Krayon

Krayon was founded in 2015 in Neuchâtel by Rémi Maillat, a watch design engineer, and his wife Fei, also an engineer — both artists at heart with a particular sensitivity to Métiers d'Art dials. Maillat's gift is a rare one: the ability to turn pure mathematics into disconcertingly simple watchmaking poetry, sketching a workable mechanical concept, as he puts it, with nothing more than a pencil. The idea that launched the house came from an unlikely place — an early-morning scuba dive. Getting up too early one day to explore the seabed, Maillat found himself wondering what time the sun would actually rise, and the question became an obsession: could a mechanical watch calculate sunrise and sunset anywhere on Earth, adjusted by hand to any latitude and longitude the owner chose? No one had ever built one. In 2017 he did, with Everywhere — and a year later, the Everywhere Horizon variant won the Innovation Watch Prize at the 2018 Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, a genuine watchmaking first recognized on watchmaking's biggest stage.

Everywhere runs on the Universal Sunrise & Sunset (USS) caliber, an astronomical computer of real audacity: 595 components built specifically for it, four differentials, 84 gear assemblies and 145 individual gear parts, three patents filed to protect the invention, and a hidden equation-of-time function calculated internally but never shown on the dial — all compressed into a movement just 6.5mm high, automatically wound by a white gold micro-rotor with 72 hours of reserve. Anywhere (2020) took the same patented principle in the opposite direction: rather than a fixed factory setting, it became a personal ephemeris the owner configures for their own coordinates, its C030 caliber (432 components, 55 jewels, hand-wound, up to 86 hours of reserve) adjusted via a long transverse screw for latitude and two smaller bridge screws — one each for sunrise and sunset longitude — with day and night sapphire discs that continuously reshape themselves as the seasons change, offered in white gold, rose gold, steel, and a dedicated Lady reference. Anyday (2025) turned the same inventive instinct toward the calendar: the world's first mechanical watch to display an entire month of days and dates simultaneously on one dial, its C032 caliber (378 components, 46 jewels, CHF 88,000) built around two purpose-designed cams — one storing 24 hours of energy to snap the date forward at midnight in a thousandth of a second, the second managing the trickier 31-to-1 month-end jump — across a rolling 35-position, five-week display that previews the next month's first days before it arrives.

Every Krayon movement is designed entirely in-house and finished to the same exacting standard: fine striping, meticulous hand-bevelled angles, extensive black polishing, and bridges whose sweeping curves are drawn directly from the coastline and sunrise over Neuchâtel itself, where the workshop still sits on the Rue de l'Evole. Even the dials carry the house signature — a distinctive 'Y' guilloché motif echoed in the faceted hour indices. Made in extraordinarily small numbers, roughly fifteen to twenty watches a year across all current models, Krayon remains one of the very few independent houses whose entire identity rests on invention rather than variation — three hypercomplications, three genuine world firsts, one small team in Neuchâtel translating astronomy and the calendar into mechanisms no one had built before.