Keaton Myrick

A WOSTEP-certified watchmaker from central Oregon, Keaton Myrick represents the independent spirit of the American West applied to traditional horology. He trained at the Lititz Technicum school in Pennsylvania in 2007, then worked for Rolex before returning to his native Oregon to pursue independent watchmaking. Inspired by George Daniels and Philippe Dufour, he debuted at Baselworld 2012, becoming one of the few American independent watchmakers working at a serious level of craftsmanship.

He works in Sisters, Oregon (beneath the Cascades), building 80–85% of each watch himself using a mix of antique and modern tools — antique rose engines for guilloché, a retrofitted System 3R setup for machining. Production: 5–6 watches per year, often fewer. His only series to date, the '1 in 30' (30 pieces, priced from $30,000), has nearly sold out. Calibre 29.30 is a heavily reworked Unitas 6497 with remade gear train wheels, bespoke filigree stopwork, hand-made balance wheel, German silver ¾ plate with circular graining, hand-bevelled anglage, screwed chatons, black-polished balance bridge — barely recognisable from the base movement. Lot included in Phillips New York Watch Auction XII (2025 estimate $15,000–30,000). Now preparing a new series of 28 watches, acquiring vintage Elinvar hairsprings. One of the quietly exceptional names in American independent watchmaking.

Myrick's path into the craft ran through restoration work that deepened his ambitions: dismantling vintage grande-sonnerie-style mechanisms during repair jobs exposed him to chiming complications most modern watchmakers never encounter hands-on, and before Lititz he had already cut his teeth at the custom wristwatch maker MKII. His own words capture the discipline behind the scarcity — he has stated plainly that production in his workshop will never exceed ten to twelve pieces a year, a ceiling chosen deliberately to preserve close relationships with clients and keep him at the bench rather than managing growth, adding that his greatest challenge now is ensuring his love of haute horlogerie isn't tarnished under the weight of production. As of early 2025 he had moved into a larger workshop and continued evolving his process: machining his own pinions on a Bechler lathe, experimenting with heat-blackened zirconium as a new dial material, and diversifying revenue by making components for fellow independent watchmakers and selectively accepting restoration work from his existing client base — practical trades that let the watchmaking itself stay uncompromised. Working from a town of scarcely two thousand people, with no investors, no partners, and tooling that in some cases predates his own grandparents, Myrick has built something genuinely rare: an American atelier producing 5-6 movements as thoroughly hand-finished as anything from the Vallée de Joux, proof that the Pacific Northwest's independent streak extends, improbably, all the way down to the balance wheel.