The first years of the twenty-first century transformed the mechanical-watch revival into something more volatile. Exports climbed, complications multiplied, cases grew, and new markets appeared capable of absorbing almost anything the Swiss industry could produce. By the middle of the decade, success was beginning to acquire its own momentum—and its own logic.
Then came 2008.
The following preview combines passages from Chapter 4, “Mania and Method (2001–2010)”, with three watches examined in Chapter 5, “The Grand Exhibits (2001–2010)”. Together they show the two sides of the decade: an industry increasingly addicted to toujours plus, and independent watchmakers trying, in very different ways, to distinguish genuine invention from spectacle.
The passages have been rearranged for online reading. Footnotes and technical specification tables from the book have been omitted.
The Baroque Explosion
The independents charted their own course. The rest of the industry was racing towards a cliff.
By 2006, Swiss watch exports had reached 13.7 billion francs, an increase of 10.9% over the already exceptional previous year. The industry was now enjoying its third consecutive year of double-digit growth. The average export price of a Swiss mechanical watch had increased considerably in five years, climbing from 1,500 francs in 1999 to over 2,100 francs in 2005.
The numbers intoxicated everyone who touched them. In the corridors of Baselworld and the salons of the SIHH, the champagne flowed without pause. China was opening. Russia was booming. The Gulf states were building watch boutiques in shopping malls that rivalled European palaces. And everywhere, the message was the same: more, bigger, louder, richer.
Watch cases swelled to monstrous proportions, approaching fifty millimetres and beyond—dimensions that would have seemed grotesque a decade earlier but now signified masculine presence and financial arrival. Dials disappeared beneath pavements of diamonds. Materials proliferated: carbon fibre, ceramic, titanium, tantalum, meteorite, even wood and stone. Colours exploded across collections that had previously adhered to conservative palettes.
The tourbillon, already ubiquitous, began to multiply. If one tourbillon was impressive, surely two were more so? The double tourbillon appeared, then the triple. Carriages rotated on multiple axes—Franck Muller’s Revolution 2 (2003) featured a cage that rotated on two axes to compensate for gravity in all positions. The technical justifications grew strained, the prices astronomical.
Those few voices urging restraint warned that the industry had reached the crest of the baroque trend, and that it would ebb, leaving space for a return to classicism and moderation.
But who was listening? The numbers kept climbing. Every month brought new records. The retailers’ shelves groaned with inventory, but the pipeline remained full. There was always another market to open, another collector to cultivate, another price ceiling to shatter.
The haut de gamme had become, in the French phrase, toujours plus—always more. More complications, more materials, more size, more diamonds, more price. The logic was self-reinforcing: as average prices rose, brands were compelled to introduce ever-more-expensive models to maintain their position in the hierarchy. Those who could still think clearly asked whether the climbers realised that the higher they went, the smaller the stairs became, the scarcer the oxygen, and the less space there would be at the top.
Greubel Forsey — Double Tourbillon 30° (2004)
Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey had spent years perfecting complications for others—invisible hands shaping the mechanical hearts of prestigious houses that lacked the patience or expertise to develop them internally. Their workshop at CompliTime had become the place where brands sent problems they could not solve themselves. The two men understood, better than most, how thin the industry’s competence ran beneath its confident surface.
By 2004, when they unveiled their own brand at Baselworld, they chose to debut with something that made established houses look almost timid. The Double Tourbillon 30° was a mechanical manifesto. They had nested a 30-degree inclined cage, completing one revolution per minute, within a slower-rotating outer cage that turned every four minutes. Two axes of rotation. Two chances to compensate for gravity’s effects on timing. A level of intentional complexity most brands would not even whisper about, pursued with the devotion of true believers who had decided that precision itself could be a form of artistic expression.
The decade was awash in tourbillons. Every brand that could afford one seemed to be producing them, the complication reduced from technical achievement to marketing ornament. Greubel Forsey’s answer was not to abstain but to insist—to build a tourbillon so considered, so labour-intensive, that it could not be confused with the epidemic surrounding it.
