AW Labs
AW Labs is a one-man watchmaking studio in Fairfax, Virginia, run by Mike Armstrong, who designs, machines, finishes and assembles every watch himself. It calls itself 'Independent American Watchmaking' and describes its watches as 'brutalist watches, engineered and built by one man, one reference at a time.' Armstrong machines the cases, dials and primary architecture in house, on a mill he built himself, and buys in only the movement, a Swiss Sellita calibre. The studio was founded in 2025 and its first watch, the Origin, reached its first owner at the end of July 2026.
Armstrong spent ten years as a federal IT project manager before turning to watchmaking. By the founder page's account, in 2023 he moved from digital systems to physical engineering, taking existing calibres apart to study how they work and experimenting with metal 3D printing. In 2024, with no access to a traditional watchmaking school, he proposed translating the 1,200-page Traité de Construction Horlogère, which he calls the industry's bible, into English for EPFL Press. The project took nine months, and he describes it as a self-directed apprenticeship in the physics and engineering behind watchmaking, working through calculations such as mainspring torque before translating each passage. In 2025 he founded AW Labs and brought manufacturing in-house, and he says the brand is defined by engineering integrity rather than heritage.
The first reference, Origin (Ref. 001), is a Founders Edition of seven numbered pieces that will not be made again; when the seventh is sold the reference is closed and the design retired. It has a 40 mm case in 316L stainless steel, 44.5 mm lug to lug with 18 mm lugs, a 316L steel dial, a sapphire crystal and 6 ATM (60 m) water resistance, and it runs on the Sellita SW300-1 automatic with a rated accuracy of plus or minus 5 seconds a day and a 56-hour power reserve. Armstrong says its wall thickness, lug geometry and tolerances were calculated for rigidity rather than chosen for style, in a style he calls Horological Brutalism. The dial ring is filled with lume from the rear, and the commission specification offers a clean date-delete dial or a date window at 3 or 6 o'clock. It costs $4,850, is made to order with delivery in about three to four months, carries a two-year warranty against manufacturing defects, and ships worldwide for free.
The brand documents its work in a series of Field Reports, which show how much of the process was learned on the job. In December 2025 Armstrong validated workholding and fixtures, machining the first cases in aluminium. His first block of 316L stainless steel in January 2026 filled the shop with smoke; rewriting the program with light, fast high-speed machining cut the first operation from over three hours to under 45 minutes, although a case still takes more than ten hours of machining in total. He caught a flaw in which liquid lume wicked up the walls of cup-style indices and redesigned the dial ring, and he later burned an end mill when the stainless steel work-hardened. He froze the design on 6 February 2026, and the Manufacturing Roadmap set out a '50/50' allocation model: half paid as a deposit that reserves a serial number and funds the movement and materials, and half due only when the watch is assembled, regulated and ready to ship. It described a first wave of up to 20 commission slots opening on 20 February, which the product page now replaces with the seven-piece edition.
The prototype shown at District Time on 8 March 2026 leaked in testing, first through an undersized crown gasket and then, in the pressure chamber, through the rigid nylon seals, which Armstrong traced to a slight torque in his mill's X-axis. He scrapped and redesigned the crown so that the crown tube is both bearing and sealing surface, replaced the nylon gaskets with rubber O-rings and moved to a press fit, and tested the case to 6 ATM before the first watch left the bench. He also designed an aluminium watch enclosure with laser-cut and bent parts, and plans to release its CAD files so others can build their own. By the end of September 2026 three Origins were on wrists, two more were on the mill (one for an independent reviewer and one for professional photography), and two remained for sale at $4,850. Armstrong told readers that Origin was a test of the whole in-house process, and that most assumptions held.
The next watch is the Oxide (Ref. 002). It is a separate watch rather than an Origin variant, built on Origin's foundation with a reworked case that is quicker and cleaner to make. It has a layered dial, sub-seconds in place of a central seconds hand, and mixed bronze and steel materials. Armstrong says the design is locked and toolpath programming is under way; pre-orders were expected to open in late 2026, and the price will wait until real machining and finishing hours are known. Existing owners get a private window before each release opens to the newsletter list and then to the public, and Armstrong plans to show Origin and, if production allows, Oxide at District Time in March 2027. AW Labs is a very young studio with a deliberately tiny output, and what is on offer is an unusually open view of how a one-man workshop learns to make a watch.