Marcu Geneve

Jérôme Marcu was born into a family that has built automata and mechanical musical instruments since the 1950s, and trained at the Morteau School of Watchmaking before a career spanning Vacheron Constantin — where he worked on grand complications under the guidance of Gérald Genta — Patek Philippe's complications workshop, Roth & Genta, Bovet, and Harry Winston, where he deepened his understanding of perpetual calendars. In 2016 he founded Techno Watch Partners in Geneva, a complications workshop serving major maisons across prototyping, component manufacture, restoration, and the development of complex calibres, some of them his own patented solutions. In 2026, Marcu founded his own eponymous brand and unveiled its debut watch, Initial, limited to 33 pieces — 11 each in deep blue, anthracite, and gold dial finishes — priced at 59,000 Swiss francs excluding taxes. Work that falls outside his own workshop is carried out in collaboration with Geneva-based specialist craftsmen, including independent watchmaker Eric-Jean Weber on the movement.

The 40mm grade 5 titanium case is 13.10mm thick, its domed sapphire crystal sitting flush against the case band like a glass cap over a bezel raised on four pillars and secured by visible steel screws — a deliberate nod to the three-dimensional construction of antique watches — with a pressure-fitted sapphire caseback. The dial itself is entirely hand-milled into an exclusive 'Pine Needles' motif, a process taking roughly 20 hours per dial and leaving each one with a texture unique to that piece alone.

The watch's signature innovation sits at the tip of each hand: a baguette-cut diamond, a solution that required completely recalculating the mass, inertia, and dynamic balance of the movement itself. Where a standard hand runs about 0.2mm thick, Initial's diamond-set hands stand 1.4mm high, built from 11 separate components in hardened, flame-blued steel and cut by electrical discharge machining, counterbalanced by a black-polished steel weight positioned to offset the effect of gravity.

Inside is the hand-wound JM01, 37mm across and 4.6mm thick, beating at 18,000 vibrations per hour with 50 hours of reserve across 19 jewels, its German silver mainplate and bridges built around a deliberately symmetrical architecture with the barrel, centre wheel, and balance wheel aligned on a single vertical axis. Finished with Geneva stripes and 75 polished angles, including 15 inward angles, its gear-train bridge is engraved 'réglé comme du papier à musique' — 'regulated with the precision of a musical score' — in place of the traditional 'adjusted in five positions,' a direct nod to his family's history building automata and mechanical music boxes. Each movement is individually numbered on that same bridge.