WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Belgium

A land of chocolate, diamonds, and racing corners, where horology arrives not by tradition but by imagination.

Belgium has no centuries-deep clockmaking legacy to trade on, no valley of ateliers passed down through generations. What it has instead is design confidence, an appetite for reinvention, and a small but fiercely creative community of independents. Much of that energy radiates from Antwerp, a city long defined by diamonds, fashion, and industrial design, and now an unlikely staging ground for horological experiments that range from oil-filled dials to racetrack-numbered limited runs.

The Belgian formula tends to run like this: keep the concept and design at home, and lean on Switzerland for movements, and often for assembly, the parts it does best. It is a pragmatic arrangement that lets ideas lead. What follows is a field guide to the makers keeping Belgian time.

The Design Houses

Ressence is the country’s most celebrated independent, founded in Antwerp by Benoît Mintiens in 2010. Its signature is the ROCS orbital display, the Ressence Orbital Convex System, which trades conventional hands for continually rotating discs, and on selected models, beginning with the Type 3 in 2013, an oil-filled chamber that makes the indications appear to float just beneath the crystal. Mintiens, an industrial designer whose background spans high-speed trains, aircraft cabins, and medical devices, showed three working prototypes at Baselworld in 2010 and never looked back. Design and engineering remain in Antwerp; assembly is done in Fleurier, Switzerland. The brand marked its fifteenth anniversary in 2025 not with a heritage retrospective but with Ahead of Time, a book profiling twenty creative leaders, which tells you where its gaze is fixed. The result is one of the most instantly recognizable dials in modern watchmaking.

Ice-Watch, founded in 2007 by Jean-Pierre Lutgen, took a very different route to international recognition. Its colorful, affordable fashion watches turned a Belgian company into a global name, proving that accessible design can travel just as far as haute horlogerie. If Ressence courts the connoisseur, Ice-Watch courts everyone else.

Komono, established in Antwerp in 2009 by former professional snowboarders Raf Maes and Anton Janssens, sits at the intersection of watches, eyewear, and lifestyle accessories. Its name borrows a Japanese word for small things, but the aesthetic is unmistakably Belgian: minimalist, sleek, and built around a considered color palette. Watches remain a core pillar of the range.

The Microbrands

Raidillon is Belgian motorsport distilled into steel. Founded in 2001 and named after the fearsome Raidillon corner at Spa-Francorchamps, the brand mirrors the circuit’s grid in its output: just 55 pieces per model, echoing the 55 cars once permitted to start the major races there. Every watch is individually numbered, and the movements are Swiss, wrapped in racing-inspired design and premium materials. The brand turns twenty-five in 2026 and is marking it with two anniversary-edition chronographs, the Curve and the Speed.

Gavox, launched by Michael Happé in 2011, builds tool watches with a professional’s brief in mind. The name fuses the Greek galaxias with the Latin vox, roughly the voice of the universe, and the collection spans aviation, diving, marine, and motorsport. Happé is a pilot and the grandson of one of the original Flying Tigers, and that lineage feeds directly into pieces meant to be used, not just admired, offered in both mechanical and quartz.

Méraud Watch Co. was founded in 2016 by Stijn Busschaert, a vintage collector and a leading member of the Belgium Watch Club, who set out to make premium, vintage-inspired mechanical watches at a sensible price. The brand launched in 2018 with the Bonaire, a 39mm diver designed in Ghent and made in Switzerland. The line leans into midcentury cues: thick luminous hands, generous hour markers, and a functional-first sensibility, with dive and chronograph models among the offerings.

Tamawa is perhaps the most unusual entry of all. Founded in Brussels in the late 2000s by designer Hubert Verstraeten, this design brand builds watches and accessories from phenolic resin, the material Belgian billiard-ball maker Saluc uses for its Aramith balls; the name is Japanese for “ball on a steel ring.” There is a second Belgian footnote inside the material: Bakelite, the original phenolic resin, was invented by Ghent-born chemist Leo Baekeland. The designs are organized around distinctive rounded resin beads in the eight official snooker colours, giving Tamawa a tactile, sculptural identity that no other maker on this list can claim.

