MICROBRAND
Awake Concept: France’s Conscious Watchmaker Brings Vietnamese Lacquer to the Wrist
A French independent measures time in mirror-polished lacquer and a decade’s patience for a single tree’s sap.
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Awake Concept, founded in 2019 by Lilian Thibault, is a French watchmaker with a mission to blend craft traditions with modern watchmaking. The brand’s motto, “Artisanship, Awakened,” encapsulates its goal to reveal the world’s beauty through the symbolism of time. Thibault emphasises transparency by collaborating with named partners and places, creating a cross-border chain of craftsmanship that is as legible as the dials themselves.
What sets Awake apart is its commitment to “conscious and poetic watchmaking” — a phrase that earns its weight here. Dials are crafted with master lacquerers in Hanoi, movements are Swiss, and straps are French-made. Thibault’s vision of “uniting cultures in the tiny space of a watch dial” is not marketing copy; it is a supply chain you can trace by name, place, and process.
The materials demand equal attention. The lacquer is sourced from Rhus verniciflua trees in northern Vietnam — trees that take roughly a decade to produce usable sap. That sap is collected by hand in the early mornings of June and July, yielding only around 200 ml per tree annually. It is then purified and dehydrated until it achieves the clarity and durability a watch dial requires. What might read as a simple “lacquered” label on a spec sheet is, in practice, a ten-year story compressed into a few millimetres of depth.
Awake’s signature collection, Sơn Mài, and its Sơn Mài Fragments trio, make that story visible. These 39 mm watches, cased in recycled 316L steel, feature hand-crafted dials with iridescent mosaics: mother-of-pearl fragments embedded in Vietnamese sơn mài lacquer, echoing the Japanese raden technique. The result shifts in colour and depth with every change of light — less a static pattern, more a miniature landscape that moves as you do.
Each dial requires approximately 15 hours of meticulous work. A black-pigmented base is polished to a mirror finish, precise mother-of-pearl inlays are set, a light veil of organic pigment — green, blue, or pink — is applied, and then around a dozen layers of lacquer follow, each dried, sanded, and polished in turn. Night-time legibility is addressed with a luminous signature inspired by Japanese lume techniques, so the dial performs as well in darkness as it dazzles in daylight.
Inside sits a La Joux-Perret G101 automatic movement with a 68-hour power reserve, housed in an 11.8 mm case. Each colourway is limited to 100 pieces, priced at €2,250. Beyond the Sơn Mài line, Awake’s broader ambitions have produced the official G7 summit watch crafted from recycled fishing nets and a blockchain-enabled “Mission to Earth” collaboration with NASA — proof that the brand’s reach extends well beyond the dial.
And at Spot.Watch — that’s always worth noticing.
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