Krayon Watch Brand Review: Watches for Everywhere, Anywhere, and Anyday

Imagine for a moment that you’re standing on the edge of your favorite coastline. You know that the sun is about to dip below the horizon, but how do you capture that exact moment? For centuries, watchmakers have tried to conquer the heavens, shrinking the cosmos down to a wrist-sized canvas and creating astronomical complications that offer a generalized view of the sky. They tell you what the moon is doing, or when the sun sets for a generic latitude. But what if a luxury watch could tell you exactly when the sun will set right where you are standing? That was the challenge taken up by the Neuchâtel watch brand, Krayon.

When you look at this Swiss brand’s timepieces, it’s not always possible to grasp what’s happening beneath their dials. The first thing you’re met with is an elegant dress watch wrapped in nice proportions, but Krayon is a brand that takes the complex engineering challenges and hides them behind a serene face. Today, we are taking a deep dive into this fascinating independent watchmaker. We will delve into the wildly creative mind of Rémi Maillat and dissect the mechanics behind models like the Everywhere, the Anywhere, and the new Anyday. We’ll also pinpoint why and how this atelier has captured the hearts of serious collectors and take an honest look at where it stumbles, because no watch brand is entirely perfect.

The man behind Krayon is a guy named Rémi Maillat, a movement constructor and mathematical engineer. Basically, he’s not your average watch-brand frontman. Before Krayon was a name printed on a dial, Maillat was putting his architectural skills to good use by running a movement conception studio that supplied high-level complications to some of the world’s most prestigious luxury watch brands. Eventually, the desire to create something entirely his own took over, and in 2013, he founded Krayon. It wouldn’t be until 2017, however, that the brand’s first watch would launch, and that four-year gap tells you everything you need to know about Maillat’s dedication. He was obsessively working on developing a mechanical calculator capable of determining the exact time of sunrise and sunset, anywhere on the planet.

The complication would need to consider factors such as latitude, longitude, the equation of time, and the specific date, which might not seem such a big deal for a computer to handle, but making gears, cams, and levers do this inside a case that fits on your wrist was far more challenging. Needless to say, Maillat achieved it, solving the unsolvable without compromising on elegance. It was called the Krayon Everywhere.

Krayon occupies a very specific niche within the horological world, its aesthetic language leaning heavily into vintage hues, exquisite guilloché dials, and perfect proportions. If you already own a Patek Philippe or Vacheron Constantin, and you’re now looking for something more unusual and intellectually stimulating, consider Krayon Watch Company the perfect place to start your search, because this brand is producing fewer than fifty watches a year, each piece essentially a bespoke creation. The company adheres strictly to a one watch/one watchmaker philosophy in which the person who begins assembling the movement is the same person who regulates it and cases it up. It’s perhaps not the most conventional way to make a watch, but what it does is promote an intimate connection between the artisan and the object, cementing Krayon's reputation among collectors who really understand watchmaking.

As I mentioned a little earlier, the Krayon Everywhere watch is the design that started it all. Released in 2017, it won the prestigious Innovation Prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève and for very good reason. When wearing the Everywhere, you can manually input your exact latitude, longitude, and UTC time zone using the crown and a pusher, and the watch will physically calculate and display the precise time of sunrise and sunset for that specific location, on that specific day.

Imagine the brainpower required to design the cam systems in this watch, which actually translate these geographical inputs into a visual display on the dial. It isn’t something you see every day in horology. For starters, you have intersecting rings on the dial’s periphery that physically expand and contract to represent the length of the day versus the night, and then you get to participate in this complex system yourself, which offers another layer of interaction with the watch. Suffice to say, its price tag, hovering north of CHF 600,000, placed it firmly in the realm of unobtainable grails for most.

Introduced in 2020, the Anywhere took the achievements of its predecessor and distilled them into something even more elegant, this time allowing the wearer to choose a specific location unique to them, be it where they live, where they got married, or their favorite destination. Fixing the location in this way massively simplified the movement. Still, the manual-winding Caliber C030 contains a voluminous 432 components and has become an important watch in the independent space due to its wearability. Despite the immense complexity of tracking the annual calendar, the 24-hour time, and the expanding and contracting daylight hours, the entire movement of the Krayon Anywhere is housed in a case that measures a modest 39mm in diameter and an impressive 9.5mm in height.

This is perhaps what makes Krayon such a well-respected brand — because it clearly understands that a watch still needs to look beautiful on the wrist, no matter its capabilities. The dial of the Anywhere comprises a center that features stunning hand-crafted details like miniature enamel paintings or an intricate guilloché effect. Meanwhile, the periphery is dominated by two sapphire disks, one light and one dark, which overlap to show the exact duration of the day and night. All the while, a tiny sun is rotating around this track, indicating the 24-hour time and crossing the boundary between the disks at the precise moment of sunrise and sunset, thus offering a complication that is grounding and rather hypnotic.

