Luxury Insider

[Pullout: It’s a somewhat bizarre way to earn a living being a watchmaker. We sit at benches and exist in a world formed through an eye glass. Depending on the type of watch making, the time spent varies but a good part of a watchmaker's days consists of sitting upright, arms high, level with your shoulders secured to a bench with precision screw drivers and tweezers. In my watch making infancy I recall the veritable wonder of looking eye level with my bench and viewing all of my tools standing upright or strewn across the working area. The wonder still remains today.

2006 is my 21st year since I started as a student at the now defunct horology course at Hackney Technical College. In that time I have had the fortune to work with a mix of extraordinary watchmakers involved in every sphere of horology, from after-sales service to restoration through to the development of complications, nationalities ranging from Swiss to New Zealander.

The reality is that with even with the most talented people, original ideas and the greatest enthusiasm the watch business is still a business.

The very best were/are probably those that nobody will ever hear of, who work like Trojans in their companies, for themselves, or as employees who simply and unassumingly are quite brilliant crafts people. Every now and again, but very rarely, one or two will take a stab at developing their own watch. However the reality is that with even with the most talented people, the most original ideas and the greatest enthusiasm the watch business is still a business. As with all businesses the watchmaking industry is still fuelled by profits, is thus jam-packed with killer competition, giants and few possibilities for the little guys.

On the manufacture side, if independent watchmakers like myself make the components ourselves problems arise with capacity; if we work with suppliers, problems arise with quantity and quality. Indeed, the challenges never cease, they simply change. Thanks to the growing awareness nurtured by the Internet community and the prestigious Horological Academy of Independent Creators (AHCI), there is now the possibility to breathe a little as an independent watchmaker. Those watchmakers who spend the majority of their time and money on their actual watches rather than on publicity to sell them, still have a chance of making their dreams into reality.

This, even if they have neither the commercial expertise nor or the cash to work as businesses conventionally do. With my first collection, a good percentage went to individual collectors who had never seen the watches in real life but who bought on the strength of a photograph and thanks to the interest garnered from seeing it the internet. I am grateful for the verbal and physical encouragement that has prevailed in the form of those collectors from every corner of the world who have looked deep into my work and the work of others like me. They have seen that what we design and make is worth spending their hard-earned cash on, without needing to have a 100 years of established history to form the confidence required to buy an expensive hand-crafted timepiece.

[Pullout:

Watch making is not the result but the journey that takes place from the idea to the reality: To have an idea, to make the initial sketches which develop into the drawings that represent the imagination, where in they continue to grow. This is followed by the development of each component and the assembly of these pieces until you have an ensemble which makes a complete, functional, moving, living time piece.