Naoya Hida & Co.

Founded in 2019 by Naoya Hida — a veteran of three decades in the Swiss watch industry, having worked in sales and marketing and distribution for Jaeger-LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin, F.P. Journe, and Breguet in Japan. After years of designing limited-edition models for other brands, Hida realised his ideal watch didn't exist, so he set out to create it himself: a mid-20th-century-inspired dress watch refined with Japanese sensibilities and meticulous craftsmanship. In just six years the brand has produced 243 watches total. Applications are curated — Hida opens an application window for each new model, then personally selects who receives the opportunity to buy.

The brand's philosophy balances familiarity with individuality — 'multi-layered upon closer inspection.' Key signatures: hand-engraved Breguet Arabic or Roman indexes (not applied, but directly engraved into the dial); German and Argentium silver dials; multi-segment graduated dial architecture (the outer minute ring machined as a separate piece — a bold manufacturing choice demanding extremely tight tolerances); filling with cashew (synthetic urushi) for a vintage feel; Argentium silver minute markers in some gold models. Eleven model types across the NH TYPE series: Type 1D (37mm, small seconds, Breguet Arabic indices, German silver dial, Cal. 3019SS — the 'core' dress watch); Type 1D-2 (18k yellow gold case, 60 18k minute markers around the circumference); Type 1D-3 (18k yellow gold, Art Deco side case engraving by master engraver Keisuke Kano, very low production); Type 3B (moon phase); Type 4A (sportier proportions); Type 5A (rectangular); Type 6A (complicated top model). Inspiration: the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Soixantième of 1991 first gave Hida a sense of what modern watchmaking could be.

2025 brought the brand's first proper complication: the NH TYPE 6A perpetual calendar, built around a newly developed Cal.3025PC created in collaboration with Habring2 and Dubois Dépraz and limited to roughly ten pieces. Its Argentium silver dial was chosen specifically for tarnish resistance, giving Keisuke Kano a stable canvas on which every Roman numeral and every indication across the month, date, day-of-week, and leap-year subdials is individually hand-carved rather than printed or applied — paired with 18k yellow gold hour and minute hands against blued-steel calendar indicators. The same year's NH TYPE 3B-3 added a lapis lazuli moon-phase disc, its hand-engraved 18k gold moon travelling across a genuine night sky, limited to five pieces. The 2026 collection pushed further still: ten models including the Valjoux 23-based NH TYPE 7A, the brand's first true chronograph, and the compact 31mm NH TYPE 8A drawing on the Patek Philippe ref. 96 and Breguet's classic dress-watch proportions, alongside continued refinements — a 36mm NH TYPE 1 (down from 37mm), acrylic-crystal variants born from enthusiast demand after 2025's NH TYPE 5A-1, and an NH TYPE 3B-4 with hand engraving across the entire 18k gold case in an Art Nouveau motif, following the positive reception of similar case-side work on 2024's NH TYPE 1D-3. Annual production has grown from an initial run of just seven watches to around a hundred a year, still sold entirely through Hida's curated application process — evidence that meticulous, hand-engraved Japanese dress watchmaking has found an audience willing to wait for it.