WatchTime India has had an exciting quarter. After returning from Watches & Watches in April, we went straight into curating an event where we showcased Schwarz-Etienne watches for the first time in the country, for collectors in Delhi and Mumbai. To see the Schwarz-Etienne Roma Synergy by Kari Voutilainen and its stunning hand guilloché up close was truly a delight. A collector at the Mumbai event remarked how a few years ago, access to independent brands like this would have been only possible if one visited Europe or, specifically, Switzerland.
Our event last month further fortified this thought. WatchTime India partnered with luxury watch retailer Ethos Watch Boutiques for the opening of its first store in Kerala, in Kochi. The brand’s biggest space—Ethos Summit is spread over two floors and approximately 6000 sq ft—also has the distinction of being the largest luxury watch boutique in the country. But what is more interesting to me here is that with its launch, 30 new watch brands have become available to watch enthusiasts and collectors in the city. And with them, the stories, ideas, legacies, and innovations found in those timepieces become that much more tangible and accessible.
Watchmaking today is nothing without its stories. Where would the Speedmaster be without its connect to the moon, or the Royal Oak without the story of how the legendary Gerald Genta designed it? Watch brands continue to build on these stories with new launches, which further help in enticing people into this universe of horology. This 12th anniversary issue is filled with such stories.
It begins with our cover watch, the Frederique Constant Classic Date Manufacture. An elegant dress watch, its simplicity belies the brand’s constant commitment to providing in-house movements at an affordable price. Frederique Constant is a young brand—it was established in 1988—but over the last 20 years it has managed to build an in-house movements inventory of 33 calibres. And it continues to be dedicated to cost-effectiveness. Somya Rauthan chronicles the brand’s journey in the story Pure and Simple (P. 54).
Another story worth knowing is of the Bovet Recital ‘Prowess 1’, a timepiece that decided to take on the challenges of tackling Daylight Savings Time, different for different countries, in a worldtimer. When I saw the watch up close, I was really impressed with what Pascal Raffy’s team had created. And the timepiece’s story begins very simply: Pascal Raffy, owner of BOVET SA, was trying to figure out the time in various cities around the world during Covid, “but it was always complicated because some cities changed to Daylight Savings Time and others didn’t. In the past, we had addressed celestial time.... Now, I decided we had to turn our attention to civil time,” he says. Read about the watch in Chitra Lohani’s interview, ‘Saving the Time’ (P. 44).
Much like Raffy, who took the path less trodden, are people like Aditya Sambhare, Romaric Andre, and Aashdin Billimoria, who all feature in this issue. Aditya Sambhare is a self-taught watchmaker based out of Pune, who not just restores and repairs watches, but also crafts skeleton timepieces, building most of the parts (except the movement) and doing the finishes himself—he has crafted seven references so far as watchmaker. The highlight of his work are the blued hands of his timepieces, which he calls ‘Sambhare Hands’. Read about his journey in the story, ‘Person of Interest’ (P. 78). Romaric Andre is the renegade of the watch world. His work with vintage watches, where he replaces one of the hands with new and modern designs, has elicited delight and dismay in equal measure, and also resulted in collaborations with brands like Frederique Constant, Louis Erard, Timex, Atelier Wen, Furlan Marri and more, proving that there can be so much more to watches.
Incidentally, Andre and Aashdin Billimoria, collector, archivist, historian and author, who I interviewed in this issue in the story ‘Old Flames’ (P. 96) are friends, and to a large measure, Billimoria is an embodiment of how watches are more than just time-telling instruments. Collecting since he was a young boy, he has today amassed more than a few hundred vintage watches from all over the world. As a watch historian and archivist, he has distilled all his knowledge into his latest book, ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Vintage Swiss Watches’. The 341-page tome, rife with how these vintage watches came about, is a page-turner. Once again, where would we be without the stories…
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