Shilp

Kikuchi Nakagawa: The Japanese Independent Watchmaker That Turned Steel Into a Miracle In the modern watch world, “independent” can mean many things. Sometimes it’s a small design studio with off‑the‑shelf movements. Sometimes it’s a lone watchmaker building ten watches a year at a bench in the mountains. And then there is Kikuchi Nakagawa – a

The Campaign That Proved Vintage Never Dies In April 2017, a 24-year-old French entrepreneur named Etienne Malec did something the watch industry considered reckless. With no manufacturing facility, no retail network, and no heritage brand backing him, he launched a Kickstarter campaign for two watch designs that looked like they belonged in a 1940s time

From Hong Kong to London: The Remarkable Birth of MINIM Watches In the bustling world of independent watchmaking, where thousands of microbrands compete for attention with flashy marketing and viral campaigns, one British brand has quietly captured the imagination of serious collectors with something far more valuable: an authentic story. MINIM Watches, the brainchild of

From a London Antique Shop to Kyoto’s Workshop: The Extraordinary Story of KUOE Watches In the heart of Kyoto, Japan—a city renowned for its preservation of ancient traditions and artisanal craftsmanship—a remarkable story of modern watchmaking unfolds in an unassuming workshop. This is the story of KUOE, a relatively young but increasingly celebrated independent watch

How a Product Designer Became Japan’s Most Influential Independent Watchmaker – In 1978, a junior high school student in Kanagawa Prefecture opened a gift from his father—a mechanical Citizen chronograph. The watch wasn’t particularly rare or expensive. But something about the complexity of its mechanism, the engineering elegance hidden behind the dial, sparked an obsession