You’ve probably never seen more watch brands on the planet than there are right now,” says Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of A. Lange & Söhne. “I also believe that watches have never received more attention from more people around the globe.” The boss of Germany’s preeminent watchmaker — and one of the best respected on the planet — knows what he’s talking about. Today, records are frequently broken, be they for accuracy, thickness, or outright complexity, and new master craftsmen and craftswomen debut high-end brands almost every week.
The stakes are accordingly high. Seven-figure price tags are no longer unusual, and despite the years of work represented in any watch, the rapid pace of an Instagram-driven collector culture demands that watchmakers and brands alike show ever-loftier ambition in their creations.
It might surprise you, therefore, to learn that there are in fact far fewer watches around than there used to be. In the year 2000, Switzerland exported nearly 30 million of the little tickers; last year the figure was just 15.3 million.
But the missing 15 million watches aren’t Rolexes or Breguets, or Tudors and Longines. They’re watches with an export value of less than $620 (which would equate to a retail price of closer to $1,300). And in the meantime, although there are fewer watches than ever coming out of Switzerland, the market has seen its value skyrocket from just under $12.4bn in 2000 to around $30.7bn in 2024.
A. Lange & Söhne
Minute Repeater Perpetual / ©A. Lange & Söhne
Watch brands have embarked on a generation-long push towards more expensive creations, and the higher up the tree you go, the more intense the horological competition. True complexity and innovation is scarce by definition rather than by design, and although the dark arts of marketing are never far away, it’s no coincidence that the brands with the strongest reputations are the ones that have consistently invested in advancing the cause of mechanical watchmaking.
“Your iPhone has the time everywhere,” says Schmid. “So that means the reason why people buy very expensive mechanical watches has to be something different. The fascination with mechanical art is one factor, and the other is that they want to see very skilled people applying a lot of dedication, time, sweat and tears into making these little miracles.”
The most valuable currency in modern watchmaking is ambition, and in fine watchmaking it’s found mainly in two places: the gleaming glass factories of billion-dollar brands like Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet, which respectively make roughly 30,000 and 50,000 watches a year, and the tiny ateliers of independent watchmakers, whose ranks swell every year with new prodigies intent on raising the bar.
Truth be told, A. Lange & Söhne sits between the two, owned by the Richemont group but with much lower production volumes than its main rivals — and in any given year some brands will have more momentum than others. So far, this year has been a quieter one for Patek Philippe when it comes to high-end innovation, for example, and independent geniuses like F.P.Journe and Rexhep Rexhepi are also temporarily between masterpieces.
“You always need to push boundaries because if you stand still, the surprise element is gone,” says Schmid. “In today’s highly competitive environment, if you lose that edge, you become obsolete pretty quick and it’s quite hard to recover.”
Tourbillon Desert Rose /©Biver
Tourbillon Desert Rose /©Biver
This year Lange’s flagship launch was a platinum-cased minute repeater perpetual calendar with a signature big date and a 72-hour power reserve, a combination of functions and attributes that, when packaged up into a 40mm by 12mm case and hand-polished to the nth degree, commands a price in excess of $930,000 (the exact figure moves with exchange rates). Schmid says that the brand’s most complex projects — such as this one — usually take between five and seven years to bring to fruition, and that you can never be sure if you’ll still be ahead of the competition by the time they’re ready.
Brands big and small will insist they spend little time thinking about their rivals. “We respect what happens outside, but if you start to get inspired by an idea from elsewhere, you start diluting your house,” says Bovet CEO Pascal Raffy. However, onlookers have recognized an horological arms race for some time now.
To an extent, it was ever thus; as long as there have been customers with deep enough pockets and years of patience to subsidize their intense devotion to horological tinkering, watchmakers have broken records for complexity. Recent titles have been traded between Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin. The former won plaudits not only for the ingenuity but the practicality of its Code 11.59 RD#4 Universelle in 2023, which claimed the title of ‘most complicated wristwatch.’
