LOTH

LOTH — short for 'Lab of Tristan Ho' — is the solo project of a Singaporean biomedical researcher who taught himself watchmaking from scratch, with no formal training, no mentors, and no watchmaking school behind him. Ho's fascination began roughly four years ago, on holiday, when a street vendor tried to sell him a fake Rolex and described its movement as though it were the real thing; within a year he was modding a Seiko NH35 in his spare time, and by August 2024 he had founded LOTH from a bench squeezed onto the second-floor landing of his parents' terrace house in Loyang. A National University of Singapore Life Sciences graduate, Ho worked by day as a biomedical research officer at A*STAR, studying cells and tissue under a laboratory microscope, and by night under a watchmaker's microscope, learning to modify and assemble calibres, engrave dials, and polish movement plates entirely from YouTube tutorials, Instagram demonstrations, and the occasional long-distance mentorship of independent watchmakers abroad. He has since spent some SGD 30,000 of his own money on tools, materials, and machines — a lathe, timegrapher, humidifier, and microscope now crowd the same family landing — and picked up metallurgy and CAD drawing alongside the finishing disciplines along the way. Following the sold-out reception of his debut collection, Ho recently left his research post to pursue LOTH full-time.

Ho has described every LOTH watch as a quiet protest against the enormous markups charged on factory-made movements dressed up as luxury — a deliberate revival of hand-finishing performed entirely at his own bench, with over 150 hours of labour in every completed piece. Two techniques define the house style, both entirely self-taught through research and relentless trial and error. Snailing, a decoration applied to the ratchet and crown wheels that dates on watch movements to the 1800s, is cut by hand on a lathe as the workpiece and a circular grinding head rotate in opposite directions, with the offset angle, abrasive grit, and rotation speeds all controlled manually to produce the finished radial pattern. Mosaic, a name Ho coined himself, adapts the traditional grattage (scraping) and charbonnage techniques using homemade cabrons — abrasive paper mounted on wooden sticks — to lay individual brushstrokes across a flat surface, each one angled deliberately against its neighbours so that no two strokes catch the light the same way, producing a shifting, patchwork luminosity unique to every piece. Alongside these signatures, Ho has also taught himself frosting, gold-plating, sunray brushing, and full hand-polishing, treating the entire discipline of finishing as something to be reverse-engineered from first principles rather than learned in a workshop.

The debut LOTH Watch 1 rebuilds a Unitas/ETA 6498 hand-wound base almost beyond recognition: every bridge is remachined in German silver — chosen, like the dial, as a nineteenth-century-watchmaking homage, left untreated so it will patina to honey and amber tones over time — with curves recalculated by mathematical formula to sit in perfect harmony with the jewels and gear train. The dial and balance bridge carry Ho's free-styled Mosaic finish, making every example genuinely one of a kind; the bridges carry wide, gracefully curved anglage with sharp hand-cut internal angles far beyond a standard 45-degree factory chamfer; every screw is slot-bevelled with a graver, chamfered on an Arkansas stone, and polished to a mirror by hand; and the crown and ratchet wheels carry single and double snailing respectively. Cased at 40.5mm in 316L steel (11.2mm thick, 49mm lug-to-lug) with a German silver dial face and steel chapter ring, thermally blued steel hands, at least 40 hours of reserve at 18,000vph, and a custom full-grain leather strap from Singaporean atelier Cattlehide, the LOTH Watch 1 was limited to 12 pieces at SGD 6,498 and sold out almost immediately, with two-thirds of the run already placed within weeks of release. The watch, and Ho's story, have since been covered by The Peak Singapore, Monochrome, Esquire Singapore, Revolution, and CNA938, and earned him a place on Prestige Singapore's 40 Under 40 list — recognition for a project Ho has said he hopes will eventually produce Singapore's first fully in-house developed movement.