Kortela Valta
Kortela Valta is a two-man independent watchmaking workshop in Porvoo, Finland, founded by Roope Kortela and René Valta — the newest names in a remarkable Finnish lineage that runs from Kari Voutilainen and Stepan Sarpaneva to Reima Koivukoski. The two met at the Finnish School of Watchmaking, where both trained in traditional service and repair. Their paths could hardly have been more different: Roope, now in his forties, spent years at the Finnish consumer-goods company Fiskars in roles from business control to B2B account management before a six-month parental leave gave him space to rethink his life and enroll in watchmaking school; René, in his late twenties, is a self-described mechanical multi-talent as comfortable filing superb inward-angled bevels as restoring a wrecked Mercedes-Benz W124. The turning point came in their second year, when Roope proposed collaborating on a precision micro-vise project and the pair began spending every spare moment milling components on an Aciera F1 — the moment Roope realized service and repair alone would never satisfy his creative ambitions. A seasoned industry mentor — a watchmaker who spent a decade working with Kari Voutilainen and is now at Petermann Bédat — provided crucial guidance in making Finland-based watchmaking with superior hand finishing viable. In the workshop, Roope leads artistic direction, design, 3D modeling, and most in-house machining including fiber-laser work; René leads prototyping, restores the vintage base movements, and performs final assembly, while both share the hand finishing.
Their debut, the Eka (Finnish for 'first'), launched in 2024 as eight numbered pieces at EUR 15,000: a 38.5mm × 9.5mm hand-finished 316L steel watch built around a fully rebuilt vintage Omega Calibre 266 — widely considered one of the finest serially produced movements ever made. The duo designed custom German silver bridges (machined in Finland, finished by hand in their workshop with traditional beveling and polishing), made the crown, carbon-steel hands, dial, bridge screws, and hairspring stud holder entirely in-house, and cut the solid 925 silver dial by laser before hand finishing. The follow-up Toka ('second'), unveiled for 2026 at EUR 25,500 in twelve pieces (six each in black and blue), marks a major technical step: a fully in-house free-sprung balance with platinum poising weights, a redesigned black-polished German silver balance bridge with echoes of Voutilainen, and the brand's first champlevé grand feu enamel dials — designed by Roope and fired by a specialist enamel artist in Neuchâtel — in a 'Seasons' pair honoring the kaamos polar darkness of Finnish winter and the blue of the country's lakes and archipelago in summer. Even the gold plating of train wheels and balance is done in their own workshop, a process most independents outsource to Swiss specialists; SJX praised finishing uniformity 'often missing from small-scale artisanal work,' and Simon Brette gave his blessing to the concave heat-annealed movement screws his work inspired.
What sets Kortela Valta apart beyond the finishing is radical transparency: the duo livestreams their watchmaking on Twitch and YouTube, letting anyone watch components being polished and prototypes taking shape in real time — they have even livestreamed the making of an entire watch. Coverage from Monochrome, SJX, Helsingin Sanomat, and the enthusiast community has grown steadily, and the pair's stated dream is the logical endpoint of their trajectory: a fully in-house Finnish watch movement. With production around ten pieces a year across small numbered series, Kortela Valta stands as compelling proof that world-class hand finishing now has a firm foothold on the shores of the Gulf of Finland.