70 Best Microbrand Watches - A Complete Guide for 2024

The past five years (or longer, actually) has seen a resurgence in the collectibility of vintage watches. Yet with this resurgence, we also have seen rising prices on coveted vintage models, which make it daunting for many enthusiasts to dip into this world. This demand opened the doors to microbrands that answer the call of higher demand for watches with vintage looks at more affordable prices. French microbrand Baltic has leaned into this theme, releasing the excellent Aquascaphe and recently launching the dressy MR01, which features applied Breguet numerals over a lovely textured dial in three different colors: Salmon, Blue, and Silver. The most interesting element for many enthusiasts will be the micro-rotor-equipped automatic Hangzhao CAL5000A movement.

Formex is one of those brands that are certainly on the cusp of being classified as an "independent" — which one could make a strong argument for, as the company has been around for a considerable amount of time by microbrand standards — founded in 1999 — and is today producing some fantastic pieces for the money. Many Formex watches are COSC chronometer-certified. Based in Biel, Switzerland, Formex has become increasingly popular thanks to the Essence model and its stylish and sporty dive-watch companion, the Reef, GMT version pictured above.

A jointly developed project between Swiss watch entrepreneur Ben Küffer, former Breitling co-owner Ted Schneider, and retired NHL player Mark Streit, Norqain was  founded in 2018. It has established itself fairly quickly and decisively as a player in the field of value-driven sports watches with proprietary movements. The movements are made in partnership with a Swiss movement-making firm called Kenissi, which was established as a subsidiary company by Tudor, and boast 70-hour power reserves as well as COSC chronometer certifications. Norqain’s primary collections include the inspiringly named Freedom and Independence lines, and more recently the mountaineering-inspired Adventure Neverest, which Norqain has used as a stage for some very innovative dial colors and textures.

Brand: Vaer

Model featured: D5 Tropic USA Automatic

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Founders Ryan Torres and Reagan Cook pooled their collective life savings to start Vaer because “we couldn’t afford the watches we liked and didn’t like the ones we could afford.” Based in Venice, California, Vaer released its first watches 2017. Designed and built with outdoor and sporting activities in mind, and adhering to the founders’ vision of “simple, well-built analog watches” for everyday wear, Vaer’s collection comprises two major pillars, one made up of dive watches like the D5 Tropic USA Automatic, pictured, and the other of military-influenced field watches, like the S5 Calendar Field, a homage to the World War II-era military-issue A-11 watch. Vaer watches offer several movement options, including Japanese quartz, Japanese solar-powered quartz, and, in the GMT model, a Swiss automatic Sellita SW330-2.

Brand: Yema

Model featured: Urban Traveller

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Founded in France in 1948, Yema has had an up-and-down history in the watch world, with ownership changing several times over the years (including a stint in the 1980s when it was owned by Seiko). In 2005, under new French ownership, Yema returned to the scene after a long hiatus and began offering a vast range of watch styles, including the racing-inspired Rallygraf chronograph, the retro-futuristic LED models, and the Flygraf GMT models that emerged from a partnership with the French Air Force, one of Yema’s many projects in its role as partner of France’s Armed Forces. By far the most emblematic Yema watch is the Superman divers’ series, which first debuted in 1963 and which still boasts a loyal following. The Urban Traveller, above, stands out from other integrated sport-luxury timepieces with its handsome honeycomb dial and its in-house YEMA2000 automatic movement.