The design was unapologetically architectural: a 43.5mm white-gold case, thick at around 15.7mm yet wear-balanced by lugged contours. The dial read as both complicated and elemental—industrial baroque, some called it. The 72-hour power reserve sustained the complex mechanism without demanding constant attention.
The finishing elevated technical achievement into art. Hand-polished bevels caught light at angles that revealed hours of patient work. Frosted surfaces contrasted with mirror-bright flanks. Each bridge announced its maker’s philosophy: that decoration and function were not opposites but partners. The attention extended to components invisible in normal wear—a commitment to integrity that only a caseback removal would reveal.
Between 2004 and 2010, only 144 pieces emerged. The watch existed for conviction rather than convenience. It invited collectors to witness the ballet of its cages, to respect its intention, and to understand that true luxury can—and sometimes must—be an intellectual act.
H. Moser & Cie — Perpetual 1 (2005)
The perpetual calendar, as traditionally executed, resembles a cockpit instrument panel. Subdials multiply. Apertures crowd the dial. Information competes for attention. The whole point, it seems, is to display complexity with maximum visual evidence.
When H. Moser & Cie relaunched in 2005, their flagship Perpetual 1 took the opposite approach. The dial seemed almost deceptively blank—no subdials, no visual clutter. A large date window, a subtle arrow-hand for months, a discreet power-reserve indicator. The leap-year indication? Cast onto the caseback, where only the wearer would ever see it.
In a decade of baroque accumulation—oversized cases, exposed movements, complications stacked for the pleasure of stacking them—the Perpetual 1 arrived like a whispered rebuke. It asked what a perpetual calendar was actually for, then removed everything that did not serve the answer.
At the 2006 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the Perpetual 1 won the Complication category—rewarded for its radical simplification of a traditionally crowded complication. Sometimes the most revolutionary act is subtraction.
The in-house HMC 341 movement, designed by Andreas Strehler, delivered substance beneath the serenity: a seven-day power reserve from twin barrels, a patented flash-calendar mechanism that transitions instantly across month lengths, bidirectional date setting via the crown. While the industry fretted over supply chains and movement dependencies, Moser was quietly building the capability to stand alone. The interchangeable escapement module anticipated a future in which independence meant more than philosophy.
The fumé dials that would become Moser’s signature were already hinting at their potential here. Colours shifted with the light, gradients deepening towards the edges in ways that photography could never quite capture. A quiet seduction that revealed itself over time rather than demanding immediate attention.
The minimalism was refined intent, not absence. The Perpetual 1 attracted collectors who valued clarity, craftsmanship, and sincerity over subdial count. As the decade’s excesses accumulated around it, the watch began to look less like austerity and more like prophecy.
The Crash
The collapse began in September 2008 and accelerated through the following months with terrifying velocity. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. The global financial system, riddled with toxic assets and overleveraged bets, was imploding. Credit froze. Wealth evaporated. The masters of the universe who had been the Swiss watch industry’s most enthusiastic customers found themselves unemployed, investigated, or desperately liquidating assets.
The watch industry, perched at the apex of discretionary spending, was among the first casualties.
January 2009: Swiss watch exports crashed 21.5%, a loss of 860,000 units and 227 million francs in a single month. The categories most affected were those that had been most inflated during the boom. Gold watches fell 23.3%. Platinum collapsed 36.7%.
No market was spared. The Chinese Eldorado shrank 42.6%. Singapore plummeted more than 60%. Russia, the darling of the boom years, crashed over 50%. Japan fell 24.2%. The United States, still the industry’s second-largest market, declined 28.5%.
The sell-in that had been pushed relentlessly through the pipeline during the boom years now sat, immovable, in retail windows around the world. Estimates suggested it would take years to work through the accumulated inventory. Discounts of 30%, 50%, even 80% appeared on watches that had been presented as precious collectibles mere months before. The grey market flourished as desperate retailers dumped products through any available channel.
It was much too easy to claim to be the mere victim of global forces. While the financial crash provided the spark, the watch industry had spent years building a tinderbox through its own house of cards. Carried away by myopia and fascinated by incredible margins, many watchmakers had acted like the frog in the fable by La Fontaine—expanding and over-leveraging until they were structurally primed to explode. Ultimately, the crisis arrived not just as an external shock, but as the inevitable reckoning for the industry’s own reckless choices.
