The History of Independent Watchmaking

November 6, 2026

Between 1970 and 1988 the Swiss watch industry went from 90,000 jobs to 28,000. In the middle of that run, in the summer of 1985, eight exhibitors put hand-made mechanical watches on show at the watch museum in Le Locle for anyone who would come. The industry was most of the way through losing two thirds of its people because nobody wanted mechanical watches, and these eight had decided to make nothing else.

Independent watchmaking is usually told as a tale of talent and stubbornness, and the talent was real. The dates say something less flattering about everyone else. The sector exists because the big groups made two retreats, twenty years apart, and left two gaps behind them. The first was forced on them by quartz, and it left the top of the market to individuals. The second was chosen: Swatch Group's attempt from 2002 to stop selling its movements to outsiders, which built the commodity supply that lets a £550 brand call itself independent today. Which retreat made a given watch is what its price is telling you.

The craft left the groups before the groups left the craft

The quartz years were not a slow decline. Between 1970 and 1983 the number of Swiss watch companies fell from about 1,600 to 600, and in March 1983 the two biggest groups, ASUAG and SSIH, had to merge to survive. The people who went were not only assemblers. Finishing, regulating, decorating, the hours of handwork a mechanical movement can absorb, were the first costs to cut when the product was being replaced by a battery. Nobody in Biel or Geneva decided to abandon hand craft. They were going bust, and hand craft was the expensive part.

Svend Andersen had already been pushed out once. He spent five years at Gübelin and left because his employers objected to him inventing alongside the job, then went to Patek Philippe's complications workshop, then out on his own in Geneva. By 1984 the customers finding him and Vincent Calabrese in Lausanne were mostly Italian collectors wanting one-off mechanical watches, and he noticed something else: "financial investment groups were beginning to buy up old factories and brand names." The brands were being bought as names, without the people who had made them. That year the two of them sent an appeal to the watch magazines asking independent watchmakers to exhibit together, because nobody knew they existed and exhibitions were beyond their means. The reply was the exhibition at Le Locle, 29 June to 29 August 1985, those eight, and the group became the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants. By 1987 it was exhibiting at Basel with George Daniels and Franck Muller on the stand.

An academy of hand-makers formed at the exact bottom of the market for hand-making, because that was when the hand-makers had been let go. Their skills had no employer, so they became employers of one.

The ideas went with them

George Daniels designed his co-axial escapement in 1974. It replaced the sliding friction of the Swiss lever with a mostly pushing action, which meant it ran without oil at the impulse surfaces and could go far longer between services. He offered it to the Swiss and spent the next quarter of a century being told no. Patek Philippe built prototype movements around it in 1981 and 1982, Daniels wore one for a decade, and that was as far as any group took it. In the meantime he fitted the escapement to five of his own watches between 1975 and 1986, and of those years he wrote that he resolved "never again, except by force of law" to follow a path he did not choose.

Omega put the co-axial into production in 1999, in a De Ville limited to 999 pieces. Part of the deal gave Daniels a batch of Omega ébauches, which became the base of his Millennium series, the first watches he ever made in any number. One of them sold at Phillips for US$469,900. Daniels made 23 pocket watches and two wristwatches almost entirely by hand in his whole life, buying in only the crystal and hairspring. Omega sold around 460,000 watches in 2025 by Morgan Stanley's estimate, an estimate Swatch Group has publicly called questionable, and the co-axial is in hundreds of thousands of the movements it makes each year.

Twenty-five years is what it took a group to adopt the one real escapement innovation of the twentieth century, and it was invented by a man working alone on the Isle of Man. In 1975 the groups had no money for a mechanical idea because the money was in quartz, and by the time they had money again the idea had been sitting on one bench for two decades. So the ideas stayed with the individuals who had them, and the individuals had no factory. That sets the price of everything at the top of the independent market.

The top floor prices hands, and hands do not scale

Philippe Dufour showed the Simplicity at Basel in 2000: a time-only watch, hand-finished, 200 pieces promised, priced between CHF 40,000 and CHF 56,000 depending on metal. For a three-hand watch with no complication that was already a lot, and it was the price of Dufour's hours. He was not alone in working that way. François-Paul Journe had founded his brand the year before by selling 20 Tourbillon Souverains on subscription, half the money up front before the client saw a watch, because he had no other way to pay for the tooling. Roger Smith, Daniels' only apprentice, went on to make the Series 2 in his Isle of Man workshop with only springs, jewels and crystals bought in, and the whole 2007 to 2019 run came to 61 Mark 1 examples.

The first Simplicity to reach auction, at Christie's in November 2016, made US$256,395, in round terms four to six times the launch price, depending on the metal. In October 2020 an original-run example made US$662,000 at Sotheby's in Hong Kong. A month later the first of Dufour's 20-piece anniversary run sold at Phillips for US$1.51m, close to forty times what the watch had cost in 2000. About 205 of the originals are now known to exist. The price has not only gone one way: a platinum original sold at Phillips in New York in 2023 for US$558,800, under the 2020 figure. What it has never done is come back near the launch price, because the thing that set the launch price, Dufour's hours, has not been reproduced.

Original-run Simplicity results at auction. The launch price was the cost of the hours; the auction price is the cost of there being no more of them.

