WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of India

From the state-run factory floors of Bangalore to a new generation of founder-led ateliers, India tells its own time.

Image: Titan Company

India’s horological identity was forged not in a mountain valley but in the ambitions of a newly independent nation. In 1961, the government-owned HMT established a factory in Bangalore — the fruit of a collaboration with Japan’s Citizen Watch Company — and set out to put affordable mechanical watches on the wrists of ordinary Indians. Championed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of self-reliance, HMT became a cultural icon, its “Timekeepers to the Nation” slogan echoing across a country building its own industrial future, as Monochrome recounts.

The story pivoted in the mid-1980s. As HMT clung to mechanical designs, a young quartz-focused brand from the Tata Group seized the moment, reshaping how India thought about wristwatches entirely. Today, India is one of the world’s largest watch markets by volume — and, in the last five years, a wave of small, design-forward microbrands has begun mining the country’s history, art, and craftsmanship for a new generation of collectors.

The Major Houses

Titan Company (founded 1984) is the giant at the center of it all. Part of the Tata Group, it grew into India’s largest watchmaker by pairing fashionable, affordable quartz timepieces with sharp instincts about a changing market — reshaping the nation’s relationship with timekeeping and capturing the majority of the domestic market. Its ascent in the late 1990s marked the definitive turning point for Indian watchmaking.

Fastrack (founded 1998) is Titan’s youth-facing arm, built for a younger, style-conscious audience. Bold, casual, and unmistakably contemporary, it has become one of the most recognizable watch names among younger Indian consumers.

Sonata (founded 1992) rounds out the family as Titan’s value-focused, mass-market brand. Widely available across the country, it delivers dependable, accessible timekeeping to an enormous everyday audience — the wristwatch as a genuinely universal Indian object.

The New Independents

If Titan’s houses represent scale, India’s microbrands represent voice — each one a small studio translating culture and heritage into wearable design.

Bangalore Watch Company (founded 2018) is arguably the country’s most prominent independent. Founded by Nirupesh Joshi and Mercy Amalraj, it draws on aviation, space exploration, and cricket for its collections — and counts India’s first space-qualified wristwatch among its milestones. It has done more than most to prove that “made in India” and “serious watchmaking” belong in the same sentence.

Delhi Watch Company (founded 2020) has earned a reputation for design-forward releases that sell out fast. Its Everest — a nod to Sir Edmund Hillary’s Rolex Explorer — captured collectors’ imaginations and helped signal that a hungry, discerning enthusiast audience had arrived in India.

Image: Fastrack

Jaipur Watch Company, founded by Gaurav Mehta, leans fully into heritage. Its handcrafted pieces are inspired by Indian motifs — ancient coins, postage stamps, and miniature paintings — turning fragments of the subcontinent’s history into dials you can wear. It’s storytelling as watchmaking, rooted firmly in place.

Kala Watch Co takes the artistic impulse further still, crafting watches with hand-drawn dials steeped in Indian culture and narrative. For Kala, the dial is a canvas, and each release is an argument that a wristwatch can carry genuine artistry.

Coromandel Watch Co., formerly Madras Watch Works, takes its name from India’s Coromandel Coast. It blends that regional maritime heritage with modern craftsmanship, giving its watches a distinct sense of geography — a reminder that Indian watchmaking is not monolithic but drawn from many coasts, cities, and traditions.

The Close

India’s watch story is one of remarkable acceleration: a country that arrived late to domestic production, built a giant, and is now producing the kind of small, culturally rooted independents that collectors seek out worldwide. From Titan’s mass-market reach to the hand-drawn dials of a Bangalore or Jaipur atelier, the throughline is confidence — a nation increasingly comfortable telling time on its own terms.

Keep watching this space. If the past five years are any guide, India’s next chapter will be worth setting your alarm for.

— Spot.Watch. Facts and history via Monochrome Watches and Teddy Baldassarre.

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of the United Kingdom

From Georgian London’s precision pioneers to a new generation of enamel dials and fire-hose straps — Britain is building again.

Image: Bremont

Long before Switzerland became shorthand for fine watchmaking, London was the world’s workshop of precision. The city gave us Thomas Tompion, the “father of English clockmaking”; John Harrison, whose marine chronometers solved the longitude problem; and George Graham, whose escapement innovations still echo through mechanical watches today. For a stretch of the 18th and early 19th centuries, British horology set the global standard.

Then came the long decline. Industrial-scale manufacturing withered through the 20th century, and Britain’s horological heritage faded into museum cabinets. But the last two decades tell a different story. Heritage names have been revived, a wave of design-led independents has emerged, and the sector is genuinely booming — the Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers reports the industry grew a remarkable 65% between 2021 and 2024, reaching roughly £206 million, as Time+Tide reported (timeandtidewatches.com). Tellingly, some 67% of the brands operating today were founded within the last ten years — this is a young, hungry industry rediscovering an old craft.

The major houses

Bremont (founded 2002) is Britain’s largest independent watchmaker, built around aviation, military and expedition themes. Crucially, it has invested in genuine UK manufacturing at its facility known as “The Wing” — a rare commitment to home production in a sector that, by the Alliance’s own figures, sources most components abroad.

Christopher Ward (founded 2004) has become the powerhouse of modern British watchmaking. The direct-to-consumer, Anglo-Swiss brand is best known for its C60 Trident dive watches, and it now sits atop the domestic industry — reporting sales of £45.5 million in 2024–2025, a 49% jump on the prior year, according to Time+Tide (timeandtidewatches.com). Its formula — Swiss movements, sharp design and honest pricing — has become the template many others follow.

