Machiel Hulsman

A former IT consultant who left a successful career in 2014 to pursue a lifelong passion for watchmaking from a small atelier in Hilversum — now relocated to Heerde, Gelderland. Entirely self-taught, Machiel Hulsman enrolled at the Schoonhoven watchmaking school in the Netherlands while teaching himself in the evenings; he soon quit his job entirely. In 2019 he completed the Marie-Elise — the first entirely handmade wristwatch from the Netherlands — and immediately won the 2019 Grand Prix at Masters of Horology. From screws, plates, bridges, and springs to the dial and case, everything is made by hand on vintage lathes and turning machines in the Netherlands, with only the balance and mainspring sourced externally.

Each Hulsman Timepieces commission is a co-creation: the client's passions, ideas, and aesthetic vision are translated by Machiel into an original design, then developed and built entirely from scratch. Every watch is unique; he never makes the same watch twice. Complications available include tourbillon, 3D moon phase, perpetual calendar, remontoir, and retrograde displays. His Easy Perpetual (2025, his first serial concept) features a foolproof perpetual calendar operated entirely through the crown, allowing fully synchronised bi-directional setting. A complete build report with photos and clips of every component, a service manual, and a certificate of authenticity accompanies every piece.

The Easy Perpetual, offered as a 12-piece Montre de Souscription at EUR 138,000 excluding VAT, solves the perpetual calendar's oldest annoyance: it can be fully set forwards and backwards through the crown alone, with no pushers, correctors, or risk of damaging the movement if the watch runs down — a genuinely novel mechanical solution to a complication watchmakers have wrestled with since Thomas Mudge's earliest 18th-century examples. The dial architecture rewards close looking: heat-blued, openworked hands in Hulsman's signature 'Marie-Elise' style, an exposed balance visible beneath a sapphire bridge at 6 o'clock, a day/night indicator and dedicated winding indicator in twin apertures, and a centre customisable in sapphire crystal, meteorite, natural stone, or guilloché, all powered by an in-house manual movement at 21,600 vph with 90 hours of reserve, finished with Côtes de Genève, polished anglage, and circular graining. Hulsman has continued at a striking pace since: a Tourbillon Solstitium followed, its one-minute tourbillon carrying a beryllium-bronze balance wheel gold-plated and weighted for poise, and he has simultaneously been developing a tri-axis tourbillon and what he describes as a 50-complication movement — ambitions that would be remarkable for any workshop, let alone one run by a single self-taught watchmaker from rural Gelderland. Now an AHCI member, Hulsman has gone, in barely a decade, from IT quality management to the leading edge of complicated independent watchmaking — proof that in the current renaissance of independent horology, formal training is no longer the only route to the front rank.