Brand History

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

How a British-French Watchmaker Ended Up Creating Ultra-Luxury Handmade Watches in Rural Japan The story of Alan Birchall doesn’t begin with luxury or ambition. It begins with a child watching his father work—the sound of machines, the precision of hands, the quiet satisfaction of creating something that lasts. At age 36, after a 16-year journey

The Unlikely Watchmaker In 2018, a 53-year-old Japanese watch salesman named Naoya Hida did something the industry considered professional suicide. After three decades representing Jaeger-LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin, Breguet, F.P. Journe, and Ralph Lauren—after building relationships with collectors who spent millions on Swiss timepieces—Naoya Hida walked away from the security of established maisons to start his

The Watch That Shouldn’t Have Existed In November 2024, the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève announced its Challenge Prize winner—the award for watches under CHF 3,000 that demonstrate exceptional creativity. The room expected Kurono Tokyo, or perhaps Studio Underd0g, brands with established followings and proven track records. Instead, the jury awarded it to a watch

Raymond Weil: The Independent Watchmaker Who Built a Family Dynasty During Crisis A Man, a Crisis, and a Watch In 1976, when the Swiss watchmaking industry was hemorrhaging to death, a 50-year-old man in Geneva made a decision that shouldn’t have worked. The Quartz Crisis had decimated mechanical watchmaking. Japanese manufacturers had proven that tiny

In the crowded halls of Baselworld 1999, most visitors’ attention was drawn to the vast, brightly lit stands of established Swiss luxury watch brands. Hidden away in a more modest corner, under the banner of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants (AHCI), a relatively unknown French watchmaker was showing a small series of tourbillon watches