Clockwheels

Clockwheels traces its origin to an old pocket watch from the 1950s, discovered during a renovation of the founders' family home, more than a decade before the brand's own website was written. Built around that watch's hand-wound Unitas 6498 movement, the idea took shape of preserving something rare and reinterpreting it for everyday use — the same movement became the 'motor' for the brand's first watch, the UHRRAD 01. A collaboration with the German engraver and case-maker Jochen Benzinger and with Hermann Grieb of Grieb & Benzinger gave Clockwheels the foundation to build watches using classical hand-craft techniques at the highest level, within a genuinely local production network, guided by a Bauhaus-inflected belief that form should follow function — achievable, in the brand's own words, only through the interplay of art and craft.

That network runs deep: alongside Benzinger and Grieb & Benzinger, Clockwheels works with strap maker Braloba in Switzerland, engraver Sabina Brägger in Bern, and the leather specialists at Ecopell, among other small workshops clustered around Stuttgart and Pforzheim in southern Germany. A parallel early project, the 9XXXR — a dashboard clock built around the Porsche 911 GT3, stripped of the model's familiar racing cues to sharpen its classic, functional lines — has since been retired into the brand's archive, leaving the UHRRAD wristwatch line as its current focus.

All three UHRRAD families share the same foundation: a hand-wound Unitas/ETA 6498 reworked in-house, 36.6mm across and 4.5mm thick, 17 jewels at 18,000 vibrations per hour, its movement entirely hand-engraved, skeletonised, and guilloché, paired with a hand-guilloché sterling silver dial in a Breguet 'Clou de Paris nouvelle' pattern, for 36 hours of reserve. Every case is made in Pforzheim: 42mm stainless steel, 12.5mm thick, with sapphire crystal front and back, worn on a hand-sewn leather strap with a steel buckle and screwed hex lug bars.

The three lines differ in how they show the time. The UHRRAD 01 is a genuine regulator, its hour, minute, and seconds displays separated onto their own distinct scales, priced at 9,800 euros with a rose-gold-plated balance. The UHRRAD 02 simplifies to a conventional three-hand layout with a rhodium-plated balance, at 8,800 euros. The UHRRAD 03 is the most ambitious: a further in-house reworking of the 6498 drives a jumping digital hour display alongside conventional minutes and seconds, worn on a sturgeon-leather strap rather than the standard cowhide, priced at 12,800 euros.