Lecomte

Lecomte is the watch brand of Florent Lecomte — industrial product designer, professor of watchmaking, and one of the most quietly extraordinary figures in French independent horology. His story begins not with watchmaking but with design: Lecomte studied industrial product design and started his career teaching that same discipline at the secondary level. In 2006 he was transferred to the Lycée Edgar Faure in Morteau — the watchmaking school in the small city on the Swiss border in Franche-Comté whose name has become shorthand for a whole generation of brilliantly trained French independents. Morteau is not just a school; it is a watchmaking cultural incubator, and Lecomte arrived there as a design teacher who knew nothing about how watches worked. The answers came from Thierry Ducret — himself a teacher at the school, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF), and a watchmaker of deep technical formation — who took Lecomte under his wing and taught him the craft. After two years of personal training with Ducret, Lecomte's management proposed that he add watchmaking to his teaching portfolio. He accepted, and over the years that followed became a specialised professor of mechanical watches with complications — the very category of watchmaking that requires the greatest precision, the deepest knowledge, and the clearest teaching instinct.

The students who passed through his classroom are now among the most celebrated names in French independent watchmaking. Florent Lecomte taught — and passed on his passion, knowledge, and watchmaking standards to — Théo Auffret (F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition 2018 winner, now a celebrated subscription watchmaker), Rémy Cools (F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition 2023 winner, GPHG Horological Revelation 2024 winner, founding an independent atelier at 22), Cyril Brivet-Naudot (independent watchmaker), John-Mikael Flaux, Julien Tixier, Luc Monnet, and others. He says of this: 'I am pleased to think that for those I have met, I have passed on a little of my passion, my know-how and my knowledge. I still keep in touch with many of them and continue to exchange our respective experiences.' His relationship with his former students is ongoing — a community of mutual influence rather than a hierarchical handover. Lecomte also trained alongside Thierry Ducret himself, whose own watchmaking brand (Thierry Ducret) appears in this catalogue; the Morteau school is the source of multiple independent names who know and respect each other.

Lecomte's career as an independent watchmaker was an accident of timing. During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, with classrooms emptied and his schedule suddenly open, he returned to his personal workshop at home and began experimenting. He documented the process on Instagram — and collectors slowly discovered him. What they found was not a brand, not a marketing operation, not a watch company with ambitions of scale: they found a watchmaker who makes watches alone, on his own time, in his own home workshop, with no employees, using both traditional and numerical machines, and who is driven entirely by the desire to push his own limits and honour the 18th-century French tradition he reveres. Every aspect of each watch — design, manufacture of components, decoration, and final assembly — is done by Lecomte himself, alone. Only certain finishing touches are subcontracted, in full transparency with clients.

The watches are organised in numbered series, each with its own character and its own single highlighted complication. The Series 1 was the debut — an open-worked piece in a 41mm stainless steel case, manually wound, with a calibre extensively redesigned and reimagined from the Unitas 6498 base. The bridges are galvanised in pink gold and carry a decidedly 18th-century French aesthetic inspired by Breguet's movement architecture; the main dial is in palladium. The decoration programme reflects classical French watchmaking rather than the Genevan tradition: anglage (bevelling) and black polishing take precedence over Côtes de Genève, which is typically achieved by machine. The interior angles on the dial — re-entrant right angles that a milling burr cannot reach — were cut by hand with an engraving tool by an engraver specialist, a detail of almost perverse difficulty. Each file pass on the bevels had to be meticulous and controlled, never touching the adjacent sanded surface. Series 1 was limited to approximately 5 pieces.

The Series 2 (2022) was the Régulateur — so named because its design highlights the balance, or regulating organ. The series 2 was the first Lecomte watch to feature a proprietary balance wheel designed and manufactured entirely in-house — no external component, no modification of an existing part, but a Lecomte-designed balance created from scratch and placed front and centre in the watch's multi-layer dial architecture, anchored by a black-polished bridge that invites inspection. Developing the balance required Lecomte to also make his own balance spring for the first series of the Régulateur. The Series 2 was produced in 12 pieces and was the first Lecomte to appear at public auction — a Series 2 example (No. 5 of 12) offered at Phillips Geneva Sessions, Spring 2026, with an estimate of CHF 3,000–6,000. Phillips described the Series 2 as a watch with 'a density of handwork that is rarely encountered in contemporary watchmaking, regardless of scale.' Screws are black polished throughout. Each piece required 300–400 hours of production. The Series 3, announced for 2023, introduced new complications relating to the display of hours and minutes and continues Lecomte's stated ambition to go further with each series in both complexity and finishing level. Future work that Lecomte has mentioned includes more complex one-off pieces and — a long-standing ambition — a tourbillon, the complication he has always associated most deeply with his hero Abraham-Louis Breguet. Contact for all enquiries is exclusively via Instagram.