Artur Akmaev
Artur Akmaev is a jeweler and watchmaker based in Santa Monica, California, whose work centers on a single, demanding craft most watch brands outsource or skip entirely: hand engraving and hand enameling, executed by Artur himself, start to finish, on every dial, movement, and caseback he touches. Rather than building a fixed catalogue, Akmaev treats each commission as a sculptural, wearable, mechanical piece of art — his stated mission is to give clients an uncommon opportunity to create something genuinely meaningful that expresses their own story, constantly experimenting with new metals, colors, and themes so that no two watches repeat the same idea. Every piece begins as a sketch, developed directly with the client before a single cut is made into metal.
The scope of his custom work ranges from deeply personal commissions to pop-culture and motorsport tributes. The Dragon/Phoenix pairs the two creatures from Feng Shui tradition across a hand-engraved, enameled, yellow-gold-plated dial with a separate black-rhodium-plated luminous minute ring. The Cotswolds watch, made for a Chicago watch collecting group, weaves the Gloucester rugby club crest into pastoral scenes of the English Cotswolds. Joan depicts Joan of Arc praying before a historically accurate coat-of-arms banner with the siege of Orléans behind her, and her martyrdom by fire engraved on the movement side. Medusa combines a fire-enameled dial with a hand-engraved figure and rose-gold-plated, snake-shaped hands. The Simpsons piece — inspired by The Simpsons Movie — builds a three-layer enameled scene dense with character detail, a single dial whose enameling alone took more than 40 hours of hand labor. A Chinese Zodiac commission replaces the hour markers with the twelve zodiac animals around a lotus-flower mandala, several of them reworked as private jokes for the client's own family. Lepidodendron Bark recreates the bark texture of the extinct prehistoric lepidodendron tree across a heat-blued automatic dial, and The Crown sets emeralds and diamonds by hand across both dial and movement.
Beyond individual commissions, Akmaev also develops small thematic collections exploring particular worlds in depth: Epic Fan, built around fandom and pop culture; Ancient East Asia, drawing on historical Asian art and mythology; PRESS START Vol. 3, a video-game-themed series; and the Carbon Collection, exploring carbon-fiber and modern material treatments alongside his traditional engraving work. Across every piece — bespoke commission or collection release — the constant is the same hands-on process: design, hand engraving, and often hand enameling, all done personally by Artur Akmaev rather than delegated to a workshop, making every watch a literal one-of-one.