The mechanism still works for a watchmaker starting now. Rexhep Rexhepi set up Akrivia in Geneva in 2012 and showed the Chronomètre Contemporain at Basel in 2018 at CHF 55,500 before tax in pink gold. It won the men's prize at the GPHG that year. By 2021 he was making about 35 watches a year with ten people, and a pink gold example later sold at Phillips in Hong Kong for HK$6,985,000.

A watch finished by hand takes a fixed number of hours, and a workshop has a fixed number of hands, so output is a few dozen a year at most and cannot be raised without changing what the watch is. Demand can grow without limit, supply cannot grow at all, and the gap is settled by whoever is willing to pay most for one of this year's thirty. The launch price of a Simplicity was the cost of Dufour's time. The auction price is the cost of there being no more Dufours.

The middle floor: a factory, but no group

Between thirty watches a year and a million movements there is a floor the story has to account for, because it is where most of the money in independent watches changes hands. F.P. Journe now makes around 900 to 1,000 mechanical watches a year with 150 to 200 people, owns its own dial and case makers in Geneva, and sold 20% of itself to Chanel in 2018. Christopher Ward reached £45.3m of turnover in the year to March 2025. Its Bel Canto chiming watch, which won the Petite Aiguille at the GPHG in 2023, is a Sellita base with a chiming module Christopher Ward designed itself, and production of it went from 50 a month to 500.

Neither is an individual at a bench, and neither is a group. They have factories, so output can grow, and the price is set by the parts they make rather than by one person's hours. A Journe costs what it does because movement, dial and case are made in Geneva under one owner. A Bel Canto launched at over US$3,000 because the base movement is a commodity and the module is not. On this floor the question is not how many a year but what, exactly, the brand made.

The bottom floor exists because Swatch Group tried to shut the parts bin

The second retreat was deliberate and recent. In August 2002 Swatch Group announced that ETA, which supplied the large majority of Swiss mechanical movements, would stop delivering ébauches to brands outside the group from 2006. The Swiss competition commission, Comco, stepped in and forced deliveries to continue to the end of 2010, then signed a settlement in 2013 that let ETA taper supply year by year until the end of 2019.

One of the companies that announcement threatened was Sellita, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, which Pierre Grandjean had founded in 1950 and whose business by 2002 was assembling ETA's movements for ETA. Miguel Garcia had joined it as a warehouse worker in 1987. In 2003 he bought the company from Grandjean, taking on 120 staff, a million assembled ETA movements a year and a business whose main customer had just said it was leaving. Eighteen months later he showed the SW200 at Basel, built on the ETA 2824 design whose patents had expired, and the staff grew to 500 over the following fifteen years. By 2019 Sellita was shipping a million movements a year of its own, roughly twice ETA's number, a figure Swatch Group itself put in a statement when Comco briefly banned ETA from supplying anyone at all. Comco lifted that ban in 2020 on the grounds that Sellita now offered comparable movements in price, volume and quality. Swatch Group had set out to starve its rivals of movements and had instead created a competitor larger than its own movement maker, run by a man who started in its contractor's stockroom.

That is the supply the bottom floor stands on. Christopher Ward itself began there, founded in 2004 and launched on 2 June 2005 as the first online-only watch brand, selling Swiss-built watches with bought-in movements and no retailer in the middle. Baltic launched on Kickstarter in April 2017, raised €514,806, and sold its HMS 001 for €332.50 with a Miyota 821A inside. Studio Underd0g sells its 01Series chronograph at £550 with a Seagull movement made for it under an exclusive agreement. None of these brands makes a movement, and none pretends to. They buy from Sellita, Miyota or Seagull and compete on case, dial, design and price, which is exactly where a small company with no factory can win. A Sellita or a Miyota is a known quantity, which is why I service the one in the watch on my own bench rather than swap it, and the case and dial are where the brand earned its price. I think that had Swatch Group kept selling ETA movements cheaply to everyone, Sellita would still be an assembler and most of the brands in this paragraph would have struggled to exist.

The word is now stretched a long way. Morgan Stanley's report on the Swiss industry in 2025 puts Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille, all privately owned, at a combined 49.1% of the market, and calls them independents, while Swatch Group has fallen to 16.1%. In that sense the independents have won. A microbrand with a bought-in Miyota is an independent in a different sense again, and it is not the sense Andersen and Calabrese meant in 1985. The same word covers a man finishing 61 watches in twelve years and a company shipping a million movements. Both are honest uses. They just describe different retreats.

What the word tells a buyer

The eight at Le Locle were filling a hole quartz had dug by making the people who could finish a movement by hand unaffordable, and the brands on Kickstarter forty years later were filling a hole Swatch Group dug by trying to keep its movements to itself. Two questions sort any independent watch into one hole or the other. The first is how many the maker finishes a year, and if the answer is in the tens, the price is for the hours, and it will not come back to the launch price because the hours cannot be multiplied. The second is which parts the maker actually made, and if the movement is a Sellita or a Miyota, the price is for the case, the dial and the design, and it should be judged against the other brands buying the same movement. The middle floor answers both: a factory of its own, a price set by the parts it makes. A Simplicity went from a CHF 40,000 launch to a US$1.51m auction because there was only ever going to be one Dufour. A Baltic costs €332.50 because there will always be another Miyota. I buy broken independents and bring them back on the bench for the same reason: the movement can nearly always be put right and the original case cannot be made again. I'd buy on the first floor for the hands and on the second for the design, and I would not pay for one while being sold the other.

Sources

Figures as of November 2026.

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