The Krayon Anyday tackles a common problem with the calendar. Regardless of whether the calendar complication on a watch is simple or perpetual, its information is often presented in small windows or subdials, without giving you a sense of the month as a whole. The Krayon Anyday features a peripheral display that numbers the days from 1 to 31 and even distinguishes weekdays from weekends. Through a clever use of color coding on the outer track, you can instantly see where your weekends fall within the month. I’d go as far as to say it reads better than a traditional wall-hung calendar. A small crescent-moon pointer glides along this track, indicating the current date, allowing you to look at your wrist and immediately understand how far away the weekend is, or how much of the working week remains.

The complication makes for an incredibly intuitive companion, one that you’ll likely use every day, and it genuinely solves a problem. The Anyday is powered by the Caliber C032, a 378-component movement that automatically accounts for the length of 31-day months. Like the Anywhere, it is housed in a compact 39mm case and features a dial adorned with the brand's signature Y-motif guilloché. Crucially, Krayon is not a one-trick pony, and what’s more, it can look at timekeeping and reimagine its own timepieces from the ground up, over and over again.

You’re probably wondering how the level of finishing on each of Krayon’s movements is executed to such a high standard, and the only easy way to answer this is by looking at its production numbers. The brand produces such low quantities of watches that even the smallest details, requiring time-consuming skill and patience, are well thought out. The movement bridges are adorned with Krayon’s unique wave motif, far different from the standard Geneva stripes, with the curves evoking the shoreline of Lake Neuchâtel. The interior angles are meticulously hand-beveled and polished, and the calibers operate at a frequency of 3 Hertz, or 21,600 vibrations per hour. The slower frequency allows for a calmer, more traditional approach to timekeeping, while the dials are equally impressive, boasting the vibrant, multi-layered blues of the Métiers d'Art Azur and the contrast of rose-gold cases and fully hand-painted decoration. 

Realistically, no watchmaker is completely bulletproof, and Krayon is no exception. If you talk to collectors who actually spend time with these pieces, one common critique that pops up is legibility. Krayon loves using a tone-on-tone aesthetic, which can make reading the time at a glance a little tricky. You might find yourself squinting at the dial if you’re caught under the glaring midday sun or when sitting in a dimly lit restaurant. Then there is the "moving target" date on the Anyday, which may take a little getting used to if your watches tend to feature the conventional 3 o’clock date. Because the date pointer on the Anyday travels around the entire perimeter of the dial, you have to spend an extra split second scanning the circumference to find it. In my opinion, it’s totally worth the compromise. A select few may disagree.

Also worth mentioning is the Daylight Savings Time issue. The sunrise and sunset complication on the Anywhere doesn’t automatically account for DST, meaning that for half the year, depending on where you live, you have to mentally add or subtract an hour from what the dial is telling you. Finally, there’s the reality of the service bottleneck, because buying a watch from a single master watchmaker can make repairs and servicing that little bit trickier. A Krayon watch has to go all the way back to Rémi Maillat's small atelier in Switzerland, so the wait times can be a concern when you are making a six-figure investment.

If you are new to Krayon, the conversation about price and value is an important one to have. Krayon watches are expensive. The Everyday retails for around $110,500, while the Anywhere demands an even higher premium of around $120,500. We are firmly in the upper stratosphere of independent watchmaking here. So, what exactly is the value proposition of a Krayon watch, and why do serious collectors fight for the chance to acquire one? Well, most people wouldn’t actually recognize one of these watches on your wrist, so it’s not about wearing a mainstream icon. More likely, you’re paying for absolute mechanical purity when you invest in one of these watches.

Krayon watches are all hand-assembled, regulated, and finished by a single master watchmaker, and you’re also getting a complication that no other brand on Earth offers in such an elegant, wearable format. Indeed, brands like Krayon hold tremendous respect and demand among connoisseurs, so pieces rarely surface on the pre-owned market, mainly because owners tend to keep them forever.

As we wrap up this deep dive into Krayon, it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate what Rémi Maillat actually accomplished back in 2017. A watch like the Anyday is a reflection of your place in the world. You can see the sun crossing the horizon in your specific hometown or look further afield to a distant latitude with the groundbreaking Everywhere. Krayon has secured its place as one of the most important and exciting names in haute horlogerie today, so if you ever have the chance to handle one in the metal, take it. You’ll quickly understand why the horological world cannot stop talking about them.