Wilbur

Jason Wilbur founded WILBUR in 2020 after two decades spent turning ambitious design ideas into physical reality. A graduate of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where a Porsche scholarship led to an internship at Porsche Design, Wilbur spent over a decade at Honda, eventually rising to lead its 'Skunkworks-style' Advanced Design Studio, designing production and concept vehicles including the Honda FC Sport and the Nuev electric urban concept, before co-founding and running the electric-vehicle company Brave Labs. His first watch design, conceived while still a student, later became the now-iconic Devon Tread 1 — Wilbur sold the concept to entrepreneur Scott Devon, who built it into the Devon brand, itself now part of this catalogue.

WILBUR describes its watches as 'mechanical supermachines' — industrial art built with intent, obsession, and mechanical integrity, meant, in the brand's words, to be 'experienced before they are understood.' The debut Automatic Launch Edition (2020) set the tone deliberately: rather than a Swiss movement, Wilbur built it around the humble, famously indestructible Seiko NH35, housed in a nine-part modular case with exposed automotive-style fasteners, water-resistant to 100 metres, limited to 250 pieces per finish and designed to support an ongoing series of small-batch 'Speed Shop' editions. The EXP line that followed established WILBUR's more wearable 'daily driver' side; its current EXP 2.0 generation, built in 25-piece batches around a La Joux-Perret movement with WILBUR's own rotor and modifications, pairs a titanium exoskeleton case with blue-and-black ceramic components, made in Switzerland.

LEO, unveiled in 2023 after seven years of development, is WILBUR's most ambitious release to date and the piece that earned the brand a place among the watches selected for the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève that year. Its name stands for 'Living Extraterrestrial Object,' inspired by Wilbur's fascination with the Roswell incident — specifically the detail that recovered wreckage reportedly carried symbols nobody could read. Rather than numerals, LEO's dial carries a cryptic alphabet of Wilbur's own invented symbols, deliberately designed to avoid resembling any real number, displayed through the WILBUR Engine One automatic jump-hour movement, built by Concepto in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland: the hour jumps on dual sapphire discs at the centre, while fixed bridges double as the minute and second hands, running at 4Hz with 50 hours of reserve inside an 8-part, hand-finished modular case with a distinctive 'landing-gear' strap.

Across versions — including the JW1.1 in titanium and black DLC with blue accents (50 pieces, 32,500 USD), the gold-accented JW1.2 and neon-yellow JW1.3 'Firefly' (25 pieces each, 36,500 USD), and further variants including Night Rider and Superviolet — LEO was capped at 100 total pieces, every one now sold out, its case back engraved 'Dedicated to the Pioneers.' Despite its Swiss movement, the watch is built and assembled in the United States, in Scottsdale, Arizona. WILBUR's next and most extreme project, the Flat-Six, remains in development: a patent-pending architecture called the Wilbur Engine 2, built around a tourbillon with a piston-style hour display, a sliding shuttle for the minutes, a vertical wheel for the seconds, and power reserve shown on the back, cased in a machined-sapphire, steel, or titanium shell, with production editions expected to start above 125,000 USD — the furthest expression yet of Wilbur's stated belief that 'time must assert itself' rather than simply being told.