The Close

Belgium’s horological scene is small, but it is anything but timid. From the orbital discs of Ressence to the racetrack-limited runs of Raidillon and the billiard-ball resin of Tamawa, these makers share a willingness to start from an idea rather than a template. That is the Belgian signature: design first, tradition optional, and Swiss engineering enlisted only where it serves the concept. For collectors tired of the familiar, this is a country worth watching.

Where to find them

• Ressence
• Ice-Watch
• Komono
• Raidillon
• Gavox
• Méraud Watch Co.
• Tamawa

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Thailand

Where a young Bangkok independent scene builds its first horological voice atop one of Asia's busiest luxury retail floors.

Thailand’s relationship with the wristwatch has long been that of a marketplace rather than a workshop. The country ranks among Southeast Asia’s largest destinations for luxury watch retail, its shopping districts stocked with the great Swiss houses and its collectors known for depth of knowledge and appetite. The making side of the story, by contrast, has rarely carried a national byline.

What Thailand has historically lacked is a watchmaking identity of its own, a maker’s tradition rather than a buyer’s one. That is beginning to change. Since the late 2000s, a small but committed independent scene has taken root in Bangkok, pairing Thai design sensibility and craft with imported Swiss and Japanese movements. These independents remain niche, sometimes barely more than passion projects, but together they represent the first generation of a genuinely Thai-rooted watchmaking voice. It is a story still being written, and its early chapters are worth reading.

The Makers

Bangkok is the natural center of this movement, and WISE is its most established name. Founded in 2008, WISE designs its watches in Thailand and hand-assembles them in its Bangkok workshop, spanning dive watches built for real underwater use as well as more expressive pieces. Among the latter are its Adamascus models, whose Damascus-pattern dials turn the layered, rippling texture of forged metal into a face rather than a blade, a nice bit of craft that gives the brand a signature look. The range is priced like a serious microbrand: the Adamascus AD861A pairs a 41mm 904L steel case, ceramic bezel and 200m water resistance with a Miyota 9015 automatic for $770, while the Adamascus ADX101 True GMT runs Miyota’s 9075 “true” GMT calibre in a 40mm case for $970. For a country whose watch culture was long defined by what it sold rather than what it made, WISE stands out as proof that domestic assembly and original design can happen under a Thai flag.

The wider scene is small and closely knit. A-rtisan, the project of Bangkok collector Ratthawich Chainarongruj, is one of the country’s earliest homegrown brands. When SJX covered it in October 2014 it called A-rtisan the first Thai watch brand, though WISE predates it; the debut Dragon, a chunky 44mm piece in steel, DLC or bronze with a hand-finished Swiss Unitas 6497 inside, was limited to 100 pieces per metal at 51,000 to 61,000 baht. At the other end of the spectrum sits Simpl, founded in 2013 by Tanachpak Warrnissorn and Alisa Kittipong, which sells minimalist quartz designs on Miyota movements in 316L steel, including a single-hand model and a rotating-dial “Reverse” line. Different budgets, same pattern: collectors and designers turned founders, working from the inside of the hobby outward.

The Shape of a Young Scene

What unites these makers is a set of shared constraints and shared ambitions. None of them can lean on centuries of local horological heritage, so they borrow the mechanical heart from established movement suppliers and pour their energy into the parts that carry identity: the dial, the case, the finishing, the story. That is the classic microbrand playbook the world over, but in Thailand it does double duty, because each new release is also an argument that a Thai watch can exist as a category at all.

It is easy to underestimate how much groundwork that requires. A retail market as sophisticated as Thailand’s sets a high bar for taste, and local buyers know exactly what the Swiss competition offers at every price. A homegrown brand has to earn attention in that environment, not merely on novelty but on execution. The presence of a maker like WISE, with nearly two decades of continuous operation behind it, suggests that at least some of these young houses have cleared that bar and found an audience willing to wear something made closer to home.

The Close

Thailand’s watch story is unusual precisely because it runs in reverse of the familiar Swiss or German arc. Here, the market came first and the makers last, arriving only in the past two decades as a scrappy, design-led generation of independents. That ordering is not a weakness so much as a different starting point, and it gives the country’s emerging brands a clear-eyed, collector-informed sensibility that shows in their work. The scene is still tiny, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But every mature watchmaking nation began with a handful of stubborn founders deciding their country deserved a watch to call its own. Thailand now has that handful, and the coming years will tell how far they can carry it.