“If you want something that is hyper-complicated and extremely user-friendly, show me a better watch than the Universelle,” said one collector who asked not to be named. “But with Vacheron Constantin it’s less about user-friendliness and more just pure brute force. Their new watch is a jaw-dropping show of power.”
Released at Watches and Wonders in Geneva this April, the Solaria or, to give it its catchy full name, the Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Solaria Ultra Grand Complication La Première, is a 45mm double-sided wristwatch with a claimed 41 complications, which earned it the world record. Among these are some truly mind-scrambling astronomical functions, enabling the wearer to monitor such esoteric phenomena as the angle of solar declination or the date of the next neap tide.
If we broaden our remit to include pocket watches — and we broaden our definition of ‘pocket’ to mean something that could hold a 1kg, 10cm watch — it’s worth noting that Vacheron Constantin also holds the honor of making the world’s most complicated watch, the Berkley Grand Complication, whose 2,877 components power no fewer than 63 complications.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the brand’s heritage director Christian Selmoni says that “the demand and interest for grand complications and exceptionally complicated timepieces is very strong.” Making the point that such creations are inherently rarer than any arbitrarily limited edition, he adds: “Our clients for such exceptional watches are looking not only for technical excellence, but also for the ultimate exclusivity.”
For the rest of us, its relevance is that it confers additional greatness on the brand’s core collections, but not everyone is as convinced. “Making the world’s most complicated watch? That’s a show-off piece, and it isn’t particularly relevant to me,” says collector Gary Getz. “Good for you that you can do it, but [renowned godfather of independent watchmaking] Philippe Dufour has a term that he uses: a ‘complication cocktail.’ There are shows of force and there are relevant watches that I and others would conceivably buy. Those are two different things.”
Highlighting a number of alternative creations — including Vacheron Constantin’s own Twin Beat Perpetual Calendar and indie Petermann Bédat’s recent Deadbeat Seconds — Getz says he prefers it when ambitious craftsmanship comes with a sense of focus. “There are a lot of mechanically great watches that aren’t coherent watches,” he says.
It raises an interesting perspective. Although independent watchmaking is generally hailed by collectors and enthusiasts as the pinnacle of the hobby, certainly in terms of horological innovation and artisan excellence (although vintage Rolex collectors would have a different view) it’s only the biggest and most prestigious brands that can set aside the resources to create record-breaking supercomplications.
“The classic independent model brings you a lot of creative freedom,” says James Marks, CEO of Biver Watches. “It takes a lot of pressure off me as a CEO, so I can focus on delivering quality rather than on [financial] results, and it lets us build the brand in a way that is more long-term. The negative is that you don’t necessarily have the cashflow to have massive R&D projects running the whole time.”
On the other hand, a number of collectors spoke privately of their frustration at what they see as a pronounced sliding scale of quality at the biggest brands.
Three of the Best
Three of the Best
Three of the Best
So despite perhaps lacking the out-and-out firepower and financial muscle of long-established names, top independent watchmakers — which often strive for higher standards across the board and offer an inbuilt rarity due to their products being released in smaller numbers — can be considered just as ambitious. “People absolutely want to have consistency in the collections — the same service, the same attention to detail,” says Bovet’s Raffy.
The brand drew widespread praise for 2024’s Récital 28 Prowess 1, a world-time watch that claims to be the first to eliminate the irregularities of daylight saving time. With 24 miniature mechanical rollers, it gives the wearer the ability to independently set each one and accurately display summer or winter hours anywhere in the world at once.
The design, which also incorporates a perpetual calendar, won the ‘Mechanical Exception’ prize at last year’s GPHG awards, the Oscars of the watch world, and was followed in 2025 by the Récital 30, which removes the calendar display but adds an extra time zone, to account for the irregular 30-minute offset of Indian Standard Time.
Describing the five-year production process, Raffy says that “most of the time our work comes from a simple idea, but its materialization becomes much more complicated than what we think at the beginning. But the journey is exciting. The artisans want to push all the boundaries to see if it’s really feasible.”
