The Independents Atelier Independent Watchmakers It’s difcult to explain one’s attraction to independent watchmaking, perhaps because so much of the connection to these watches is rooted in emotion. For every collector of contemporary, independent watchmaking, you’ll get a diferent answer on why they’ve veered towards this niche. For one thing, independent watchmakers are by defnition unique in their creative approaches, and they tend to attract very strong and diverse personalities. Then there’s the relationship between the watch’s owner and its maker. Buying a watch with someone’s name on the dial can be somewhat of an intimate process, with at the very least one’s commitment to and support of a little known watchmaker, and at most, several meetings with that watchmaker - this usually happens when ordering a custom piece, for example. Unlike more well-known, industrial watch brands that sell to several thousands of clients ever year, artisans like Philippe Dufour and Ludovic Ballouard can say they know every client they’ve sold a watch to. Even independent watchmakers with a higher output such as MB&F and F.P. Journe, are in touch with many of their clients and receive direct feedback from them. But even when you take emotion out of the equation, there remains countless “rational” reasons to purchase a watch from an independent watchmaker, including being able to trace the watch back to its source, knowing where your watch was made, when and by whom; entering into an exclusive club of collectors, and meeting like-minded individuals that share your passion for an artist’s work; and obtaining a watch that displays undisputed quality, with contemporary and very fnely hand-made or handfnished mechanisms.
In many ways, owning a watch from a modern independent watchmaker isn’t that diferent to owning a mid-century Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet wristwatch, and maybe that’s why so many collectors of vintage watchmakers are slowly turning to contemporary brands in order to complement what they already have. There are obvious parallels between these watches, from the way they were made to the limited numbers of available examples. And in both cases you become one of the few people on earth to own a particular watch model – be it at rare yellow gold Patek Philippe reference 1518, or a white gold, skeletonized MB&F Legacy Machine Perpetual calendar, two watches separated by more than 70 years and ftted with very diferent perpetual calendar movements. The only, very real diference between the two is that modern watches are perhaps a little less fragile, and more easily serviced than historically important timepieces. Perhaps that’s why so many collectors of the latter are turning their attention towards contemporary watches, as wearable future collectibles. The result of this maturing trend is the inclusion, for the fourth season in a row, of a section of the Geneva auction dedicated to independent watchmakers. The following pages focus on some of their latest, most exciting and most exclusive timepieces.