Ivan Berets enters watchmaking with a problem most young independents would be happy to have: the work is serious enough to resist the word microbrand, but the name is too new to carry the authority of a manufacture. The Series 1 is positioned in the space between those poles. The trade press places Berets under “Microbrand” while describing the execution as worthy of a prestigious manufacture; Berets’ own site calls the watch a “bold reimagining of classical watchmaking”; his retail partner speaks of “classical restraint” joined to “contemporary architectural design.” The language keeps the two ends visible, then offers the object as their reasonable reconciliation.
This is the useful middle. It is also where the €16,000 question begins.
The poles have first been simplified. “Microbrand” becomes shorthand for outsourced production, accessible pricing and borrowed components; “haute horlogerie” becomes the opposite condition, where handwork, scarcity and authorship justify admission to a higher order. Real watchmaking is messier than this. But once the field has been reduced to two caricatures, an emerging independent can appear to transcend both simply by being small, artisanal and expensive.
Berets has genuine grounds for resisting the lower pole. He trained at the Korpela & Hofs Watchmaking Competence Centre in Le Locle, where his school watch became the prototype for Series 1. In his account to Monochrome, he describes manually machining bridges, the mainplate and motion-work components, then finishing the movement himself. In the production watch he makes the German-silver three-quarter plate, bridges, screws, locating pins and click system, as well as the dial and some components behind it. This is not catalogue assembly disguised as authorship. It is watchmaking.
But it is not yet the opposite pole either.
The Series 1 is a time-only watch in a 316L stainless-steel case. There is no complication to change the mechanical proposition, no precious-metal case to move the material proposition upward, and the Series 1 material identifies no collaboration with an established artist whose authorship might introduce another source of scarcity or cultural value. Its design language is restrained, rectangular and consciously classical: minimalism filtered through an Art Deco vocabulary that watchmaking has used for generations. Berets makes the arrangement his own through details—the crown at twelve, the tension between symmetry and asymmetry, the surface treatments, the two tonal personalities—but the underlying visual grammar is inherited rather than unprecedented. The watch asks originality to reside in inflection.
At €16,000 excluding tax, inflection has to carry considerable weight.
The movement makes the question more interesting, not less. Berets describes it as an “in-house caliber based on the Peseux 7001.” That formulation is technically more defensible than the cynical reading it invites. According to Berets himself, the Peseux 7001 still provides much of the movement’s functional core—the gear train, escapement, balance, and winding and setting system—while Berets manufactures much of the architecture presented to the eye through the caseback, including the three-quarter plate, bridges, screws, locating pins and click system. The movement is therefore substantially reworked, particularly in its visible architecture, without becoming fully proprietary. Yet the distinction remains important because Berets has also said that he is developing a fully in-house calibre for a future project. The language itself acknowledges a threshold that Series 1 has not crossed.
Nor does the exhibition back entirely dissolve that ambiguity. The three-quarter-plate architecture gives Berets a large surface on which to demonstrate his own making and finishing, but by definition it also covers much of the mechanism underneath. What is displayed is authorship, not mechanical totality. It simply cannot do all the work that the phrase in-house is increasingly asked to do.
This is where neither-norism becomes useful. The Series 1 is offered as neither the ordinary microbrand watch nor the institutional manufacture piece: independent, hand-finished, limited, personal. The Limited Edition describes “in-house movement re-engineering” and a balance of contemporary styling with classical presence. Such phrases do not falsify the object. They naturalize its position. A set of commercial decisions—small production, extensive handwork, selective remanufacture, steel, time-only mechanics, €16,000—begins to read as proportion itself, as though this combination naturally occupies the space between accessible microbrand and haute horlogerie.
It does not. A market position is being chosen.
Twenty pieces of Oscuro and twenty of Levante are planned, and low-volume hand production is expensive. Berets is also doing work that most start-up founders cannot do themselves. Those facts explain a substantial premium over an industrial watch using the same underlying calibre. They do not, on their own, make €16,000 inevitable. At that level the collector is being asked to price more than labour. He is being asked to price authorship before it has accumulated, design language before it has become recognisable, continuity before the atelier has had time to demonstrate it, and future mechanical independence before the announced fully in-house calibre exists.
This is not unique to Berets. It is a recurring temptation among ambitious watch start-ups: to enter the haut-de-gamme from the price end. Traditionally, price was supposed to emerge from accumulated reputation, difficult mechanics, costly materials, exceptional artistic input, or some combination of them. The newer sequence can run in reverse. Set the price in the territory of the established independent, then allow the price itself to tell the buyer how seriously the object should be read.
Expensiveness becomes evidence of importance.
The collector is invited into the same middle. He need not be the mass-market buyer choosing an interchangeable microbrand, nor the conventional client buying a famous name at a famous price. He can become the person who saw the talent early. The premium purchases proximity to the maker, rarity, handwork and the possibility of being proved right later. This is a powerful form of collector psychology because it converts uncertainty into discernment. What has not yet been established becomes precisely what the early patron is congratulated for recognising.
That does not make the patron foolish. Berets may become exactly the watchmaker that Series 1 asks the market to anticipate. His technical seriousness is evident, his willingness to manufacture components manually is unusual, and the project has more substance than its “microbrand” label suggests. The correct criticism is therefore not that the watch pretends to be haute horlogerie. It is that the pricing asks the market to settle the question too soon.
What makes this watch worth €16,000? The answer is not nothing. There is labour here, training, risk, hand-finishing, low production and a young watchmaker doing materially more than assembling other people’s parts.
But the scale still tips.
Series 1 belongs closer to the ambitious start-up than to the established haut-de-gamme manufacture it is priced beside. Steel. Time only. A familiar classical vocabulary. A deeply modified rather than fully proprietary calibre. No external artistic authorship to add another layer of value. None of these is a defect. Together they make €16,000 look less like the consequence of the object than a declaration about what Berets wants the object—and the name—to become.
The effort deserves attention. The position still needs earning.
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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