Shane Tulloch

Shane Tulloch grew up in New Zealand — literally in and around his father's jewellery workshop — then studied micro-mechanical engineering for four years with a focus on watch movements.

After multiple visits to Switzerland, he met designer Eric Giroud in Geneva in 2016, who became his co-creator. To develop the movement, Tulloch contacted watchmaking engineer Christophe Beuchat, who introduced him to Kari Voutilainen — Beuchat had just been named Director of Voutilainen's Comblémine SA parts and dial manufacture in Saint-Sulpice, Val de Travers. Voutilainen, Beuchat, and movement designer Stéphane Bépoix embraced the project; it took three years to create the debut T-01. The T-01 First Edition Regulator (40mm, 18k red or white gold, 50 pieces at CHF 36,800) features a proprietary hand-wound calibre with twin barrels in series for optimal torque; 21,600vph; free-sprung variable-inertia balance with 18k gold timing weights, Breguet overcoil with Philips terminal curve hairspring suspended under a single-arm black-polished steel bridge; 96-hour power reserve; 27 jewels including 2 in gold chatons; 183 parts; German silver bridges with hand-polished bevels; 18k white gold double-spoke gear train wheels with circular-grained faces. The powder-frosted sterling silver dial with slightly tilted regulator sub-dials is available in silver, slate grey, nickel, and royal blue.

What makes Tulloch's story unusual among independent founders is that he is, by his own admission, neither a trained watchmaker nor a machinist: after university he spent time at McKinsey & Co in consulting, then moved through a tech start-up and venture capital before independent watchmaking captured him entirely. His four years of self-taught micro-mechanical engineering study were a means to an end — enough technical fluency to conceive the T-01 and speak as an equal with the team he would eventually assemble around it, rather than to build the watch with his own hands. He has described growing up watching his mother, a designer who loved to draw, and his father, a jeweller who brought her ideas into physical form — a creative-and-maker partnership he has said shaped how he later approached his own collaboration with Eric Giroud and Kari Voutilainen's team. Small details throughout the T-01 reveal that team's fingerprints: the decorative mainspring barrels, patterned to individual customer preference, were Voutilainen's own suggestion, and rather than the customary straight 45-degree bevel, every bridge edge is filed and polished by hand into a rounded profile Tulloch specifically requested. Despite being built almost entirely in Switzerland by some of the country's most respected specialists, the T-01 deliberately does not carry a 'Swiss Made' label — a quiet acknowledgment that Tulloch himself, the name on the dial, remains the vision behind the watch rather than its maker.