Awake

Awake is a French watch brand founded with one declared mission: to preserve, elevate, and give new meaning to rare artisan crafts — the Métiers d'Art — through the object that symbolises time itself. Its founding philosophy, expressed as 'Artisanship, Awakened,' captures the dual movement the brand lives within. Artisanship: the heritage of humanity, knowledge passed hand to hand across centuries, the savoir-faire of artists who commit patience and passion to what they make. Awakened: because preservation is not achieved through freezing; it is achieved through challenge, reinterpretation, and connection to contemporary culture. The brand's emblem is a three-part symbol — a shield (standing against the quiet erasure of the irreplaceable by automation and algorithms); a bridge (between centuries, between cultures, between humans); and an hourglass opening into infinity (representing the individual's connection to time, the short timeframe of one life against the long timeframe of civilisation). Every dial Awake creates is entirely handmade. No exceptions. The production is limited by design — not to create artificial scarcity, but because the disciplines the brand has chosen cannot be performed faster without losing their soul. The team divides itself, characteristically, into two poles: Savoir-Faire (the craft) and Faire-Savoir (the storytelling), each considered equally essential.

The craft Awake has chosen as its primary vehicle is Sơn Mài — Vietnamese lacquerwork, one of the oldest and most revered artistic traditions in Asia and, in its Vietnamese form, among the most technically demanding surface arts in the world. The process begins in the northern forests of Vietnam, where sap is harvested from the Rhus Verniciflua tree — only 200ml can be collected from a tree more than ten years old, and the harvest window is limited to the humid months of June and July, drawn in the early morning. After extraction, the sap is refined, filtered, and dehydrated into the transparent base to which natural pigments are added. Each dial begins with a hand-applied foundation of pure silver leaf — itself the product of a 300-year-old Vietnamese craft from the village of Kieu Ky on the outskirts of Hanoi, where artisans hammer gold or silver bars by hand until the metal is flattened to ultrathin sheets, laid onto traditional Do tree bark paper, and cut into small squares; the room must be sealed during application, as a single breath can disturb the placement. Over this silver leaf foundation, dozens of layers of lacquer are applied, each dried under carefully controlled humidity conditions (80% is optimal), then sanded and mirror-polished before the next layer is added — a process that can take several weeks. The depth, brilliance, and visual complexity that accumulates through this layering is impossible to achieve by any other means.

A second savoir-faire used by Awake is micropeinture artistique — artistic miniature painting — in which artists work with ultra-fine brushes and natural pigments under magnifying lenses, sometimes for weeks on a single dial no larger than a few square centimetres, creating fully hand-painted imagery with no automation and no repetition. Awake also incorporates a proprietary guilloché technique developed as part of its innovations programme: a precision-engraved guilloché pattern applied to selected dial surfaces provides a structured counterpoint to the organic depth of the lacquer layers above it, creating a visual dialogue between mechanical precision and artisanal warmth.

The collection is structured around the Sơn Mài name — itself the Vietnamese term for the lacquerwork technique — expressed across four permanent families and an expanding programme of special projects. The Sơn Mài Guilloché Main is the core collection, combining the hand-guilloché base with lacquer layers in an evolving palette; the current offering includes the Alba variant pictured here. The Sơn Mài Frosted Leaf introduces a frosted texture to the silver leaf underlayer, shifting the visual character of the surface from luminous to diffused; the Royal Red is the most recent addition. The Sơn Mài Silver Leaf Vignette Collection offers a lighter visual expression, the silver leaf more prominently visible beneath sheer lacquer. The Sơn Mài Fragments is an abstract family whose dials fracture the lacquer surface into irregular panels of contrasting colour, available in Pink, Blue, and Green. Beyond the permanent collections, Awake's Special Projects programme has produced several collaborations and limited editions: the Sơn Mài Year of the Sssnake for the 2025 Lunar New Year, the Jurassic Watch in both T-REX and Raptors editions (micropainted prehistoric imagery across the dial), the Deadly Watch (a memento mori themed edition), and the Cotton Candy collaboration with TTB — all limited and most now sold out. All prices include shipping, import duties, and taxes for all destinations worldwide.