Where to find them

• WISE
• A-rtisan (via SJX)
• Simpl

Source: wisetimepiece.com, watchesbysjx.com, simplwatch.com, theslenderwrist.com

And at Spot.Watch — that’s always worth noticing.

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Austria

From the gilded clocks of the Habsburg court to hand-finished chronographs made in the shadow of the Alps.

Austria’s horological story begins in the imperial imagination. During the long reign of the House of Habsburg, Vienna was one of Europe’s great capitals of culture and craft, and its finest workshops kept time for emperors, empresses, and the intellectual class that gathered in the city’s coffee houses. The name that best captures this era is Carl Suchy, whose family firm rose from a Prague workshop, founded in 1822, to become “Purveyor to the Imperial and Royal Court,” as chronicled by Collective Horology. Emperors from Ferdinand I to Franz Joseph I, and clients as varied as Sigmund Freud, are counted among the brand’s historical patrons.

After the empire fell and the 20th century swept its old certainties away, Austrian watchmaking went quiet for decades. What has emerged in recent years is smaller but no less serious: a compact scene split between technically rigorous independents, revived heritage names, and design-driven microbrands that mine Austrian history, civic culture, and Alpine landscapes for inspiration. The output today runs the full spectrum, from accessible everyday watches to hand-finished, in-house complications.

The Makers

Serious independents

Habring² is the technical heart of Austrian watchmaking. Founded in 2004 by Maria and Richard Habring and based in Völkermarkt, Carinthia, the workshop builds genuinely Austrian-made mechanical watches, including complications that would flatter far larger houses. Its split-seconds chronographs and deadbeat (jumping) seconds movements have earned it a devoted following among collectors who value substance over spectacle. For a country with a small industry, Habring² punches enormously above its weight, and among the names on this list it is the only one whose movements are made in Austria.

Revived heritage

Carl Suchy & Söhne carries the weight of the deepest name in Central European watchmaking. Tracing its lineage to 1822 and the imperial court connections detailed above, the modern brand was revived in 2016 by art and design entrepreneur Robert Punkenhofer as an Austrian luxury label; its contemporary watches are designed in Vienna but run on Swiss-made movements, per Collective Horology. Rather than trading purely on nostalgia, the watches lean into Viennese design culture, drawing a line from the city’s artistic heritage to the wrist. It is the rare case of a historic name whose story is worth the revival.

Everyday and functional

Jacques Lemans is Austria’s most widely distributed watch company, headquartered in St. Veit an der Glan, Carinthia, and founded in 1974. Its range spans fashion, sport, quartz, and mechanical pieces across several lines, making it many buyers’ first Austrian watch and a familiar sight in shop windows well beyond the country’s borders. If Habring² and Carl Suchy represent the high end, Jacques Lemans anchors the accessible one.

LAKS takes Austrian watchmaking in a distinctly modern direction. Best known for wristwatches and wearable payment technology, including its LAKS Pay and Watch2Pay concepts, the company is more interested in function and connectivity than in traditional haute horlogerie. It is a reminder that a national watch scene can innovate at the intersection of timekeeping and everyday utility, not only at the workbench.

Normalzeit is perhaps the most quintessentially Viennese entry on this list. The label draws its name and its look from Vienna’s public standard-time clocks, the civic timepieces once dotted around the city, and translates that recognizable visual language into minimalist wristwatches. For anyone who loves the idea of wearing a piece of a city’s design history, Normalzeit offers exactly that.

The Close

Austria will never rival Switzerland in volume, and it does not try to. What it offers instead is a small, characterful family of makers who each speak in a different Austrian accent: the technical seriousness of Habring², the courtly heritage of Carl Suchy & Söhne, the broad reach of Jacques Lemans, the forward-looking utility of LAKS, and the civic minimalism of Normalzeit. Together they suggest a horological identity that is quietly re-forming, one watch at a time, along the same Danube that flows past Vienna, the imperial capital that Suchy’s Prague workshop once served.

Spot.Watch will keep watching the Alpine scene. Until next country, keep your eyes on the wrist.

