Kauri

Kauri Watches was founded in Geneva in 2019 by Samuel Gillioz, a trained watchmaker and movement designer-builder who set out to build an independent brand around two goals: pushing his own creative and technical limits one model at a time, funding each new, more ambitious collection from sales of the last, and doing it all while keeping a genuinely human dimension to the business — direct exchanges and relationships with clients as a deliberate pillar of the project, rather than an afterthought. The result is a brand built around a single, distinctive technical challenge: combining a fine Swiss automatic movement with a case made from real wood, a material almost never used in serious watchmaking because of how difficult it is to work with at watch-case tolerances and how poorly it behaves under daily wear without specialized engineering.

The debut Model O1 — limited to 50 numbered pieces — solved that problem with a 41.0 x 43.8mm, 9.9mm-thick wooden case set inside a 316L stainless steel structure and a waterproof sealing ring, water-resistant to 30 metres (3 ATM) under a sapphire crystal, with the case finishing done by hand using traditional tools and techniques inspired by the ornamentation found on fine watch movements. Buyers choose between five precious wood species, each with its own character and backstory: Kauri, a 30,000-to-50,000-year-old swamp wood from New Zealand preserved for millennia in oxygen-free sphagnum peat bogs; Macassar ebony from the Celebes Islands, dense and traditionally prized in fine cabinet-making; Kingwood, one of the rarest and densest woods in the world, historically used for aristocratic furniture in 17th-century Latin America; Briar burl, a fire-resistant Mediterranean wood more familiar from tobacco pipes, prized here for its dramatic flame-like grain; and Swiss Ebony, in fact a Swiss-grown walnut compressed through an innovative process into one of the densest, hardest woods available. Every wooden case is impregnated with a natural drying oil for long-term protection. Inside, the Model O1 runs a self-winding Swiss automatic movement on ball-bearing rotor with 25 jewels, beating at 28,800 vph (4Hz) for a 42-hour power reserve, paired with blued steel hands and a choice of black or white indices, on a Geneva-made antiallergenic leather strap with a double folding clasp.

Kauri watches are independently certified Swiss made — and by Gillioz's account significantly exceed the official bar: where the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry's tightened standard requires at least 60% of a watch's value to originate in Switzerland, Kauri's watches reach more than 90%, achieved through close collaboration with established Swiss component suppliers rather than vertical in-house manufacturing. The brand marked its second anniversary with the DUO model, a rounder-cased evolution of the same wood-and-automatic-movement formula, and continues to produce unique, one-off timepieces alongside its numbered limited editions — every Kauri watch, the brand says, has its own story to tell.