Oan Gio

OAN.GIO is the creation of Nghia Nguyen Dai, a French-born Vietnamese watchmaker who spent over six years at a renowned French watch brand overseeing production and innovation before founding his own house, encouraged by his wife Oanh; his brother, a product designer and 3D artist who spent years at Rolex, worked alongside him on the brand's design and technical details. The name blends 'OAN,' a phonetic rendering of 'one' and also his wife's name, with the Vietnamese word for time, 'giờ'; the resulting logo reads variously as the brand's own initials, an infinity symbol, the number eight, considered lucky across Asian culture, or a snake, revered in Vietnamese tradition as a symbol of wisdom and intuition. OAN.GIO positions itself explicitly as 'a blank canvas for the world's finest artisans,' built around collaborations with small independent workshops and individual craftspeople rather than a single in-house atelier of its own.

The core OG Collection spans six distinct craft techniques rather than a single house style. The Sơn Mài line revives Vietnamese lacquer painting, a craft only formalised in the 1930s at Hanoi's École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine, founded by French artists — a fitting echo of the founder's own French-Vietnamese identity — built on a base lacquer technique with roots stretching back thousands of years in China and Persia. Alongside it sit dials in rose-engine guillloché, Damascene metal inlay, hand engraving, and titanium coloured through controlled oxidation rather than paint, priced from roughly 1,690 to 3,990 dollars across the range.

Above that core sits the brand's premium tier. The Wajima Collection's Masterpiece Series has its dials hand-painted by maki-e lacquer artisans in Wajima, the coastal Japanese town regarded as the birthplace of that craft: Bouken Koi depicts a koi fish leaping after enduring trials on the Yellow River, while Henshin Dragon shows the same fish's completed transformation into a dragon — together telling the East Asian legend of perseverance and transformation, with only two examples of each ever made. A parallel Raden Collection, developed with Japanese lacquer artist Keisuke Sano, applies Urushi lacquer and abalone-shell raden inlay across a further four models.

Inside is the in-house Prestige V2 calibre, based on the ETA Unitas 6498-2 but entirely reworked by a precision partner in Glashütte, the birthplace of German watchmaking: hand-wound, 36.60mm across, 17 jewels, beating at 21,600 vibrations per hour with 56 hours of reserve, regulated across five positions to within six seconds a day. Its custom mainplate and bridges are galvanised in 3N gold with a perlage pattern, finished with rhodium-sandblasted and rose-gold-brushed surfaces, diamond-polished chamfers, and mirror-polished screws, housed in a 40mm, 316L steel case with a sapphire 'Chevé Box' crystal and 5 ATM of water resistance.

Straps are made from upcycled vintage Japanese kimono fabric through a collaboration with Thailand-based studio Adiantes, each one a 'double upcycle' of fabric remnants that leaves no two examples alike. The Wajima Collection was priced at 6,490 US dollars and, like the rest of OAN.GIO's current output, is presently sold out, with the brand taking newsletter subscriptions ahead of future production batches.