Kirill Chernetskiy

Kirill Chernetskiy is a young Russian watchmaker whose origin story reads like a fable of the YouTube age. Trained as a jeweler, he was inspired by the example of Konstantin Chaykin — Russia's most celebrated independent watchmaker — and set out to teach himself the construction of the tourbillon by studying videos online. Just two months later he had built his first flying tourbillon, then another. With growing experience and the support of his family, he made the leap from experiments to enterprise, launching his own production under the name Kirill Chernetskiy's Watch Workshop with the goal of creating complicated watches entirely in Russia.

His debut, the Geometry, is unlike anything else in watchmaking: a watch with a 'living dial' composed of 290 individual parts, 275 of which are movable. The dial's interlocking triangular elements shift and shimmer with every gesture of the wrist, each part machined with a movement clearance of just two hundredths of a millimeter (0.02mm) per side relative to its mating component — a tolerance so unforgiving that a variance of a single hundredth of a millimeter in either direction would cause the elements to seize or grind against each other. Producing such parts demands high-grade equipment and tooling, and the dial's manufacturing technology is in the process of being patented. The case is its own feat of construction: ten separate elements machined from Russian-made VT-6 titanium, housing a Swiss Sellita SW200-1b automatic movement beneath sapphire crystal, in dimensions of 39mm across and roughly 11mm tall. The Geometry is limited to 999 numbered pieces, sold directly through the workshop with authenticity and warranty verifiable by serial number on the brand's site.

Recognition came swiftly and at the highest national level: in October 2024, at the Moscow Watch Expo, the Geometry won the Grand Prix — the top overall prize — at the third annual 'Best Russian Watches' competition, where 40 companies and independent makers entered 67 models across eight categories and 25,000 public votes were cast alongside the jury's judgment. In a moment of poetic symmetry, the prize was presented to Chernetskiy by none other than Konstantin Chaykin himself — the very watchmaker whose example had inspired him to pick up the craft. Kommersant hailed the result as a triumph for Russia's independent watchmakers, and reviewers dubbed the Geometry perhaps the most important Russian watch of 2024 — a remarkable arrival for a self-taught jeweler-turned-watchmaker whose first tourbillon was only a few years behind him.