Source: Collective Horology, jacques-lemans.com, carlsuchy.com (press kit)

And at Spot.Watch — that’s always worth noticing.

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of the Philippines

In studios across Manila, a young generation of makers is stitching island heritage into steel and sapphire.

The Philippines does not carry centuries of horological baggage, and that turns out to be its advantage. Without a legacy industrial base to preserve, the country’s watchmaking story is being written fresh, largely by small, family-run studios that design and assemble their timepieces close to home. The result is a movement rather than an industry: nimble, personal, and unmistakably local in character.

What binds these makers together is a hunger to tell Filipino stories on the wrist. Rather than imitating Swiss or German house codes, the strongest brands here reach into national history, art, language, and craft for their inspiration. That spirit has grown up alongside Manila’s enthusiast community and cultural showcases such as the ArteFino Festival, where design, heritage, and homegrown business meet. The scene is young, but it is moving quickly, and it has already earned attention well beyond the archipelago.

The Storytellers

The two names that have done the most to put Filipino watchmaking on the international map both build their identity around heritage.

Ibarra Watches, founded in Manila in 2014, is one of the country’s pioneering independent brands. It designs its own watches and leans hard into Philippine identity, treating each release as a chance to celebrate local history and culture rather than simply sell a dial and a case. Its emphasis on local assembly has made it a reference point for what a homegrown watch brand can be. In a market long dominated by imports, Ibarra helped prove there was room for something genuinely Filipino.

Makina Watches, founded in 2017, takes a more design-led, contemporary route to the same goal. The brand presents itself as a family-run operation with watches designed in the Philippines, and it has built a following for modern mechanical pieces that feel current without losing a sense of place. Where some heritage brands look strictly backward, Makina reads as forward-facing, a reminder that Filipino watchmaking can be as much about clean modern design as it is about historical reference.

The New Wave

Around these flagbearers, a broader community of microbrands has taken root, each carving out its own niche within the local movement.

Argos Watches is a Philippines-based microbrand offering watches that are designed and assembled locally. Its positioning centers on accessibility, the idea that independent, locally rooted watchmaking should be within reach rather than reserved for collectors with deep pockets. That approachability matters in a growing scene, where a first mechanical watch is often someone’s entry point into a lifelong hobby.

Isidore rounds out the group with its own collections and a notable editorial streak. Beyond releasing watches, the brand actively documents and champions the local independent scene, identifying itself squarely with the Philippines’ expanding microbrand community. That dual role, part maker and part chronicler, reflects how tightly knit and self-aware this movement has become, with participants who are as invested in the whole scene’s health as in their own releases.

Why It Matters

Taken together, these four brands sketch the shape of a young horological culture finding its feet. There is no single formula here. Ibarra and Makina show two paths, one rooted in heritage and one in modern design, while Argos and Isidore demonstrate how newer entrants can widen the tent through accessibility and community building. What they share is a commitment to designing and, in several cases, assembling their watches in the Philippines, keeping the creative and commercial value close to home.

It is worth being honest about scale. This is a movement measured in small studios and passionate enthusiasts, not vast factories. But that is precisely what makes it interesting to watch. The country is building its horological identity in real time, guided by makers who care more about telling their own stories than fitting into anyone else’s mold.

Where to Find Them

• Ibarra Watches
• Makina Watches
• Argos Watches
• Isidore

Details on each maker come from the brands’ own websites, linked above. Founding dates are noted only where the brand states them; where a date is unknown, we have left it out rather than guess.

Why this watch, on this wrist?

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The Watchmakers of Indonesia

Young, tropical, and design-hungry: a scene built on wood grain, batik, and borrowed movements tuned to island life.

Indonesia does not carry the centuries of horological baggage that Switzerland or Japan lug around, and that is precisely its advantage. The country’s watchmaking identity is barely a decade deep, forged not in old manufactures but in a modern surge of design-driven microbrands. These are makers who lean hard into national character, tropical hardwoods, batik-inspired motifs, and rugged field aesthetics, while sourcing dependable Japanese or Swiss movements to keep the quality up and the price sensible.

