Apiar

Apiar was founded by two childhood best friends, Matt Oosthuizen and Sam White, who set out to challenge the assumption that British-made watches were commercially impossible by proving the opposite through pioneering manufacturing rather than traditional craft. The story began in November 2022 as a personal passion project: bitten by the watch bug, Matt drew on his engineering and 3D-printing background to build custom watches for himself, Sam, and their fathers. Seeing a genuine gap in the market for true engineering and additive manufacturing applied to horology, the two united in January 2023 to found Apiar. Early experiments with titanium powder manufacturing that March revealed hard lessons about how watch cases actually look, feel, and machine at this frontier of the craft, and by June 2023 the pair had produced their first fully machined titanium prototype — one that fogged up and was, by their own account, 'held together by hope,' but which they wore with genuine pride as Britain's first additively manufactured watch. The Invenire v1.0 debuted publicly at Worldtime UK in Heathrow that September, gathering critical early feedback, before the full Invenire launched globally in June 2024 with customers worldwide ordering genuinely one-of-one timepieces through an interactive 3D configurator.

The brand's own summary of its mission is blunt: 'We created Apiar to ask why not? and to inspire the watch industry to leap forward using pioneering manufacturing.' Since then Apiar has moved quickly — a November 2024 collaboration with dial artist Chris Alexander (the ERB piece); the Gen1.0 dress watch co-designed with generative-technology designer Max Resnick, shown at British Watchmakers Day in March 2025; the industry-first Dawn or Dusk collection in August 2025, featuring an 'impossible' titanium dial seamlessly integrated into the midcase; a further Gen1.1 MR² Solana-themed collaboration; New York Times coverage in February 2026; and the Gen1.1 Underground, which sold out in just 40 minutes at Apiar's second British Watchmakers Day appearance in March 2026.

Apiar's defining technical claim is that it builds watch cases using precisely the same materials and precision engineering found in £5 million hypercars and orbital rocket engines — reasoning that if those standards are good enough there, they are good enough for the watch on a wrist. Every case begins as Grade 23 titanium powder, a tougher and more biocompatible alloy than the Grade 2 or Grade 5 titanium conventionally used in watchmaking, thanks to its very low oxygen content, and standard in aerospace and biomedical applications. The case is then built using Laser Powder Bed Fusion on Renishaw 500Q Flex machines: lasers sinter the titanium powder at temperatures exceeding 1,660°C under high pressure, forming the case one layer at a time, each layer just 0.06mm thick, until the complete, geometrically complex form emerges directly from the machine — a shape that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive to produce by conventional case-machining methods.

The still-powdery case is then cleaned with fine brushes and high-frequency oscillation to remove any residual powder from its internal geometry, annealed at 850°C for two hours to relieve internal stress and optimise the titanium's mechanical properties, cut free from its build plate using Electrical Discharge Machining (a heat-based, non-mechanical cutting process), and finished by hand just enough to look sharp and feel right — without erasing the distinctive surface hallmarks that mark it as genuinely additively manufactured rather than conventionally cast or milled. Apiar also publishes a full carbon footprint breakdown for its Apiar Base case (material sourcing, manufacturing, and transportation emissions individually itemised), and works with a network of UK precision engineering partners as part of its explicit 'Build British' commitment.

The current collection spans five lines: Gen1.0, the original futuristic dress watch platform; Gen1.1, its evolution, including the Solana-themed MR² and the Underground reference; ERB, the Chris Alexander dial-art collaboration; Carbon1.0, a further material exploration; and a fully bespoke commissioning service through Apiar's in-house Labs, where customers can work directly with the team to develop genuinely unique, one-of-one pieces built to their own specification. Watches are sold directly through Apiar's own shop, with the brand positioning itself less as a traditional watchmaker and more as a manufacturing-technology company that happens to have chosen the wristwatch as its proving ground.