Tourby
Tourby Watches began, fittingly, with a broken pocket watch. In 1999, 25-year-old Erdal Yildiz of Hagen in Westphalia inherited his grandfather's pocket watch — powered by a Unitas caliber in need of a service — and the search for a watchmaker to revive it ignited an obsession: watch magazines, countless books, small watch fairs, and trips abroad hunting undiscovered old pocket watch movements to buy and repair. By 2002 the hobby had become a profession, as Yildiz pioneered selling watch movements and parts online worldwide; when customers began asking him to build complete watches, unique unbranded pieces followed, and in 2007 the Tourby brand was registered at the Patent Office in Munich. The founding inspiration never left: a pocket watch for the wrist is the brand's trademark, its designs forever informed by his grandfather's heirloom and the honest Unitas hand-wound movement, which experiences a genuine renaissance in Tourby's hands — refined by a master watchmaker, a hand engraver, and a goldsmith into finished works of art. American collectors became the brand's biggest customers, many commissioning Tourby to bring old American railroad pocket watch movements back to life as everyday heirloom wristwatches.
The defining feature of Tourby is customization on a scale almost no one else offers at the price: through direct sales, customers effectively assemble their own unique timepiece, choosing case, dial (enamel, guilloché, sector, gemstone — aventurine, lapis lazuli, turquoise), hands, crown, movement grade, decoration (perlage, sunburst, skeletonization, skeleton wheels, swan-neck regulator, custom rotors), lume, artificial aging, and hand engraving executed in-house. The catalogue spans a remarkable range — Marine and Railroad classics, Art Deco dress watches and 1930s-style Art Deco chronographs, Ottoman enamel models beloved in the Middle East, pilot's watches, the Old Military line, the Lawless dive watch (a 500m diver developed in 2011 with Australian diver Brendan Lawless), and premium pieces like the Planetarium and full skeletons. Milestones stack up: in 2012 the lifestyle magazine Luxos ranked the Tourby Aviator among the world's ten best pilot's watches — the only German brand on an otherwise all-Swiss list; in 2013 the U.S. Navy ordered a limited pilot's watch series for selected combat pilots of the Strike Fighter Weapons School Pacific, each with a secret hand-engraved number and never sold to the public.
Perhaps the brand's most storied moment came in 2018, when Yildiz won a long-running, David-versus-Goliath lawsuit brought against him involving IWC and its parent Richemont — one of the world's largest luxury groups — prevailing despite being hopelessly outmatched financially. Design recognition followed: the Old Military won the German Design Award in 2020 (with the Lawless Vintage placing third in the Chronos readers' poll the same year), the Art Deco Sector Dial took the Special Prize in Luxury Goods in 2021, and in 2026 the Art Deco Chrono earned Yildiz his third German Design Award — making him, quite possibly, the only non-designer ever to win it three times. With stores in Hagen and Wetter an der Ruhr, retail partnerships across Germany and Austria, and devoted collectors from the United States to the UAE and Qatar, Tourby stands as proof that accessible, deeply personal, pocket-watch-souled watchmaking still thrives in the Ruhr.