The center of gravity is Bandung and Jakarta, cities where creative studios, outdoor-lifestyle labels, and dedicated indie watchmakers all share the same restless energy. As the travel outlet TRAppe put it in a 2026 roundup of local brands, the appeal here is “less about screaming wealth, more about wearing stories” (https://www.trappetravel.com). It is a scene built for humid days, long commutes, and people who would rather wear something with a face and a founder than a familiar logo. Below are three makers pushing that story forward.

The Makers

Lima Watch

Founded in 2015 by Herman Tantriady, Lima Watch began by making a name in minimalist wooden watches before broadening into more accessible mechanical models. The design language stays quiet and unfussy, soft silhouettes and clean dials that read as gender neutral and work as easily at a desk as at a warung. Lima positions itself firmly as a local independent, the kind of brand that grew organically out of Indonesia’s design culture rather than chasing an international template. It is a good entry point for anyone curious about the homegrown scene.

Woodka

If Lima is the understated one, Woodka is the playful one. Founded in 2013 out of Bandung’s fertile design community, the brand made its name with wooden watch cases paired with colorful, patterned, interchangeable straps. The result is expressive without tipping into gimmick: a watch you can dress up or dress down by swapping the band to match your mood. Woodka remains one of the most recognizable design-focused makers in the country, and its emphasis on wood keeps it tied to that distinctly tropical material palette that defines so much of Indonesian watchmaking.

Santura

Santura rounds out the trio as a microbrand producing original wristwatch designs built for everyday wear. Its presence runs primarily through Instagram, which is fitting for a scene where limited drops and direct-to-buyer releases are the norm and where founders often answer their own messages. Santura sits squarely in the mold of the locally run watch projects that have made Indonesia’s indie landscape worth watching: small, intentional, and made to be worn rather than admired behind glass.

The Bigger Picture

What ties these makers together is not a shared factory or a shared century of tradition. It is a shared attitude. Each one starts from the idea that a good watch should reflect the person and place it comes from, and that reliability need not require a five-figure price tag. They tend to source movements from Japan or Switzerland, then house them in cases conceived at home, a pragmatic split that keeps quality high and cost approachable.

Buying into this scene is refreshingly easy. Many brands sell direct through their own sites or via Instagram Stories, while marketplaces and Jakarta and Bandung concept stores carry curated selections. Drops move fast, so the standard advice applies: if you see one you like, do not linger.

For collectors used to the polished machinery of the established watchmaking nations, Indonesia offers something different, a scene still finding its voice, still experimenting, still small enough that buying a watch can feel like backing a person rather than a portfolio. That is not a limitation. It is the whole appeal.

Close

Indonesia’s watchmaking story is only just being written, and that is what makes it exciting. Lima, Woodka, and Santura are three of the voices shaping the early chapters, each proving that identity and craft can matter more than heritage and hype. Watch this space, the island scene is only getting louder.

Where to Find Them

Source: TRAppe Travel, “Top Local Watch Brands from Indonesia in 2026” (https://www.trappetravel.com).

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of the Netherlands

In the land of dikes and windmills, a small band of makers has earned the nickname “Switzerland by the sea.”

The Netherlands is not a country most people file under “watchmaking,” yet its horological pedigree runs surprisingly deep. It begins in the 17th century with Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch mathematician who in 1656 built the first pendulum clock and later, in his 1673 treatise Horologium Oscillatorium, explained precisely how it worked. In that era the Dutch were among Europe’s premier producers of fine clocks, and that quiet inheritance never fully faded.

Today the country punches well above its weight. As WatchTime put it in a March 2026 feature by Martin Green, the Netherlands is a minor player in volume but a serious one in creativity and quality. Dutch watchmaking now stretches across two extremes: hand finished, limited edition complications from independent ateliers, and affordable, design forward watches from a growing wave of microbrands based in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Delft.

The Haute Horlogerie Houses

Christiaan van der Klaauw is the country’s astronomical wizard. Founded in 1974, the brand specializes in celestial complications: planetariums, precise moon phases, and other mechanisms that map the heavens on the wrist. Van der Klaauw joined the elite AHCI in 1990, and per WatchTime, the house later produced the smallest mechanical planetarium in the world in its signature Planetarium model. The brand has collaborated with Van Cleef & Arpels on planetarium modules and won the Calendar and Astronomy prize at the 2021 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève for the CVDK Planetarium Eise Eisinga.