Brand: William Wood

Watch Featured Above: Valiant Black

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Founded in London in 2016, William Wood Watches pays tribute to its namesake, founder Jonny Garret’s grandfather, who was a decorated 25-year veteran of the British Fire Service, with its use of upcycled firefighting materials in its watches. The crowns are capped with a medallion crafted from melted-down brass London Fire Brigade helmets from the 1920s. Among the variety of interchangeable straps and bracelets available are tough, supple rubber straps that have been hand-cut from fire hoses used more than 10 years by the U.K. Fire and Rescue Service, which still maintain a faint smokiness from their decade-plus of service. Other aesthetic nods to firefighting culture abound, including a checkered ring around the dials’ perimeter, in place of a traditional minute track, echoing the livery of a British fire engine; a double index at 12 o’clock that resembles the collar markings on the lapel of a U.K. Fire and Rescue Service Crew Manager, an applied vintage fire helmet above the logo, and the counterweight on the central seconds hand that takes the form of the chime inside a historical fire bell. William Wood Watches are offered with a choice of two different types of mechanical automatic movements, either a Japanese Seiko NH35 or, for a slight upcharge, a Swiss Sellita SW200. William Wood donates a percentage of the sales of each watch to firefighting charities, including the U.K.’s Fire Fighter Charity, which provides mental, physical and social support to the firefighting community, and the Australian Bushfire Relief Fund. In 2021, for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, William Wood partnered with the Tunnel to Towers Foundation to auction off a unique edition of its Triumph Heat chronograph model to benefit the charitable organization, which raised $19,000 after an opening bid of $2,000.

Brand: Bausele

Watch Featured Above: OceanMoon II

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From the name, you might think that Bausele is a Swiss microbrand based in the (former?) watch-industry trade show capital of Basel. You’d be right about the Swiss part, but way off on the home base. “Bausele” is an abbreviation of “Beyond Australian Elements,” and refers to the unique design sense that Swiss watchmaking entrepreneur Christopher Hoppe, who moved to Sydney with his Australian wife and founded the brand in 2011, brings to the table with this Swiss-made, Australian-designed microbrand. Bausele’s flagship collection is the OceanMoon series of professional grade dive watches, outfitted with 200-meter water resistant steel anti magnetic cases on straps made of recycled ocean waste and containing Swiss automatic calibers. Among those “Australian elements” are the cases’ hollow glass crowns through which you can glimpse an actual living element of Australia — red earth from the Outback, sand  — which allow the watch’s owner to literally carry a piece of Australia with them anywhere in the world. Bausele is the official watch of the centenary of the Royal Australian Air Force as well as several military corps and even the iconic Sydney Opera House.

Brand: Waldan

Watch Featured Above: Heritage Professional

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Originally founded by Oscar Waldan in 1979, New York-based Waldan Watch Company is enjoying a renaissance under the guidance of Oscar’s son, Andrew Waldan, who revived the dormant brand during the challenging year of 2020. Thus far, Waldan consists of two distinctive sub-families within the flagship Heritage Collection: the dressy Professional, and the more casually colorful Sportline, which has a Nautilus-like lined-texture motif on the dials. All the watches feature steel cases with the thin, stepped, polished bezels typical of early Waldan models and knurled crowns. Most notably, they all feature a U.S.-made movements, namely the “Ameriquartz” caliber 70200, a quartz caliber developed and produced by Fine Timepiece Solutions (FTS) in Fountain Hills, Arizona that carries a five-year warranty. Also noteworthy at this price point (around $300) is Waldan’s use of sapphire crystals rather than mineral glass over the dials.

Brand: Studio Underd0g

Model featured above: Watermel0n Chronograph

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London-based Studio Underd0g started out as the pet project of a restless University of Nottingham graduate, product designer Richard Benc, during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns. The “zero” replacing the letter “o” in his one-man brand’s name is a nod to its individualistic mission of making horology a little less “serious” and a bit more “playful.” The watches are distinguished by vibrant bright colorways on their degradé dials, and the names that derive from them, including the pink-and-green “WatermelOn'' model (pictured) as well as the black-and-white “Go0fy Panda” and mint-green-and-white “Mint Ch0c Chip.” The watches are all assembled in Great Britain and mounted on Epsom calfskin leather straps from The Strap Tailor, an artisanal shop also headquartered in London.Most notably, Studio Underd0g watches are equipped with hand-wound ST-1901 column-wheel chronograph calibers, which are made in China but based on the classical Swiss-made Venus Caliber 175. Each watch is inspected for accuracy and demagnetized before being shipped from the U.K. with its own individual “Report Card.” The first series from the young brand was priced at a very reasonable $475.

