The world is once again in the throes of its epic love affair with independent watchmaking. I mean Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Tony and Maria in West Side Story’s all-or-nothing, ride-or-die kind of love. Sure, part of this is the staggering escalation in values for the output of watchmakers like Philippe Dufour. In just a few short years, Dufour’s Simplicity has gone from a mid-$50,000 watch to a million-dollar grail on the auction scene. Similarly, François-Paul Journe’s Souscription watches, the timepieces he used to raise the funds to start his brand, have charted a meteoric rise to become million-dollar-plus unicorns.
Why has this suddenly happened? To me, one of the extraordinary by-products of 2020, with us all stuck at home and sitting in front of our computer screens, is that we had time to re-examine independent watchmaking. What we found was a blissfully seductive oasis of intensely personal and deeply authentic visions of true watchmaking creativity. Even more, because of the collective alienation we felt, it was almost as if appreciating a watch that was the repository of so much inchoate emotion and immutable expression fulfilled that need to connect with something and someone real. Personally I feel that this change will be permanent. From Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei of Urwerk, the Grönefeld brothers and Max Büsser to Laurent Ferrier, Richard and Maria Habring, and Stefan and Ev Kudoke, some of my favourite independent watchmakers and brands have never
