Tsoroev Rashid

Tsoroev Rashid is a self-taught watchmaker operating entirely alone from his workshop in Magas, the capital of the Republic of Ingushetia in the North Caucasus of Russia — geographically equidistant between Moscow and Istanbul, and about as far from the centres of Swiss watchmaking as it is possible to be while remaining in Europe. Born in 1997, Rashid encountered mechanical watchmaking at the age of 15, when a display case in a shop window stopped him in his tracks. With no formal training available locally, he taught himself from books — among them George Daniels' Watchmaking, Donald De Carle's Complicated Watches and Their Repair, and a Soviet technical manual, Technology of Watch Production by Sergei Vasilievich — as well as from the internet and Russian watch forums, where early feedback and encouragement from fellow enthusiasts spurred him forward. A lathe sourced from a family member enabled him to begin making actual components. After several years of study through repair and restoration, he presented his first production model in 2019 at the age of twenty-two. He can produce approximately thirty watches per year working alone; beyond that, he believes quality would suffer.

His debut model, the Arrow, was a hand-wound three-hander on an ETA/Unitas 6498 pocket-watch movement in a polished stainless steel case, with a sandblasted matte dial carrying hand-applied blued steel indices shaped like arrowheads and flame-blued hands of the same form — all finished by Rashid himself. Multiple batches followed, in gold-plated, silver-plated, anthracite, and salmon dial executions, each limited to tiny numbers (as few as three pieces for some variants), with every batch selling out quickly. His evolution to the Arrow Evo in 2024 represents a significant step: the movement was upgraded to the La Joux-Perret LJP G100, a Swiss automatic with 68 hours of power reserve, but the heart of the watch is the dial — a solid piece of brass that Rashid first marks with relief hour indices and a minute track using CNC, then finishes entirely by hand using a self-developed tremblage technique, hammering the surface over at least two full days to produce a grainy, light-catching texture while mirror-polishing the raised numerals and relief elements. The case for the Arrow Evo is a 40mm, 10mm-thick stainless steel design that Rashid drew himself but receives from a supplier in an unfinished state — he finishes it himself entirely by hand, polishing the convex bezel and lug tops while brushing the flanks and between the lugs, with crisp boundaries maintained using custom jigs he makes himself. He also reworks the movement's tungsten rotor, skeletonising it by hand — a feat of patience given that tungsten's extreme hardness (more than double that of brass) makes it prone to shattering if worked improperly. The Arrow Evo is limited to 30 pieces and priced at USD 5,000.

Even the brand's name carries a personal signature: Rashid presents himself surname-first, Tsoroev Rashid, following the naming convention of his native Ingushetia rather than Western order — a small but deliberate way of keeping his origins visible in everything he makes. His earliest memory of watches is his father's gold pocket watch, a piece with a black dial, a moon phase, and a blue cabochon set into the crown that, by his own description, sounded almost like a vintage Cartier; the Arrow's distinctive arrowhead lugs, meanwhile, trace back to a moment while repairing a friend's watch, when the shape of its lugs first caught his eye and stayed with him. On the Arrow Evo, Rashid's hand-polishing method was chosen specifically to preserve the case's original sharp geometry: rather than the traditional polishing technique that inevitably rounds off edges into soft bevels, he works the surfaces by hand precisely to avoid that rounding, keeping the sculpted lugs and crisp transitions as drawn. Despite selling out edition after edition — some variants limited to as few as three pieces — Rashid has held firm to his own ceiling of roughly thirty watches a year, working entirely alone with no plans to hire help, because for him quality and solitude are inseparable. From a shop-window watch that stopped a fifteen-year-old in his tracks to a one-man workshop equidistant from Moscow and Istanbul, Tsoroev Rashid remains proof that world-class hand-finishing recognises no geography.