Spotlight: Horage

One of the things that I most enjoy about the world of watches is that there are an almost infinite number of stories to be discovered. No matter how much you think you know about one thing or another, there is always more to be learned. From my own experience, I have found that the stories which are more intriguing to me come when you venture a little off the beaten path.

I think this is ultimately what prompted me to delve into the world of independent watchmaking, a world where creativity and ingenuity is king.

Now, that’s not to say ingenuity isn’t found in the more mainstream – of course it is. For example, I can remember when TAG Heuer launched the Carrera Heuer 02T Tourbillon; priced at around £15,000, widely thought to be the most accessibly priced tourbillon on the market. This was a huge achievement and certainly somewhat of a disruptor, given the tourbillon is a complication often reserved for high-end brands and collectors, with price tags of at least 3 or 4 times this new Carrera.

I was watching a video on the Heuer 02T Tourbillon which talked about it being perhaps the lowest priced tourbillon available, and within the comments section were a handful of posts talking about a Swiss brand called Horage, with a less expensive tourbillon watch…

A Swiss tourbillon watch for CHF 7,500? 

My intrigue was immediately piqued; I started exploring this Swiss brand named Horage, a brand which has quietly been going about its business since it was started in 2006 and has achieved some truly incredible things along the way – for instance designing and architecting three movements, including a tourbillon, in-house.

And this isn’t the overly gratuitous use of “in-house” we often find today. With Horage, this means entirely developed from scratch, by Horage, in-house.

Indeed, this is not the first time that I have featured Horage on this blog, having previously highlighted them to be an incredible value proposition in independent watchmaking in one of my first collaboration articles with my partners at The Limited Edition.

With this article, I wanted to take a bit more time to shine the Watch Affinity Spotlight on the brand itself, as opposed to going in depth on any specific watches. I was fortunate to have been able to attend a recent collectors’ evening hosted by The Limited Edition and Horage’s Landon Stirling, where I was able to learn more about the brand and get some insights into how Horage has grown to be what it is today.

Horage cites their brand ethos as being to “create a foundation, build upon it, and deliver excellence”, and so I have split this article into those three parts to try and underpin how much I believe this is a brand which doesn’t just talk the talk, but very much walks the walk as well.

Horage watches – Part 1, ‘create a foundation’

Horage was founded by Andreas Felsl and Tzuyu Huang in 2007. After both had spent time working in the Swiss watch industry, creating OEM products such as cases, dials and hands for other Swiss brands, they wanted to move away from their success being reliant upon other brands, and create their own. The result was Horage, a name created by merging the Latin word ‘hora’, meaning ‘time’, and ‘age’ for the passing of time.

Soon after, Horage presented their first watch – Omnium – at Baselworld in 2009. Initially, the idea was to create nice looking round watches, using ebauche movements from external suppliers. However, as things started changing in the industry with regards being able to readily acquire movements in this way, Horage and their approach significantly changed tack, with the founders deciding to take on the ambitious task, especially for such a small brand, of building their own movement from scratch for use in their own watches.

“We started what we thought would be about five years of engineering to create the movement, but it actually took between seven and ten years before K1 was finalised – the idea was to really solidify our brand’s independence with the development of K1”, recalls Landon Stirling, Marketing Director at Horage.

“During that time, during those seven years, Horage as a brand was essentially on ice with no brand development, everything was 100% R&D and movement development. The challenge we faced was that when the K1 movement was done in 2015, even though there were lots of brands looking for a movement, nobody wanted to take the risk of being the first one to use it.”

Once the movement was done, Horage turned to Kickstarter and other Crowdfunding forums as vehicles to produce the first watches with their K1 movement. This enabled the brand to firstly refine the K1 through learning what did and didn’t work once the movement was on peoples’ wrists, and secondly to get the word out about this small Swiss brand which had developed an entire movement and its architecture from scratch – not something that happens all too often.

In the years which followed, Horage watches such as the Autark, Multiply, and even a new generation of Omnium the with the in-house K1 movement started to leave the production line of the company’s Biel Bienne headquarters.

These watches ultimately helped to fund the next evolution of the brand, to building on the foundation of independence facilitated by the in-house development of the K1 movement.

Part 2, ‘build upon the foundation’

After completing the K1 movement, Horage didn’t simply stop there. In the years that followed, they started development of the K2 micro-rotor movement in 2017, (which will be on customers’ wrists this December as the new Supersede collection launches) and also the K-TOU tourbillon movement in 2019.

Next to the successful creation of K1, making the tourbillon accessible to so many more collectors via the K-TOU is one of the brand’s greatest accomplishments, in my opinion. The Horage Tourbillon 1 watch was the first time Horage caught my attention, and I imagine the attention of many others, too, and as it happens the story behind it is quite a tumultuous one!

