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Opinion
0826
26 August 2026

The Rise of the Independents: What Actually Makes a Watch Brand Independent

A Framework for Telling Independent Watch Brands From Microbrands

By @midlifecrisiswatches · · 8 min read

I listen to Good Times, the podcast formerly known as Four Married Men, on the treadmill most weeks. It's the right mix for that setting: approachable, priced in the range I actually shop, and the four of them rarely agree on anything, which is more useful than four people agreeing. I'm a big fan and if you haven't watched or listened, you should check it out.

Their recent episode on the rise of independent watchmaking sent me down a rabbit hole. Jake, Salim, Justin, and Tim each staked out a definition, mostly around production volume. Under 5,000 pieces a year, someone said. Under 1,500, someone else countered. Nobody landed anywhere solid, and by the end of the hour they'd more or less agreed the category is a gray area and moved on to wrist checks.

I don't think it's a gray area. I do think we've been asking the wrong question and lets get into it...

Borrow the Test from Music, Not from a Spec Sheet

Ask what makes a musician independent and nobody reaches for production numbers or how many session players they hired. The test is whether they're signed to a major label. An independent artist owns their masters, controls the creative output, and keeps the economics. They might use a session drummer, license a beat, work with an outside producer. None of that changes the answer. What changes the answer is signing away control.

Watchmaking has spent a decade arguing about volume and vertical integration when it already had a cleaner test sitting next to it. The question isn't how much of the watch a brand makes in-house. It's who controls the decisions and who keeps the value.

Automotive sharpens this further, because it exposes the one place a pure ownership test breaks. Ferrari was majority-owned by Fiat for nearly 20 years, with the stake growing from 50 percent in 1969 to roughly 90 percent by 1988, and it stayed there until the 2015 IPO and 2016 spinoff that made Ferrari N.V. its own public company. Nobody in their right mind ever called Ferrari a Fiat brand in spirit, because Ferrari never shared a platform, an engine, or a supply chain with anything wearing a Fiat badge. Compare that to a Volkswagen Group brand sharing a chassis across four different names including Lamborghini. Same fact pattern on paper, an outside conglomerate holding equity, completely different reality on the ground.

So the real test has two parts. Does an outside group hold control. And does that control come with pooled production: a shared platform, shared movement architecture, a supply chain absorbed into a bigger machine.

Running the Test on the Watches Actually on the Table

Chanel owns 20 percent of F.P. Journe, a minority stake in Romain Gauthier since 2011, and 25 percent of MB&F. In every one of those deals the founder kept majority control. Max Büsser held onto 60 percent of MB&F even after Chanel bought in, and Chanel's own language on the deal was that the brand would keep operating independently. By every account since, it has. That's a label advance, not a signing. Independent, by this test.

LVMH's La Fabrique du Temps is the opposite case. LVMH acquired the movement house outright in 2011, and when Daniel Roth and Gerald Genta were revived in 2023, they came back inside that same shared facility alongside Louis Vuitton's own high complications. No founder equity, no creative veto, one factory floor for all three names. That's the major buying the catalog outright. Not independent.

Tudor doesn't even need the equity argument to make the point. Tudor and Rolex are sister companies, both owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, not parent and subsidiary. But Tudor's movements come from Kenissi, a manufacturer majority owned by Tudor itself, with Chanel holding a 20 percent stake alongside it. That's pooled production sitting one level up from any equity question entirely. Nobody on the Good Times panel tried to put Tudor in the independent conversation, and this is why.

Ownership Answers One Question. It Doesn't Answer the Other One.

Here's where the podcast's instinct about volume and outsourcing was pointing at something real, even if volume was the wrong proxy for it.

A microbrand selling a $900 diver with a Miyota inside, a case pulled from an open catalog, and a founder who owns the whole company outright passes the ownership test cleanly. No conglomerate touched it. By pure control, that brand is more independent than F.P. Journe, who took Chanel's money. Nobody actually believes that, including me, which means ownership alone isn't the whole answer. It tells you whether a brand is independent from a corporate structure. It says nothing about whether the watch itself was independently made.

That's a second, separate axis: did the brand originate its own core mechanism, or curate one off a shelf anyone can buy. Laurent Ferrier's proprietary, in-house-finished caliber sits at one end. A Miyota 9039 dropped into a house-brand case sits at the other. The line the podcast crew groped toward with Roman Gauthier, an engineer with a fully proprietary movement, is exactly this line, they just didn't name it.

Sourcing an outside movement doesn't automatically disqualify a brand here, the same way Pagani sourcing its V12 from Mercedes-AMG doesn't make it a kit car. Pagani engineered its own chassis and commissioned the engine to its own spec. Petermann Bédat and Roman Gauthier operate the same way with outside movement development. The disqualifier isn't outside hands. It's pulling something off a shelf that a thousand other brands can also pull off, unmodified, and calling it yours.

A Third Tier the Watch World Hasn't Named Yet

This is where two brands I'd been circling, Awake and Oan.Gio, actually earn their own category instead of getting lumped in with the Miyota-and-a-custom-rotor crowd.

Awake runs a La Joux-Perret G101, an off-the-shelf automatic caliber available to any brand willing to buy one. The case is standard steel. But the dial is Vietnamese sơn mài lacquer, hand-applied by named master craftspeople in Hanoi, over ten hours of labor per piece. Oan.Gio does the same thing from the other direction. Its founder left a production role at a French luxury house specifically to go commission real artisans: a century-old Italian atelier for guilloché, Japanese maki-e lacquer specialists for another run.

Neither brand touches the engine in any major way. Both are doing something categorically deeper than a personalized rotor, which is a cosmetic layer on an unchanged mechanism that any engraver can execute in an afternoon.

Automotive already has a name for this tier, and I'd steal it outright: the coachbuilder. Zagato and Pininfarina never built an engine or a chassis. They took someone else's mechanical platform and put real, hand-formed craft into the one layer that was theirs. Nobody ever called that a kit car, and nobody called it a manufacturer either. It's its own thing, named for where the craft actually lives.

So here's where I land, and I don't think it's complicated once you stop asking one question and start asking two:

Independent means the founder or private ownership group controls the creative and production decisions, and the core mechanism, whether built in-house or commissioned to their own spec, originates with them.

Coachbuilder means the mechanical platform is shared, but real, named, verifiable craft depth goes into the case, dial, or finishing. Ask who the artisan is and what the technique is called. A genuine answer here is the tell. "Hand-finished dial" with no name attached is marketing. Sơn mài lacquer applied by a named craftsperson in Hanoi is not.

Microbrand means the platform is shared and the customization is surface-level: a color, a rotor, a strap. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I'm just trying to point out the differences.

Ownership tells you if a brand is independent from a conglomerate. Origination tells you if the watch is independent in what it actually is. You need both questions to get a real answer, and the Good Times crew spent an hour circling both without quite separating them. And because of that, I wrote this blog post which likely not many people will read :)

The End of The Episode - The Weekly Challenge

If any of the Good Times crew are reading this, I appreciated the end of the episode where each of you have to live with/wear a watch for a week. I love this idea and it's going to be good content. Before this section though, you all discussed one independent brand and I appreciated the content around Krayon. It was well researched without going too deep, but the insight around their movements and uniqueness was really fascinating. Thank you.

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