Makina
Makina is a family-owned Filipino watch brand, made in limited numbers and designed to fuse industrial grit with quiet elegance. Its CEO, Danilo Villanueva, introduces the brand as "the man behind the Machine", and the name is the Filipino word for machine, from the Spanish máquina, and also what Filipinos call a watch movement. The brand has been active since 2017 and describes its watches as a little off-centre, defiant and entirely its own, with a lean toward form over function.
The brand says its watches have won design awards, including the Good Design Award in Chicago, the A' Design Award, the International Design Awards, the European Product Design Awards and the London Design Awards. It has also made commissioned pieces for organisations including the Philippine Olympic Committee, San Miguel Corporation, the Philippine Military, Megaworld International and Altria Group, and offers custom timepieces for commemorative and corporate clients through a request form. Collaborations include a Ford piece and the MK01 with QUICCS, a Philippine Independence Day project.
The standard collection is named for demons and angels: Cassiel, Azazel, Andras, Mephisto, Uriel and a QUICCS model. The Azazel, described as Makina's only demon built for daily wear, has a Swiss movement, a sandblasted case with upgraded water resistance and a unidirectional timing bezel, in GMT Black, GMT Blue, Black and Green versions. The Andras, as presented in a 2023 pre-order, was Makina's first rectangular watch and first PVD-coated case, in 316L stainless steel, 44 mm from lug to lug, with a multilayer sand-textured brass dial, a sapphire crystal, 50 metres of water resistance and a Swiss Sellita SW260-1 automatic with small seconds at six o'clock, offered at USD 625 in the first pre-order phase; an Andras II in grey has since followed. The Mephisto, the original "Demon Reborn", is the brand's first watch with an integrated bracelet, with Mephisto III, III GMT, III GMT Gray and III Cream versions open for pre-order.
Few specifications are published on the brand's site, and no current prices. Several of its pages could not be read when this listing was written, because the site blocks automated readers: the Cassiel, Uriel and Uriel VII Blue pages, the QUICCS and custom pages, and the Azazel GMT Blue, Andras II Gray and Mephisto III GMT pages. The listing therefore says little about those models, and the Andras details come from a 2023 pre-order page whose photographs showed a prototype, with its thickness given as both 11.1 and 10.5 mm. The brand says it ships worldwide, with no import duties on selected models for the United States and the Philippines, and watches carried a 24-month warranty at the time of the Andras pre-order. This listing draws only on the brand's own website.