Producing a tourbillon wasn’t necessarily always on the cards for Horage, but with the support of Florian Serex, who has been an external contractor for Horage as well as then-CEO of La Joux Perret, the project got underway in 2019. Landon explained that as Serex was also a lecturer, he loves sharing his knowledge and so was eager to work with the next generation of watchmakers to realise this new tourbillon project.

Given the complexity, the plan was to leverage some of the movements available via La Joux Perret catalogue as a base and modify them to create Horage’s tourbillon. However, the project ran into issues in March 2020 when the management at La Joux Perret changed and they pulled out of the project, and the Covid-19 pandemic sent the world into lockdown.

Thankfully, Serex lent his expertise to the brand, and the project was able to continue and do it themselves. Where normally these types of movements might take three to five years to create, Horage had to do this in 8 months to meet their promise to their customers. As Landon explained how the brand managed this, I thought it was the epitome of building on their foundations:

“We were able to do this because we had developed the K1, and K2 so far. Automatic movements, for the most part, are far more involved with more moving parts than hand-wound. All the developments we had from K1 and K2, as well as future K2 developments that hadn’t yet rolled out, we were able to apply to the tourbillon. Aside of course from a tourbillon cage, so our team needed to develop this.

“Thankfully, through Covid, there were no suppliers with orders as everyone had cancelled, and so we also had free reign when it came to production. We could get time on machines, get everything turned around quickly and create a movement in record breaking time.”

I found it really interesting to learn how the brand was able to take learnings from K1 and the then not-yet-finished K2 movements and apply this knowledge to the K-TOU tourbillon. There is something quite uplifting about thinking of these three movements all helping to elevate one another, and very much exemplifies the concept of building on the foundation.

Following on from the imminent launch of the Supersede, which introduces a GMT complication to the Horage catalogue for the first time, hopefully we will continue to see the Horage engineering team continue to see more of these innovations and various complications or functions in future!

Part 3, ‘deliver excellence’

With no private investors, Horage is very much invested in creating the best product that they can, and they have a clear focus on engineering as the vehicle to achieving this.

It was interesting speaking to Landon and learning that within Horage they have an ‘engineering team’, rather than a design and marketing team. After all, as Landon put it, “the idea of in-house starts with engineering… we get a lot of customers asking why we don’t spend more on marketing? Well, we could, but that means we’re going to spend less on engineering!”

There was a clear message about being able to support this team and drive innovation, and this is a big part of why the IP of the K1 movement was licensed to another watch brand in 2021. Supporting an engineering team is a big responsibility, it is costly, time consuming, and for such a small brand to invest in movement development is a big risk. This strategy is designed to alleviate that risk, and also by outsourcing some of their expertise, Horage is helping other brands to create and develop their own movements, driving innovation across the industry.

Having handled several Horage watches over the course of the collector’s evening, I can now attest to the quality of these watches first hand.

I was really impressed with them up close, and it is clear to me that the Horage team has an incredible attention to detail. With the new Lensman 1, the brand’s second tourbillon watch with the K-TOU movement after Tourbillon 1, the case has been made a little thinner and there is a slight rework of the K-TOU movement aesthetic.

With the Supersede, the bracelet is available with either polished or brushed centre links, and also features a micro-adjustment clasp which offers 10mm of adjustment through 1mm increments.

Small details matter, and the Horage team are, in my opinion, mastering these details.

The standards of excellence to which Horage hold themselves to account is perhaps best conveyed by Landon’s response when I asked what the biggest challenge over the brand’s early years was:

“Our home in Biel Bienne is also the home of Rolex and Omega, and this is the benchmark we must reach. It is the highest level of industrial watch manufacture, and this is important because it’s where performance and accuracy come from, where speed in production and expediting a product come from.

“As a brand, we are focused on being a performance watchmaker, we want to be on that level, and I believe that we are. The biggest challenge for us is meeting that benchmark.”

Quite the benchmark, indeed!

In Summary

When I first learned of Horage, I was hugely impressed by what they had achieved, and having been able to spend the time speaking with Landon, this has only impressed me further. Rather than simply review their watches, with this article I have sought to try and give you an idea of where Horage watches come from, an insight into the DNA of what makes a Horage watch special.

Horage is a brand that despite all this, still makes only around 1000 pieces a year, and are generally a business-to-consumer model with very few specialist and trusted retailers around the world, such as The Limited Edition.

I think Horage has gone about themselves in exactly the right way, placing great importance on transparency and openness to the community which is commendable. Over the next few years, whilst the brand will of course continue to offer high performance movements at fair market value, I expect we will see the introduction of interesting products that the community wants to see, and, true to the brands ethos of building on the foundation, more complication and function added to their existing repertoire of truly in-house movements.

For more information on Horage watches, follow Horage on Instagram or visit Horage.info. You can also visit our partners at The Limited Edition.

If you have any questions, please get in touch via our Contact page, or via our Instagram.

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