MCT Watches
MCT — Manufacture Contemporaine du Temps — was founded in 2007 by Denis Giguet, working from a workshop on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in the historic heart of Swiss watchmaking. Every watch is assembled from start to finish by a single watchmaker for full traceability, and once assembled, each movement is exhaustively tested by that same watchmaker for a further three weeks before it leaves the workshop. Consistent with what the Manufacture calls a genuine respect for the 'Swiss Made' label, all case and movement components for its core collections are sourced and finished in Switzerland, with after-sales servicing also handled in-house.
The debut Sequential One, launched as the S100, set the brand's course: its designer drew on the elegant lines of 1940s British automobiles for a 45mm, 18k gold case, built around MCT's own hand-wound Calibre MCT-S1.0, a 471-component movement with a Breguet terminal curve and 40 hours of reserve. Its 'Sequential' display shows the hour across four modules of five triangular prisms each, which pivot to reveal the current hour, while the minutes turn on a 270-degree rotating sapphire disc — a genuinely novel way of reading time that required MCT to develop an entirely new movement architecture just to drive it. Each colourway was limited to 99 pieces, priced around 89,500 USD; later S110 references carried the same prism concept forward in updated finishes.
Sequential Two, the S200, brought the prism display into a round 44.6mm case for the first time, adding a sapphire ring set into the case band and upgrading to an automatic movement, the 654-component Calibre MCT-S2.0 with an 18k gold micro-rotor, extending the minute display to a full 360-degree sweep around the dial's perimeter. Standard pink and white gold references were limited to 99 pieces each around 92,500 USD, while a rarer black-DLC-coated white gold edition, its prisms picked out in deep blue, lemon green, or orange, was limited to just nine watches across the three colours at roughly 97,500 USD; later S210 and S220 references, including a sport-oriented variant, extended the same architecture further.
To mark its tenth anniversary, MCT introduced the Dōdekal One, or D110 — the first mechanical watch, by the Manufacture's account, to display the hour digitally at the centre of the dial. Inspired by 1970s electronic watches, a complex set of cams and carriages moves numeral segments through a 2.5-second translational motion to change the hour, while the minutes are shown by a conventional flying hand; the self-winding Calibre MCT-D1, with its own gold micro-rotor, carries 50 hours of reserve. Cased at 43mm in a cushion shape with lugs styled like twisted leaves, the D110 was offered in titanium or black-DLC titanium with 5N pink gold, each limited to 25 pieces, priced from 60,000 to 65,000 USD.
The Frequential One, F110, took the opposite approach: rather than reinventing the display, it moved a conventional hours-and-minutes dial around a central suspended balance wheel, visible turning at the dial's core like a small orbiting body. Achieving that meant relocating the escapement itself to the centre of the movement, on Swiss pallets with a variable-inertia balance and Breguet terminal curve, with the hands guided around it on a ball-bearing-mounted ruby roller; the hand-wound Calibre MCT-F1.0 runs on double barrels with a power-reserve indicator across 279 components. Cased at 42mm in DLC-treated titanium, F110 references run from roughly 44,700 to 46,900 USD. Alongside its numbered collections, MCT produces one-off Exceptional Pieces for select clients, and — an unusual choice for a haute horlogerie house — accepts payment in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as a member of the Crypto Valley association, in keeping with a broader identity built around pairing traditional Swiss watchmaking craft with a deliberately contemporary, technology-forward outlook.