Emphasizing the qualities that set a brand like his, which will make no more than 1,200 watches a year, aside from a mainstream maker, Raffy explained that 20% of his team’s ‘intellectual capacity’ is always set aside for new projects, and that between 35% and 40% of the brand’s production would be bespoke in some way.
It may sound like an extraordinarily labor-intensive model — and let’s face it, it is — but such boasts have become a near-necessity. The pandemic years saw an explosion of interest in high-end independent watchmaking, catapulting dozens of businesses to new planes of desirability. While the froth has subsided from the crypto-fueled market bubble, it has left behind a world awash with young indie brands, all bursting with talent and jostling to stand out.
“If you want to play that game,” says Schmid, “you have to understand that the one rule in fine watchmaking is stay true to yourself, but push boundaries regularly. Surprise people.”
The most memorable indie launches of recent times have heeded those words. Take Berneron, the eponymous passion project of Breitling’s former creative director Sylvain Berneron, which launched with the Mirage, an asymmetric dress watch with a custom-made shaped movement and a perfectionist mentality. Its follow-up model, an annual calendar intended to combine the feel and aesthetic of mid-century vintage calendar watches with numerous modern technological advances, is due any time now.
Berneron’s arrival on the connoisseur scene was suitably lowkey for a self-funded labor of love, but its debut stood out not only for its unique look but also for its meticulous approach. Gone are the days when you could quietly launch your brand with a simple time-only round watch and build up to greater achievements; today’s newbies must make a splash from day one.
So it was with Biver, which arrived on the scene in 2023 with a carillon minute repeater tourbillon costing more than half a million Swiss francs. James Marks says that with founder Jean-Claude Biver’s industry profile — the former CEO of TAG Heuer, Hublot and Blancpain is recognized as one of the most influential executives of the past 40 years — anything less would have looked ‘lazy’ and derivative.
“It showed the technical ability of the team, and it showed the level of finishing that we wanted to achieve,” Marks says. He points out that the brand’s $93,000 Automatique is finished to the same standards, and adds that in today’s climate, it’s impossible for anyone to rest on their laurels.
“The market is so fickle in terms of its desire to have novelties that you do need to keep yourself visible in collectors’ eyes. You cannot just say, ‘Right, we’ve launched the Automatique, I can afford to sell those for four years, have a little bit of downtime, and then start thinking about what to do next.’ You’ve got to start one project before you finish another.”
Or you launch your brand with a trio of watches each more audacious than the last, in a Los Angeles aircraft hangar thronged with celebrities and industry luminaries. This was the manner in which Urban Jürgensen, a centuries-old Danish watchmaker, was revived in June 2025. It could be said that throwing the parsimonious model of modest artisanship out of the window is easy when you have wealthy backers such as Andrew Rosenfield, president and managing partner of the financial services firm Guggenheim Partners, who together with his son Alex has resurrected Urban Jürgensen in partnership with master watchmaker Kari Voutilainen.
But for all the razzmatazz of the launch, there were no corners cut in terms of the craft. On the contrary, the long-awaited relaunch surprised die-hard geeks with its inclusion of a remontoir tourbillon in the flagship UJ-1, an innovative perpetual calendar and, even in the simplest model, a natural escapement.
As Getz puts it, “It wasn’t just a product launch, it was a full brand concept launch, and they had the resources. If you ask me, it was patterned after the 1994 relaunch of A. Lange & Söhne. It’s right out of that playbook, and people who were in the room (back then) still speak of the shock and awe when they unveiled the watches.”
The impression tallies with reports that the Rosenfields have ambitious growth in mind for the brand, maybe falling short of Lange’s 6,000 watches a year, but aiming to sustain the quality of its debut trilogy at volumes of up to 1,000 watches, putting it in the same league as perhaps the most commercially successful traditional indie watchmaker of our age, F.P.Journe.
To take the financial clout of a mainstream house, combine it with the quality of a true artisan and scale it up to these levels might just be the most ambitious goal in watchmaking today.