The independents and microbrands

The real energy of British watchmaking today lives among its independents, most of them micro-businesses of ten people or fewer.

Fears is a revival with real lineage: a Bristol watchmaking family firm dating back to 1846, relaunched in 2016 by Nicholas Bowman-Scargill, a descendant of the founder. It’s a rare case of continuity in a sector otherwise defined by newcomers, marrying heritage credentials with contemporary design.

Farer (founded 2015) brings a jolt of colour to the London scene. Its travel-inspired dive and dress watches lean into bold dials and adventurous palettes, offered at accessible price points that have won a devoted following.

Image: Christopher Ward

AnOrdain (founded 2016) is Glasgow’s quiet triumph. The brand has earned international acclaim for its hand-enameled dials — grand feu and fumé work of a quality once thought beyond a young British maker — paired with Swiss movements. It’s proof that British craft can compete on artistry, not just design.

Pinion (founded 2013) works out of Oxfordshire, producing small-batch watches designed and built in England. Its use of modern automatics alongside rare new-old-stock movements gives its watches a mechanical character that mass production can’t replicate.

Mr Jones Watches (founded 2007) is London’s resident eccentric, celebrated for playful, artistic dials that reimagine how a watch tells time. With dial printing and assembly handled in-house, it’s a genuinely creative studio as much as a watch brand.

William Wood Watches draws on a firefighting heritage, most distinctively through straps made from repurposed fire-hose rubber. The result is a brand with a story stitched into every detail — a fitting emblem of British microbrand character.

Britain’s watchmaking future looks less like a restoration of empire and more like a spirited insurgency — dozens of small studios, a couple of scaled-up leaders, and a growing appetite to bring more production home. The heritage of Tompion and Harrison is a heavy inheritance, but for the first time in a century, there’s a generation confident enough to carry it forward. Keep your eye on this island.

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Nigeria

In Lagos and Abuja, a bold new generation is teaching Africa’s most populous nation to keep its own time.

Image: Asorock Watches

Nigeria carries no centuries-old horological pedigree — no alpine valleys of family ateliers, no guild traditions passed down through generations. What it has instead is something arguably rarer in the watch world: raw entrepreneurial nerve. As Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, Nigeria has become a crucible of creative energy, and that energy has finally found its way onto the wrist. A young cohort of founders is building what may be the continent’s first genuinely homegrown watch brands, exporting African identity to a global stage that has long overlooked it.

The reference points here are cultural rather than mechanical. Aso Rock — the great granite monolith that towers over Abuja and lends its name to the seat of Nigerian power — supplies both imagery and ambition. The artistry of the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa peoples informs the design language. This is a scene that is young, unapologetically bold, and almost entirely microbrand-driven, mirroring Nigeria’s broader reputation as a hub of hustle and invention. Where Swiss houses trade on heritage, Nigeria’s makers trade on identity — and on the confidence to build something from scratch.

The Makers

Image: Micserah Watches

Together, these two makers sketch the shape of an emerging national scene: one house reaching outward toward the global luxury market, the other cultivating the domestic appetite that will sustain it. Neither leans on inherited tradition, because there is none to lean on. That’s precisely what makes the effort worth watching — every dial is a first draft of a national horological identity still being written.

Nigeria’s watch story is only a few years old, and that youth is its charm. There are no ancient workshops here, no dynastic secrets — just founders in Lagos and Abuja betting that African design deserves a place on the world’s wrists. It’s early, it’s bold, and it’s unmistakably Nigerian. Keep an eye on this one; the continent’s first great watchmaking chapter is being written right now.

Where to Find Them

• Asorock Watches — asorockwatches.com
• Micserah Watches — micserah.com

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Mexico

Where artisan leather, metalsmithing, and a proud national identity find their rhythm on the wrist.

Image: BOCA MMXII

Mexico’s relationship with the wristwatch is older and richer than many collectors realize. During the import-substitution boom of the 1960s and 70s, domestic names like Haste and Steelco built a homegrown industry, turning out watches for a country eager to make its own. Those mid-century marques still surface in vintage circles today — a subject of lively debate on forums like WatchForum.com, where enthusiasts trade notes on Mexico’s lesser-documented horological past (see, for example, the roundup at Timepiece King).

But Mexico is far from a museum piece. A new generation of microbrands has emerged, drawing on the country’s deep well of artisan craft — leather-working, metalsmithing, and design sensibilities honed over centuries — to build watches that feel unmistakably Mexican. Mexico City reinforces that momentum by hosting SIAR, one of Latin America’s most important watch fairs, giving the region a genuine stage and cementing Mexico’s role as a dynamic hub in the wider watch world.

The Makers

The New Guard

BOCA MMXII, founded in 2012, is a Mexico City-based brand that stitches two worlds together: Italian design instincts and Mexican leather craftsmanship. The result is a lineup of watches — and eyewear — that reads as a genuine cultural crossover, where European aesthetics meet the tactile richness of Mexican artisan traditions.

It’s a fitting emblem of where the country’s watch scene is heading: outward-looking in style, rooted at home in material and making. The brand’s leather-forward identity leans into exactly the craft heritage that gives Mexican timepieces their distinctive character, and its founding year — encoded in the name’s Roman numerals, MMXII — signals a maker consciously building a modern chapter rather than reviving an old one.

Mexico’s watch story runs on two tracks at once — the vintage nostalgia of Haste and Steelco, and the forward energy of makers like BOCA MMXII carrying artisan craft into the present. With SIAR anchoring the calendar and a growing community of collectors documenting and celebrating the country’s output, Mexico is a scene worth watching. Hasta la próxima — keep your eyes on the wrist.

Why this watch, on this wrist?