Grönefeld, founded in 2008, is the pride of Oldenzaal. Run by brothers Bart and Tim Grönefeld, the atelier produces very small runs of highly finished, complicated watches that have won a devoted following among collectors. Where Van der Klaauw looks to the stars, Grönefeld looks to the craft itself: finishing, architecture, and the kind of hand work that defines independent haute horlogerie.

The Design-Driven Independents

Holthinrichs Watches, founded in 2016 in Delft, is one of the most distinctive names in the country. Founder Michiel Holthinrichs trained as an architect, and it shows in the brand’s sculptural cases. The workshop is also notable for its use of metal 3D printing in watch components, a forward looking twist on a traditional craft.

Aevig, founded in 2013, is a small Dutch brand producing retro inspired mechanical watches. Designed in the Netherlands, its collections are aimed squarely at enthusiasts hunting for genuine independent-brand value rather than logos.

The Everyday Dutch Brands

TW Steel is arguably the country’s most internationally visible watch name. Founded in 2005 by Ton and Jordy Cobelens, the brand made its reputation on oversized sport and fashion watches. If you have seen a big, bold Dutch watch on someone’s wrist abroad, chances are good it wore a TW Steel dial.

Fromanteel, founded in 2011 in Amsterdam, produces classically styled watches with a nod to the historical Fromanteel clockmaking name. Its collections lean toward accessible modern dress and everyday pieces, bridging heritage inspiration with contemporary design.

Prisma is the elder statesman of this group. A long running Dutch label with roots dating to 1948, the brand offers accessible quartz and mechanical watches and presents itself proudly as a Dutch watch label with post-war heritage.

URBN22 rounds out the new guard. This Rotterdam based microbrand takes an urban design focus, drawing its branding and model themes from Dutch city identity. It is a fitting emblem of where much of the country’s fresh energy now lives: in style conscious, city rooted watchmaking aimed at a younger audience.

From Huygens’s pendulum to Van der Klaauw’s planetarium and Grönefeld’s finishing bench, Dutch watchmaking has always been about ingenuity over scale. It is a small cluster, but a mighty one, spanning collector-grade complications and cheerful, design-led everyday watches. Switzerland by the sea, indeed. Keep an eye on these makers. The Dutch are quietly building something worth watching.

Why this watch, on this wrist?

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The Watchmakers of Morocco

Where the desert light meets a young idea, a nation famous for craft is learning to keep time on its own terms.

Morocco is a country of makers, but not, historically, of watchmakers. Its craft heritage runs through leatherwork, hand engraved metal, and the intricate geometry of textiles and tilework rather than through balance wheels and hairsprings. There is no centuries old mechanical tradition here to rival Switzerland, no valley of ateliers passing skills between generations. What Morocco has instead is a design vocabulary, one of pattern, color, and place, waiting for a new medium.

In the 2020s, a small wave of Moroccan entrepreneurs began pouring that vocabulary into wristwatches. The scene is genuinely young, still largely undocumented, and populated by microbrands rather than manufactures. What unites the newcomers is an instinct to blend international watch conventions with distinctly Moroccan references: the names of cities, the language of the street, and the ornamental grammar of the country’s artisans. It is early days, and the number of verifiable independent brands remains small, but the ambition is real.

The Makers

Magana is the standard bearer for this emerging movement, and its name tells you everything about its intentions: “magana” is the Moroccan dialect word for watch. Launched in April 2023 by Mehdi Mabrouk, with co-founder Omar Chaoui, the brand presents itself openly as a Morocco based watch company rather than a generic microbrand borrowing exotic flavor. Its debut collection paid tribute to culturally significant cities, with models named for Fes, Istanbul, and Kyoto, wrapping annual calendar dials inside contemporary 40mm steel cases.

According to Time-Telling Magazine, which profiled the brand and tested a later “Tribute to Tundra” piece (source), Magana’s identity leans on more than its geography. The company ties its sales to a sustainability pledge, engraving a tree planting commitment on its casebacks and framing its collections around raising awareness of climate change and supporting community development. It is an unusually mission driven posture for a brand this new, and one the reviewer described as a serious commitment rather than a marketing flourish.

