Liudas Norkus

Liudas Norkus grew up in a small Lithuanian town of around 800 people, where, in his own words, everyone pretty much knew each other and there wasn't much to do. He moved to England in 2015 in search of independence, working full-time jobs until 2021, and only discovered watchmaking in 2019 — after the move — when a watch magazine full of unique independent creations caught his eye. Curious how the pieces inside a watch actually worked, he ordered a £25 watch repair kit from Amazon and opened up one of his own mechanical watches; he has said that single moment of seeing the tiny components inside was what hooked him for good. With no watchmaking school behind him, Norkus taught himself entirely from the internet, researching how other independents built their watches, until he connected in 2019 with Denis Carignan, a watchmaker in New Hampshire, USA, with three decades of experience, who mentored him and exchanged ideas with him for the next five years. He also credits English watchmaker Jack Matthew Elam, whom he considers among the finest working in the country today, with teaching him many of the hand-finishing techniques he later applied to his own watch.

Norkus began by studying movements he had bought — measuring them with a depthing tool, callipers, and a microscope fitted with a digital camera, then recreating them in CAD software, including a dual open-heart movement, fusee-and-chain pocket watch calibres, and the Seagull ST3600, the movement he would eventually build his own watch around. He worked through several complete watch concepts he was ultimately unable to produce before settling, in 2022, on the design that became his debut: the LN1 Regulator, inspired by the regulator pocket watches of Ferdinand Berthoud, Breguet, and Patek Philippe, whose traditional layouts he had always been drawn to as a collector himself. The finished movement, based on a heavily modified Seagull ST3600 (a Chinese-made ETA 6497 clone) with 17 jewels running at 21,600vph (3Hz) and roughly 46 hours of reserve, was chosen partly for its proven reliability after Norkus watched one run trouble-free for years, and partly because it let him build a genuinely accessible first watch. Everything visible — case, dial, movement architecture — was designed entirely in-house in CAD, and Norkus machined the top plate, bridges, pillars, and barrel himself on a lathe and milling machine, with only the hands and barrel lid laser-cut externally in the UK before he hand-finished every visible component by sandblasting and traditional hand tools.

The result is a genuinely three-dimensional dial built from 38 individual parts: offset hours at 12 o'clock, central regulator-style minutes, small running seconds at 9, and, at 5 o'clock, an openworked bridge revealing the mainspring barrel itself — all visible bridges, pillars, and hands 24k gold-plated over a sandblasted, lacquered mainplate, echoing the raw brass aesthetic of the antique pocket watches Norkus collects. A domed box sapphire crystal maximises the view of the multi-level dial from every angle while keeping the watch reasonably slim: the steel case is just 6.2mm thick on its own, 11.2mm with the crystal, at 41mm across. Registered as a company and unveiled on Instagram and LinkedIn in January 2025, the LN1 Regulator became an overnight phenomenon: the first batch of 100, priced at £900, and a second batch of 100 at £1,100, sold out through an invite-only WhatsApp group in a matter of hours, with Norkus and a small team fielding hundreds of messages and over 250 orders in the opening rush. Norkus is now developing the LN2, aiming for more extensive in-house movement work and, potentially, US-based production, while continuing to build a following among Lithuanian and international collectors alike — a remarkable debut for a watchmaker with no formal training, working almost entirely alone from a flat in London.