Richard-Harvey Watch Company

Richard-Harvey Watch Company began in 2020, in the basement of its founder Mat, a healthcare worker who took up disassembling and reassembling his own watch collection as a distraction from the stress of working through the height of the pandemic. What started as a way to understand how mechanical movements functioned became, over repeated evenings taking watches apart and putting them back together, something closer to a genuine passion. Mat decided to build a watch of his own — intended as a gift for his engineer father, who had spent a career innovating and never settling for what already existed — but when he went looking for components, he found the available market unsatisfying: 'What was out there felt familiar, homages to timepieces that I'd seen before, maybe even worn before.' He built the gift anyway, working with what he could source, and finishing it taught him not just how to assemble a watch but that he wanted to make something genuinely his own. Over the following year he spent his off-hours designing and redesigning dials, hand-sets, and cases, eventually naming the company after his two grandfathers, Richard and Harvey — both military veterans, true patriots of the country they called home — and building a debut watch he hoped would make them proud. Richard-Harvey Watch Company, LLC is today a veteran-owned small business.

The Attitude, the brand's first model, comes in two variants honouring Richard and Harvey directly: The Patriot, incorporating the red, white, and blue of the American flag as a symbol of their patriotism, and The Blackout, a dark, monochromatic, tactical exterior representing their military service — both currently offered at $699, in leather, FKM rubber, and NATO strap options, with recently updated low-profile crownguards. The Lark, the brand's second model, is a true GMT field watch offered in four colourways named for navigational themes — Summit Gray, Meridian Green, Horizon Blue, and True North Black — at $899, part of a design direction the brand describes as inspired by everyday navigational instruments for land, sea, and air, engineered to be worn and wound always rather than treated as a display piece.

What sets Richard-Harvey apart from many microbrands is Mat's own candour about the difficult realities of small-batch watchmaking, published in a founder-written journal called Waypoints. Ahead of launching the Lark, he weighed crowdfunding carefully, ultimately choosing Kickstarter's all-or-nothing funding model specifically because it protects backers — no one is charged unless the real, production-based funding goal is met. He set that goal at the actual number needed for production rather than an easily-crossed symbolic figure designed purely for a 'fully funded' marketing banner, a decision he stood by even after the campaign fell short and dozens of third-party services flooded his inbox offering to manufacture fake early backers and manufactured momentum. When the Lark's Kickstarter didn't reach its threshold, Mat wrote publicly about the outcome rather than quietly moving on, committed to building the watch anyway out of pocket, and pledged the original campaign pricing to every backer once production completes — a level of transparency about the mechanics and setbacks of running a small watch brand that is rare in the microbrand space. 'We're not in this to hit a percentage,' he wrote. 'We're in this to build something worth wearing.'