"Handmade" on a watch dial usually means a person polished what a machine cut. Greubel Forsey's Hand Made 1, launched in 2019, set out to take the word literally: 95 percent of the timepiece — including the hairspring — is made using only hand-operated tools. Each watch takes about 6,000 hours of work, roughly three years of one person's labour.
Start where the watch starts, with the regulating organ, built entirely in Greubel Forsey's own workshops. The balance spring is fashioned from an alloy produced in-house, then rolled in a hand-operated rolling mill, no computer assistance. Only a few balance springs can be cast at a time. Industrial production, the maker points out, turns out several hundred in the same operation. That one contrast is the whole business model: the spring is made the slow way, so everything downstream of the spring is slow too.
The arithmetic follows. The finished watch has 308 components, and getting there took more than 800 individual parts made to the maker's standard. A single screw can need up to twelve operations and eight hours. A hand-made wheel takes 600 times longer than a high-end industrial one. The escape wheel's twenty teeth are cut one by one, and machining and finishing the escape lever alone takes a month and a half. The tourbillon carriage carries 69 components of its own.
The honesty is in the exceptions, which the maker lists rather than hides: the sapphire crystals, the case gaskets, the spring bars, the jewels and the mainspring are bought in. Everything else — movement, the 43.5 mm white gold case turned on a pantograph lathe, the hand-enamelled dial work, the flame-blued hands, even the leather strap — is made by hand. At 6 o'clock the dial says HAND MADE where SWISS MADE normally sits. And the pace has only tightened since launch: Greubel Forsey's current product page describes production as a single timepiece each year.
Previously's Take
Every maker in this tier sells scarcity, but most of them manufacture the scarcity afterwards — waitlists, allocations, limited runs of machine-made watches. The Hand Made 1's scarcity is structural. A workshop that rolls its own balance springs a few at a time cannot scale up, double a shift, or chase demand. The limit is not a marketing decision. It is a consequence of the method, and the method is the watch.
The numbers
Sources · 4 sources
- Greubel Forsey — Hand Made 1 collection and technical page (maker's current record)
- WatchTime — "Introducing the Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1," November 2019 (95% figure, 6,000 hours, component details)
- TheWATCHES.tv — "What It Takes to Manufacture a Watch by Hand with Greubel Forsey," Part II documentary, May 2020
- Horobox — Hand Made 1 review (308 components, tourbillon carriage of 69 parts)
Photographs: Greubel Forsey · Greubel Forsey · Greubel Forsey
