Laine Watches

Torsti Laine's path to watchmaking began unconventionally — as a computer engineer in Finland, before discovering horology and enrolling at Kelloseppäkoulu (the Finnish School of Watchmaking), the same institution that trained Kari Voutilainen. In Finland, watchmaking and micromechanics are taught together rather than separately as in Switzerland — shaping Laine's combined technical-and-aesthetic approach: 'you don't need to just make high-quality parts but also beautiful parts.' In 2014, while still a student, he won the A. Lange & Söhne Watchmaking Excellence Award — the richest prize in watchmaking education at the time — for an ingenious moon-phase mechanism. This led to work at A. Lange & Söhne in Germany, then with Kari Voutilainen in Switzerland. Around 2016 he relocated his family to Le Locle, Switzerland and established his own brand — a small, unmarked workshop ('Laine — Watchmaker') in a typical Le Locle townhouse.

Laine makes and finishes nearly everything in-house, including his celebrated dials — a rarity even among Swiss independents. His signature is colour and texture: sandblasted, circular-grained, hand-painted gradient (fumé), or PVD-plated surfaces, often in vivid hues unusual for traditional watchmaking. The Gelidus (Latin for 'ice-cold/frosty') collection features skeleton syringe hands over richly coloured dials with frosted case-side cavities; the Gelidus Guilloché adds swirling hand-guilloché patterns and sculpted polished case sides. The V38 (38mm) uses the Vaucher 5401 micro-rotor automatic movement (also used by Parmigiani Fleurier), extensively reworked and finished by hand. A collaboration with Revolution produced 'One Love' — the word 'peace' hand-engraved in 70 languages across the movement. Outstanding value for the depth of handwork involved.

Laine's newest reference, the P37, distills the workshop's obsessions into his smallest case yet: 37mm and just 8mm tall thanks to the slim Peseux 7001, limited to 99 pieces with five dial finishes, its vintage-syringe hands filed and polished by hand from steel just 0.2mm thick — with optional heat-bluing on the lighter dials — atop a rose-gold-toned movement carrying hand-turned guilloché, two black-polished bridges, a black-polished crown cap and barrel screw, and seventeen hand-chamfered steel components. A Murasaki Flame P37 dial variant was named a finalist in the Exception category of the Timepiece World Awards. Earlier in 2025, Laine relocated his atelier from Le Locle up the mountain to La Chaux-de-Fonds, gaining room to expand and installing, among newer CNC equipment, a straight-line engine-turning machine built in 1914 — purchased from a specialist dealer in Los Angeles and, fittingly, returned to work in the very town where it was manufactured over a century ago. Laine has described his own method simply as starting with the movement and refusing shortcuts, an ethic he traces back to his unconventional training: Kelloseppäkoulu, he has said, teaches you to solve problems with your own resources rather than a big institution's machine shop. As of 2026 his watches remain made-to-order directly from the workshop, with wait times running one to two years and prices from roughly CHF 9,000 for the base V38 moonfrosting to CHF 12,000 and beyond for triple-guilloché or fully bespoke commissions — a computer engineer turned watchmaker still building nearly everything himself, one frosted, coloured, hand-guilloché dial at a time.