The design language is where the Moroccan thread becomes most visible. Time-Telling highlighted grain and satin finished dials, rugged steel cases, and, in the later pieces, Moroccan Zellij engraving on the caseback, the same interlocking tile geometry that decorates the country’s palaces and fountains. That detail, along with dial and strap colors chosen to echo specific deserts, is what lifts Magana out of the crowded field of generic microbrands and roots it in a place. The outlet also noted the brand’s early signature of striking orange fabric straps, a small styling choice that quickly became recognizable.

On the technical side, Time-Telling reported that the tested model uses a self winding annual calendar movement running at 28,800 vibrations per hour (4Hz) with a roughly 40 hour power reserve, housed in a 40mm case measuring 12.50mm thick with a 47mm lug to lug span. The reviewer praised the legibility of the dial under anti glare treated sapphire, the smooth day and date adjustment, and a month pusher at the two o’clock position, along with a screw down crown backing up 30 meters of water resistance. It is worth stressing that these figures come from the outlet’s hands on account, not from Spot.Watch testing.

The magazine’s verdict was warm to the point of affection, going so far as to compare the wearing experience to a Tudor Black Bay, which is heady company for a brand barely more than a year into public life. It also disclosed that the piece was provided outside its usual revenue model, so read the enthusiasm as an enthusiast’s, not a transaction’s. Whatever weight you give the comparison, the takeaway is clear: Magana is trying to make watches that feel considered, culturally specific, and genuinely wearable, whether under a shirt cuff or on a hike through the Moroccan hills.

Where to Find Them

Magana, the Morocco based watch company producing city inspired annual calendar timepieces, available direct from its official site.

Close

Morocco’s watch story is not written in centuries, but it has finally begun. For now it rests largely on a single documented name, and that is exactly what makes this moment interesting: a country celebrated for the patience of its craftsmen is discovering that patience translates neatly to horology. If Magana is any indication, the next chapter of Moroccan making will carry the desert, the Zellij, and the language of the street straight onto the wrist. We will be watching.

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Taiwan

Where century-old shopfronts and crowdfunded upstarts share the same island for time.

Taiwan’s horological story is not one of centuries-old manufactures tucked into alpine valleys. It is a story of retail energy, enthusiast passion, and a scrappy new generation of independents. On this island, established watch retailers that have counted the decades sit comfortably beside young designers experimenting with vintage components, field-watch heritage, and modern craft. Taipei’s boutique scene keeps expanding, with dedicated concepts devoted to independent watchmaking that mirror a rising local appetite for both the great Swiss houses and homegrown small-batch labels.

What emerges is a distinct Taiwanese character: pragmatic, design-forward, and unafraid to reinterpret the past. The country’s makers tend to build around function first, whether that means a rugged field watch or a small run of carefully finished mechanicals sold straight to the people who love them. Below are three names that capture that spirit, from a long-running national favorite to boutique operations that treat every batch as a personal project.

The Makers

Elegantsis

Founded in 1999, Elegantsis is one of Taiwan’s most enduring independent watch brands and a familiar name to local collectors. Its catalog runs the full range, from quartz pieces to mechanical models, with a recognizable streak of military and field-watch influence throughout the lineup. For anyone tracing the roots of a homegrown Taiwanese watch identity, Elegantsis is a logical starting point: a brand that has been quietly building its own story for more than two decades. It presents itself proudly as a Taiwan watch maker, and its longevity speaks to a steady following on the island.

Havaan Tuvali

Based in Tainan and founded by Eric Yeh, Havaan Tuvali represents the artisanal end of Taiwan’s microbrand movement. The brand is known for small-batch watches that blend vintage parts with hand work and contemporary dial designs, an approach that has drawn attention beyond the island. As Forbes noted in its profile of the maker, Havaan Tuvali’s method is deliberately unconventional, prizing character over volume. It is the kind of operation where the personality of the founder shows up on the wrist, and where scarcity is a feature rather than a marketing tactic.

