Hazemann took the prize for his AH.02 Signature, a 42-millimeter stainless steel timepiece.
The brand’s first watch, called Subscription School Watch, is a “completely different” version of that winning timepiece, Mr. Monnin said — with a hand-wound movement made in-house. The 39.5-millimeter timepiece has two complications, the passing strike and the instantaneous jumping hour. So when the watch chimes the hours, the hour hand jumps to the correct numeral. (The watch was a finalist in the mechanical exception category at the 2025 Grand Prix d’Horologerie de Genève, an industry competition.)
“We make every pinion wheel, winding system, everything apart from the mainspring and hairspring,” Mr. Monnin said. “And we make 100 percent of the decorations in-house.”
Unusually, the brand has produced two versions of the watch: a version with openwork subdials and a serif font, signed by Mr. Hazemann, and an Artistic one with a malachite dial and opal subdials, and Mr. Monnin’s surname engraved in script on the movement plate. Both versions are 59,000 Swiss francs (or $74,500).
They said the two versions represent themselves. “And in this way we have our own specifications, not ‘sporty’ and ‘classic,’ as many other brands,” Mr. Monnin said.
Mr. Hazemann said having their own business has always been their goal. “But if somebody had told us a few years ago that we would be where we are today,” he added, “I would not have believed them.”
“The Only Way”
“It was not a choice,” Dann Phimphrachanh, 41, said as he walked along Lake Neuchâtel one day in November just as the setting sun made the distant Alps glow. “For me the only way to keep the flame and do things was to become independent.”
After he graduated in 2005 from the Casa Pia watchmaking school in Lisbon, he ended up doing everything from repairs to assembly at companies including Parmigiani Fleurier, Greubel Forsey, Bulgari and Jaeger-LeCoultre. But over time, he became disillusioned.
“I was disappointed with the deception in the industry,” he explained, referring to what he described as frequent discrepancies between reality and the kind of marketing language that called things artisanal when they were not.
So in 2018 he established his one-man workshop in Yverdon-les-Bains, on the southern tip of Lake Neuchâtel. This year he moved it to Laténa, at the northern end, and he introduced Seconde Vive, a 39.5-millimeter stainless steel time-only watch.
“It has taken me seven years to make the first watch — it takes time and machines are expensive,” he said. “So, I was also working on the side, restoring for several boutiques to pay the bills.”
He has sold seven watches, each at 65,000 Swiss francs (roughly $80,000), and has been working on those orders before taking on any additional ones. “The next three years are officially booked,” Mr. Phimphrachanh said.
The watch’s development was time-consuming.
“I kind of went off grid to be as uninfluenced as possible,” he said, working alone and deciding to incorporate a simple-to-understand yet mechanically complex complication: jumping seconds, a feature sometimes called dead seconds, in which the second hand moves in one-second jumps rather than sweeping smoothly around the subdial at 5 o’clock.
“I wanted to prove my watchmaker skills, but I also wanted my watch to be understandable to everyone,” he said. “A jumping second is something historically profound, with a strong watchmaking spirit. It is important to make the second jump both smooth and sharp, which took a lot of modifications — I had to upgrade the movement seven times.”
The Black Tulip
Annelinde Dunselman began her career as a social worker, directing plays with addicts and working with victims of domestic violence. “I was always into watches, and I wanted a change,” Ms. Dunselman, 50, said recently, “so I applied to watchmaking school.”
Initially she thought she would service watches, but the more she learned, the dream of having her own brand slowly grew. After graduating from Vakschool Schoonhoven, a vocational school in that Dutch city, she interned at Jaeger-LeCoultre and Philippe Narbel and then went to work at Grönefeld.
Three years ago she decided to create a watch with her own movement. But, as she had specialized in assembly and decoration, she had to ask colleagues in Switzerland to convert her designs into technical drawings.
She has the parts produced in Switzerland and has been bringing them back to her home in the Dutch town of Zwolle, where her workshop overlooks a pond. There she decorated, assembled, adjusted and tested the final prototype — and expects her Black Tulip watch to be ready for market in January, at 38,000 euros ($44,060). She already has sold all 10 in the limited edition.
“Now the first prototype is finished, and the first two watches will be delivered shortly after New Year,” she said of the 38-millimeter watch with a zero-reset mechanism, which means that, when the crown is pulled, the second hand goes to 12 and stays there.
With a zero-reset mechanism, it is common for the balance, the wheel that controls timekeeping accuracy, to stop along with the second hand. But in the Black Tulip, the balance keeps oscillating, which she said is good for precision. “It is a beautiful, fun and practical complication,” she said.
The design has a concave bezel, decorated on the vertical side with Ms. Dunselman’s logo, which is a stylized tulip on its side and the letter D. The same pattern is laser-engraved on the dial, which has four layers. And engraved between the lugs is the label: Created in The Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The Black Tulip is a Dutch legend; a black tulip cannot be created. “Things we cannot make are inspiring,” she said. “The idea of a black tulip reminds me that perfection is not possible. But I could be as close as possible.”
Belgian Style
Bernard Braboretz and Bernard Van Ormelingen, the founders of L’Atelier Bernard, released their first watch in mid-November, and they are not afraid to use the word perfect.
“We make sure to run a watch for a while before delivery to be sure everything is running perfectly,” said Mr. Van Ormelingen, 27. So he and Mr. Braboretz, 26, feel sure that watch, called The Owl, is ready for sale at 150,000 Swiss francs ($187,700).
The 39-millimeter steel watch features a duplex escapement, a feature invented in the early 18th century that distributes energy in a different way than most watches. “We remade it with higher amplitude and improved accuracy,” said Mr. Braboretz — so its timekeeping has a maximum deviation of plus or minus 10 seconds a day. And the watch has a power reserve of 45 hours.
Mr. Braboretz learned clockmaking at IFAPME (Institut Wallon de Formation en Alternance et des Indépendants et Petites et Moyennes Entreprises) in Liège, Belgium. “I knew nobody in the area who worked with watches, so I taught myself,” he said.
Mr. Van Ormelingen did his horological studies at IATA (Institut d’Enseignement des Arts Techniques Sciences et Artisanats) in Namur, Belgium, and then an internship at Jaeger-LeCoultre. “I stayed three months in their métiers d’art department, improving my guilloché skills,” he said, using the industry term for a traditional engraving method.
Their tasks are divided along those lines. Mr. Braboretz does most of the technical work while Mr. Van Ormelingen focuses on the decorations, which include concave beveling, gold inlay and guilloché engraving in three dimensions. “But we design together,” Mr. Van Ormelingen said, “and we always discuss everything between us.”
About a year ago, the men got tired of going back and forth to Switzerland for meetings and to search for materials, so they moved their two-man atelier to Fleurier, one of Switzerland’s many watchmaking towns. “Two rooms for watchmaking, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, it is all we need to build watches — here we make 97 percent of our parts,” Mr. Van Ormelingen said.
Mr. Braboretz joked that they have a five-meter (16-foot) commute: “There is no traffic jam, it’s easy to go to work.”
The two men plan to make three watches a year, and only six of any model will be released.
“Three for 2026 are sold already,” Mr. Van Ormelingen said. “Two are going to collectors in New York, and one to Geneva. With three watches per year, we can be sure that we really did our best on each component. There is only one compromise we have to make: the quantity.”
The post Living the Watchmaking Dream appeared first on New York Times.
