Simon Brette

Simon Brette is the son of a carpenter, raised in Auvergne, France, who studied engineering at the Haute Ecole Arc Ingénierie in Le Locle, Switzerland, originally hoping to work in the automotive industry. Graduating into a recession redirected him into watchmaking instead: in 2011 he joined Jean-François Mojon's movement development house Chronode as a technical constructor, spending five years working on some of the most inventive calibres in contemporary independent watchmaking, before moving on to the avant-garde (and now defunct) MCT as project manager, turning the brand's time-display concepts into working reality, and finally to MB&F as development project manager, overseeing movement concepts from R&D through to production. After more than a decade in these behind-the-scenes roles, he set up as an independent design and movement consultant — and, during two months of paternity leave following his daughter's birth, began sketching a watch entirely his own, free of any client's constraints. The project crystallised around a conviction formed in 2020, as he watched demand for independent watchmaking surge at auction while many of the specialist artisans who actually built these watches — engravers, polishers, engine-turners — remained anonymous and, in some cases, close to bankruptcy. Brette resolved to build a watch that would credit and showcase those artisans by name.

That watch, the Chronomètre Artisans, debuted in April 2023 immediately after Watches and Wonders Geneva and became one of the most talked-about launches of the year for a watchmaker no one had previously heard of. Sold through a souscription (subscription) model — early clients' deposits funded the watch's completion — the debut Zirconium edition ran to just twelve pieces at CHF 50,000 and sold out immediately. At its centre sits the hand-wound SBCA calibre: an oversized, variable-inertia balance beating at 2.5Hz (18,000vph) with 72 hours of reserve, wolf's-tooth gearing on the ratchet and crown wheels machined by specialists Mac Bolis and Alyna Rouelle, and — the watch's signature detail — screws with concave, bowl-shaped heads mirror-polished to appear as small domes from a distance, hand-finished one at a time by artisan Anton Peterson at roughly an hour per screw, using a technique he had originally judged impossible, each one seated in a solid gold chaton. The 5N red-gold dial, hand-engraved into a texture the team calls 'Dragon Scales,' partially opens to reveal the going train, keyless works, and a frosted sapphire seconds ring, all set behind titanium bridges angled toward 11 o'clock. Among the artisans who worked on the piece was Barbara Coyon, decorator daughter of fellow French independent watchmaker Pascal Coyon. In November 2023 the Souscription edition won the Horological Revelation prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève.

Brette has since extended the Chronomètre Artisans across a growing family of limited editions, each reworking the case material and dial artisanship while keeping the SBCA architecture intact: a Rose Gold edition (2024, 50 pieces, CHF 85,000, sold out) pairs a red-gold case treated with black DLC against grey steel, the coating deliberately block-polished away on raised surfaces for contrast; a Titanium edition (99 pieces) sets a partially open dial with black-polished keyless works and off-centre seconds against a multi-dimensional, tremblage-hammered black dial ground — built up from hundreds of thousands of individually hand-cut facets over several days' work by engraver Yasmina Anti; and a Stainless Steel edition (60 pieces, CHF 81,000, sold out) carries a green-to-violet iridescent ALD coating inspired by aurora borealis hues over a hand-engraved 'Aurora Waves' dial of undulating concave forms, paired with a new 446-component steel bracelet — including 146 concave screws echoing the movement's own — debuting in April 2026. Across every edition, Brette's project remains as much about a network of named specialists as it is about any single design: a deliberately humanist answer to an industry that, in his view, too often lets its finest hands go uncredited.