The Terrain Revealed
By the end of 2009, Swiss watch exports totalled 13.2 billion francs — falling below the levels of 2006. Five years of sustained growth, from 2004 through 2008, had been erased. The expectation of perpetual expansion had been violently broken.
Yet the year of crisis saw an extraordinary wave of new manufacturing investments. Between September and November 2009, no fewer than nine inaugurations of new facilities or official groundbreakings took place in the watchmaking heartland—from the massive (Rolex breaking ground on a new manufacture in Bienne) to the intimate (Armin Strom completing a modest but well-equipped facility where the company could now produce almost all movement components in-house). The economic slowdown had helped in unexpected ways: machines arrived quickly, qualified personnel were available, and there was time to optimise quality rather than rush to market. Greubel Forsey inaugurated a new manufacture spectacularly inserted into the earth, flanked by a restored seventeenth-century farm, where cutting-edge CNC equipment sat alongside a hand-decoration department of fourteen employees—one quarter of the entire workforce—executing techniques that would have been familiar to eighteenth-century craftsmen.
The small independents were building foundations while the large groups were managing crises.
The geography of demand had shifted. China had risen to fourth place among export destinations, registering a 43.5% increase in December 2009 even as most other markets continued to decline. Combined with Hong Kong’s perpetual dominance, the Chinese-speaking world was becoming the industry’s centre of gravity. Russia, the darling market of the boom years, had collapsed from thirteenth place to eighteenth. The oligarchs who had been loading up on elaborate complications were selling, not buying.
Within this contracted market, a sorting had occurred. Brands with genuine heritage and loyal customer bases—Rolex above all, but also Patek Philippe, Omega, and others with decades of consistent positioning—had weathered the storm better than those who had chased trends. Among the independents, those who had maintained discipline emerged with their reputations enhanced. Those who had expanded too quickly or compromised too readily discovered that small size offered no automatic protection from the consequences of poor judgement.
The watch market had arrived at its saturation point. It had eaten too much, had become obese, and now it must thin down. The bazaar was closed.
De Bethune — DB28 (2010)
When De Bethune launched the DB28 in 2010, the lugs caught your attention before anything else: they seemed to float, to adapt, to refuse the rigidity that watch design usually demanded.
The case, crafted from grade-5 titanium, measured approximately 42.6mm in diameter yet a remarkably svelte 9.3mm thick. Its floating lugs—variable-geometry attachments that adapted to the wrist’s contour—were precision ergonomics, a rare gesture in an industry content with fixed solutions. At the 2011 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the DB28 captured the Aiguille d’Or—not through convention but by bending perspectives.
At six o’clock, the spherical moonphase—cast half in blued titanium, half in palladium—brought one of De Bethune’s signatures to the dial, achieving such precision that correction would be needed only every 122 years.
Inside, the DB2115 impressed: hand-wound, twin barrels delivering a six-day power reserve, its indication discreetly placed on the caseback; a patented silicon balance, De Bethune’s own flat overcoil hairspring, and a shock-resistant Triple Pare-Chute system.
The decade had seen materials multiply—titanium, ceramic, carbon fibre—deployed with varying degrees of seriousness. De Bethune had pursued the same vocabulary but with a researcher’s discipline. In Denis Flageollet’s workshop, silicon was not a borrowed innovation but a native one, developed through years of experimentation that most houses would have outsourced entirely. The heat-treatment that produced De Bethune’s signature blues emerged from controlled processes that fused science and craft at the molecular level.
Polished titanium cabochon hour markers orbited a concave chapter ring. Sapphire hour hands floated, allowing uninterrupted views of the bridge structure. The bold aesthetic was honesty rather than showboating. The design language—floating lugs, spherical moons, blue-flamed titanium—would recur across subsequent collections, each iteration refining but never abandoning the founding vision.
Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Independent Watchmaking follows the rise of Swiss independent watchmaking from the mechanical renaissance of the 1990s through the upheavals, experiments and market transformations that followed. Its central question is not simply how independent watchmakers survived, but what became possible because they remained independent.
Sergio Galanti
About the Author
Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.
No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.
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