Selten Watch Company

Founded in 2017 by Leonardo Tsai, Selten Watch Company is a Taiwan-based independent that sells original mechanical watches directly to enthusiasts. Selten has used crowdfunding to bring its models to an international audience, a route that has become a signature of the modern microbrand era and one that lets a small team reach collectors far from Taipei. Tsai comes from a family with a horological background, which lends the brand a sense of continuity even as it operates with a clean, contemporary aesthetic. It is a good example of how a young Taiwanese label can punch above its size by going straight to the people who care most.

Taiwan may not carry the manufacturing legacy of Switzerland or Japan, but it offers something arguably more contemporary: a culture where retail passion and independent creativity feed each other. From Elegantsis and its long national run to the artisanal batches of Havaan Tuvali and the crowdfunded ambition of Selten, the island proves that a horological identity can be built in the present tense. Keep an eye on Taipei. The next chapter is being written in its boutiques right now.

Where to Find Them

Until the next country, keep watching.

Why this watch, on this wrist?

WATCHES BY THE COUNTRY

The Watchmakers of Israel

Where Bezalel design sensibility meets Hebrew script, military memory, and the patience of the hand.

Israel was never built for horology the way Switzerland or Japan was. There are no valleys packed with movement factories here, no century old assembly lines feeding the world’s wrists. Instead the country has grown something smaller and stranger: a scattered, deeply personal community of makers who treat a watch less as an industrial product and more as an object with a story to tell. That story is usually rooted in Jewish identity, in the rhythms of Hebrew letters, in military heritage, or simply in the restless creativity of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

The design vocabulary owes a lot to the country’s art schools, especially the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, whose graduates approach a dial the way a sculptor approaches a block of stone. Add to that a taste for limited, small batch production and direct to collector sales, and you get an Israeli scene defined by intimacy rather than scale. What follows is a short guide to three makers who capture that spirit, from the atelier bench to the established factory floor.

The Independent Voice

The clearest example of Israel’s studio approach is Itay Noy, an independent timepiece maker working out of the old city of Jaffa. Founded in 2000, the studio produces one new collection a year, with every watch assembled to order by hand. Noy describes himself as “one of a few dozen” independent makers of his kind in the world, turning out roughly 120 pieces annually, all in his own original designs and built around in-house dynamic dials, modules, and complications.

THE MAKERS

Noy’s background explains the artistic bent. He graduated from the jewelry department at the Bezalel Academy before taking a master’s degree at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and his work has been collected by institutions including the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Europa Star’s Serge Millard called him “one of the most truly creative watchmakers of the moment” who “occupies a very interesting and unusual niche for such a limited production.” Since 2005 he has also taught timepiece making and design back at Bezalel, closing the loop between school and studio.

The Storyteller

If Noy represents the art gallery end of Israeli watchmaking, ZMAN Watch sits closer to the collector who wants a piece of home on the wrist. The microbrand builds automatic watches with Hebrew dials, releasing editions tied to Israeli places and to themes of Jewish identity. The name itself, zman, is simply the Hebrew word for time, which tells you how central language is to the concept.

ZMAN works in the modern direct model, producing limited runs and selling them straight through its official site rather than through a retail network. That keeps the batches small and the storytelling front and center, which is exactly where an identity driven brand wants to be.

The Established House

For something closer to actual industry, there is Adi Watches, based in Yavne and founded in 1984. Adi is one of Israel’s genuinely established domestic producers, better described as a manufacturer than a microbrand. Its output centers on Made in Israel watches, Judaica designs, and models carrying military or unit emblems, which makes it a natural fit for the country’s strong tradition of commemorative and service related timepieces.

Where the studio makers chase artistic singularity, Adi has spent four decades building a recognizable domestic catalog. Its Judaica pieces and IDF linked emblem watches speak to a broad audience at home and abroad, and its longevity gives it a rare status in a market otherwise defined by tiny workshops.

Where to Find Them

Closing Time

Israel’s horological story is not about volume, and it never will be. It is about voice. From Itay Noy’s hand assembled art objects in Jaffa, to ZMAN’s Hebrew dialed tributes to place and identity, to Adi’s decades of Made in Israel emblem watches, the through line is the same: each piece is meant to carry a message, not just the hours. In a country better known for software and startups, these makers prove that patient craft and a strong point of view can still find room on the wrist.

Why this watch, on this wrist?