Aubert & Ramel

Founded by Thomas Aubert and Alexis Ramel-Sartori — two 24-year-old Franco-Swiss watchmakers who both trained at the Lycée Edgar Faure in Morteau, the famous French watchmaking school near the Swiss border, and met during an internship at Luc Monnet's workshop, where they also encountered fellow rising independent Simon Brette. Thomas Aubert won the F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition 2024 with his school watch Séléne — a key-wound wristwatch on a modified cal. 6497, featuring animated 'shooting stars' on the caseback powered by a clever system that recovers the normally wasted recoil energy of the click mechanism. Both had already contributed to some of the finer time-only watches in the independent scene before striking out under their own name; their atelier, on Rue Jaquet-Droz near the MIH (International Museum of Horology) in La Chaux-de-Fonds, is equipped to manufacture virtually any watch component in-house.

Their debut Ouréa began roughly a year before its 2025 launch, sold initially as a six-piece platinum pre-series taken entirely on subscription, based only on digital renderings, before a further fourteen pieces followed in titanium at CHF 72,000. The watch is a time-only, hand-wound design with an in-house calibre developed over 800-plus hours: 174 parts, 17 jewels, grade 5 titanium bridges over a brass mainplate, 18,000vph, a 72-hour reserve, a variable-inertia balance, and a Breguet terminal-curve hairspring hand-shaped by the pair themselves. Its distinctive 'scraped' or griffé dial finish inevitably invites comparison to Simon Brette's own celebrated Chronomètre Artisans — unsurprising, given both founders' time in his workshop — while the movement's bar-style click, mounted with the ratchet wheel on top and the click underneath in a less common arrangement, nods to a construction style recently popularized by Philippe Dufour. The 40.4mm grade 5 titanium case (9.3mm thick, or 11.5mm including the box-shaped sapphire) houses the silver griffé dial with white lacquered markers and titanium spade-shaped hands; each mainplate is individually numbered 1 to 14.

Despite launching only in late 2025, Aubert & Ramel was quickly folded into Monochrome's roundup of the finest independent watchmaking discoveries of the year, named alongside other closely watched newcomers as proof of a genuinely accomplished debut rather than a promising first attempt. Priced deliberately just below the leading names in the ultra-fine time-only segment, the Ouréa stakes its claim less on complication than on the kind of hand-finishing usually associated with watchmakers a decade further into their careers — a debut built, in the founders' own words, on an architectural and deeply personal vision, driven by the ambition to create pieces that are truly original rather than simply repeating what has already been done.