Independents to Watch

François-Paul Journe trained as a restorer of antique watches in Paris before setting up his own workshop in Geneva. His Souveraine line uses 18-karat rose-gold movements (later 18k red gold) with a distinctive linear power-reserve indicator and the Chronomètre à Résonance, in which two independent balance wheels synchronise through mechanical resonance rather than any direct connection.

Journe production is around 900 watches a year across all references. The Souverain Tourbillon Souverain and the Chronomètre Bleu in tantalum are the references most often discussed at auction, but the entry-level Élégante quartz watches are arguably the more interesting object lesson: they show that the workshop's identity sits in design and finish, not in mechanism alone.

Rexhep Rexhepi was 25 when he founded Akrivia, having trained at Patek Philippe and BNB Concept. His early Akrivia tourbillons were technical exercises; the Chronomètre Contemporain, launched in 2018 in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Hagmann (the casemaker behind many Patek Philippe minute-repeater cases of the 1990s), repositioned the workshop as a producer of restrained, time-only watches finished to a level that earned the 2018 GPHG Men's Watch prize.

Production is a few dozen watches per year. The waiting list, last publicly discussed by the workshop, runs into years rather than months.

Gaël Petermann and Florian Bédat met as students at the École Technique de la Vallée de Joux. Their first reference, the 1967 Dead-Beat Seconds, takes its name from the year their two grandfathers - both watchmakers - first met. The dead-beat seconds mechanism advances the seconds hand in discrete one-second jumps, a complication associated historically with marine chronometers and rare in modern wristwatches.

The workshop is closer to a school project that grew up than to a brand: production is below 50 watches per year, and the two founders still hand-finish components themselves. This is the model that the AHCI was originally designed to support.

Maximilian Büsser left a senior role at Harry Winston to set up MB&F (Maximilian Büsser & Friends) on a deliberately collaborative model: each Horological Machine or Legacy Machine is built with named external watchmakers - Jean-François Mojon, Stephen McDonnell, Eric Coudray - credited on the dial or movement.

MB&F is the most visually adventurous of the independents: the Horological Machine series uses sculptural cases that abandon the round-watch convention entirely. This makes the brand divisive but also clearly authored. There is no risk of mistaking an MB&F for anything else, which is itself a form of editorial discipline.

Independent watches are not, on average, better than equivalent watches from the established Geneva and Glashütte houses. A Patek Philippe Calatrava is finished to a standard that very few independents match in their entry-level pieces, and Patek's after-sales network - service centres on four continents, parts available for watches made decades ago - is something no small workshop can replicate.

What independents offer is a different relationship: a watch designed by a person you can name, often built in numbers small enough that you can know roughly who finished your specific movement. Whether that is worth the trade-offs is a personal question, not a categorical one.

The honest summary is that the independents are interesting because they are independent - not because independence is a virtue in itself, but because it produces editorial coherence that is genuinely difficult to manufacture inside a large group.