Fabian Pellet

Fabian Pellet built his independence on twenty years inside one of Switzerland's great houses of complication before ever signing a watch under his own name. Born in Lausanne, he apprenticed in the Vallée de Joux, then specialized further in Le Locle in grande complication work and the restoration of antique watches. In 2003 he joined the Breguet Manufacture, first in the minute repeater department, then for a decade in Grandes Complications and Restoration — handling and rebuilding some of the most demanding movements in the haute horlogerie canon alongside highly qualified colleagues, an experience he calls invaluable. Believing in passing that expertise forward, he spent five years teaching at the École Technique de la Vallée de Joux, covering regulation, small complications, and finishing in practical School Watch classes, alongside theoretical courses in regulation theory, complications, clock mechanisms, and technical drawing. In 2022, after nearly two decades of professional practice, Pellet relocated to Tokyo and began devoting the majority of his time to watch creation under his own name, while still teaching occasionally at a local watchmaking school.

His debut movement, revealed in 2024, was deliberately built to resist the temptation to impress. Pellet describes it plainly: though passionate about complicated watchmaking, he chose to make his first movement simple — convinced that apparent simplicity is, in truth, the harder discipline, and that uncompromising reliability must be earned before any complication is added to it. Every component was calculated, sized, and positioned from scratch; blank parts are machined on precision equipment for mechanical exactness, then entirely hand-finished and decorated — polished angles, Geneva stripes, sunray and black-polished surfaces, with decoration alone consuming a third of each component's total production time. The movement runs at a deliberately traditional 18,000vph (2.5Hz), its thicker mainplate built for rigidity, its bridges left open and simple to reveal the gear train beneath, and its gear roots left flat across the entire train — an architectural detail paying direct homage to historic watchmaking. A streamlined time-setting mechanism avoids constantly rotating parasitic gears for greater long-term reliability, while an offset winding mechanism positioned on the dial side keeps the bridge architecture clean and lets the finishing take center stage; casing screws are fully concealed for a sleek, uninterrupted caseback.

The result, displaying only hours, minutes, and a small seconds at 6 o'clock beneath a hand-crafted Grand Feu enamel dial, is a watch that argues its case through restraint rather than spectacle. Pellet's own account of the process — beginning empirically with antique tools to test his own component-making ability, before turning to state-of-the-art equipment for the critical, rigorously toleranced parts, all finished entirely by hand — reflects a watchmaker building outward from craft rather than backward from a marketing brief. With a Breguet Grandes Complications pedigree behind him and, by his own admission, considerably more ambitious mechanisms still to come, Fabian Pellet's first watch reads as a foundation stone rather than a final statement.