Cramain

Cramain is a small German house built on a purist's promise — that a watch can be crafted solely by human hands, with no external companies involved in its design, construction, manufacturing, or finishing. The name itself fuses 'crafted' and 'main,' French for hand. The brand was founded by two young men from very different paths: Kilian Leschnik, a watchmaker who graduated top of his class from Germany's watchmaking school in 2016 with his 'Piece École' Mark I (never commercialised), and Dr. Julian M. Stiels, a Swiss medical doctor with no formal watchmaking training who taught himself computer-aided design well enough to construct the watch and its movement himself. The pair began developing their Mark II together as early as 2014, with Stiels joining full-time in 2018 to make Cramain his sole calling; the workshop in Villingen-Schwenningen, a small town in southern Germany about 90 minutes from Zurich, is outfitted with restored vintage machinery — Hauser jig borers and SIXIS milling machines — a prerequisite the founders saw as essential to practicing genuinely traditional manufacturing and finishing techniques. Entirely self-funded, the venture was partly bankrolled by prototyping work Leschnik carried out for various Swiss watch brands.

Their 2020 debut, the Mark II Constant Force, is what SJX called simply 'hand made and impressively finished' — a hand-wound, time-only wristwatch (hours, minutes, small seconds) built around a 20-second remontoir d'égalité. Of its 267 components, 235 are made entirely by hand, with only rubies, sapphire crystals, and springs sourced externally — even the applied hour numerals are hand-shaped on a pantograph, their feet cut, their form struck, their edges bevelled, then finished individually by hand. The 39.5mm × 11.7mm case (available in titanium, 18k white or rose gold, or platinum) houses a tridimensional movement architecture built from titanium, German silver (maillechort), gold, and sapphire, decorated in an exhaustive vocabulary of anglage, black polishing, frosting, and both circular and straight graining. The design language — an open, technical, three-dimensional caliber on display — has drawn comparisons to Greubel Forsey, a reputation the young brand's finishing does not embarrass.

The watch's beating heart is its own take on the constant-force remontoir first devised by Robert Gafner, an instructor at the La Chaux-de-Fonds watchmaking school in the 1940s, later used by the legendary Derek Pratt and, more recently, Ferdinand Berthoud's celebrated FB 2RE — a Reuleaux-triangle cam that charges and discharges a secondary spring three times a minute to deliver perfectly even torque to the escapement regardless of the mainspring's state of wind. Cramain's refinement adds hooked teeth to each point of the ruby Reuleaux triangle to improve its action, all housed within a 35-part remontoir assembly visible at 6 o'clock beneath a V-shaped bridge. The Swiss lever escapement runs at 18,000vph off a variable-inertia balance with gold timing screws and a Breguet overcoil hairspring, storing 60 hours in reserve. Limited to just 12 pieces — priced at CHF 152,000 in titanium, CHF 154,000 in platinum, and CHF 158,000 in white gold — with each watch taking three to five months to complete after the first delivery in late 2021, the Mark II asks a considerable premium for a debut, but stands, in SJX's words, as a wristwatch of extremely high quality from a watchmaker with genuine dedication to form and finish.