Brand: Kuoe

Watch Featured Above: Royal Smith 90-008

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Kuoe was established in 2020 in the Japanese city of Kyoto. Its founder, Uchmua, who also serves as watch designer, was attending university in London a decade earlier when he discovered a shop that sold and repaired antique wristwatches and subsequently fell in love with their classical design and the accumulated history they represented. After several years working for another watch manufacturer, he ushered in the launch of Kuoe with its first timepiece, the vintage-influenced Old Smith 90-001. The Royal Smith models that followed represent Kuoe’s “premium” line, inspired by watches from the 1940s with rectangular cases, hand-applied Breguet numerals on the dials, and Japanese-made Miyota automatic movements inside, providing a high-beat frequency of 28,800 vph.

Brand: Trafford

Watch Featured Above: Crossroads

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Based in Austin, TX and hailing from northern England, watch enthusiast Nathan Trafford worked in the creative end of the advertising business before the call of the watch industry moved him to found his own brand in 2020. Trafford’s passion for design and typography is evident in the brand’s flagship collection, called Crossroads, comprised of timepieces whose distinctive feature is the motif of a curved horizon line — in the sides of the rectangular steel case, on the rotor of the automatic Miyota movement, even on the buckle of the straps, which are made of Italian suede leather. The meticulously brushed dials are offered in an array of colors, many paying visual tribute to the scenery of Trafford’s adopted home of Texas.

Brand: Circula

Watch Featured Above: ProTrail Sand

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Circula, a name referring to the circular shape of mechanical watch movements and their gears and wheels, traces its history all the way back to 1926, when the founding Huber family opened a watch and jewelry wholesale business in Pforzheim, one of Germany’s traditional horological centers. The brand as we know it today, which is currently run by Cornelius Huber, grandson of the founder, came into being in 1955. Then as now, Circula has specialized chiefly in purpose-built tool watches, like the DiveSport and AquaSport for divers, the AquaSport GMT for active travelers, and the ProTrail, a robust field watch with a sturdy, scratch-resistant antimagnetic case and a Swiss-made Sellita self-winding caliber.

Brand: Tornek Rayville

Watch Featured Above: TR-660

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If Tornek-Rayville’s military-look dive watches look familiar, there’s a reason. The original models, sold exclusively to U.S. military clients, were actually heavily modified Fifty Fathoms watches, sourced from Swiss watchmaker Blancpain and re-branded by retailer Allan Tornek as a clever end-around to the “Buy American Act” of 1933, which required America’s armed forces to buy strictly from American brands. (Hence, “Tornek,” the retailer’s name, plus “Rayville,” a vocal anagram of Blancpain’s Swiss hometown of Villeret, or "Ville-Ray".) Entrepreneur Bill Yao, who had previously founded the tool-watch brand MKII, relaunched Tornek-Rayville in 2010, with a heavy emphasis on a reissued version of the most legendary model, the TR-900, which was worn by U.S. special forces during the Vietnam War. The TR-660 followed, offering another does of mid-’50s Fifty Fathoms DNA at a far more accessible price point, Modern Tornek-Rayvilles are made in Japan and contain the Seiko NE15 automatic movement.

Brand: Momentum

Watch Featured Above: Sea Quartz

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Since 1980, the St. Moritz Watch Corp. of Vancouver, Canada, has been making sturdy and affordable sports watches under the Momentum brand. The flagship Sea Quartz divers’ watch has its origins slightly further back, when brand founder Simon Pennell originally introduced it as part of his earlier brand, Chronosport. The model, one of the first analog dive watches with a quartz caliber, is best known for its role in the iconic 1980s TV series Magnum, P.I., where it was worn for the first three seasons by star Tom Selleck. Today’s Sea Quartz models replicate the fondly remembered design of the original, with robust 300-meter water resistant cases and Swiss-made Ronda quartz movements.

Brand: ADPT

Watch Featured Above: Series 1 Dual-Time

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The initials in this microbrand’s name stand for “All Day Purpose and Terrain,” which should be a tipoff that ADPT watches lean design-wise more into tool and sport than elegant luxury territory. Launched by online retailer and content platform Worn & Wound in 2017, and produced in collaboration with another boutique watch manufacturer, BOLDR Supply Co., the collection is fronted by the Series 1 three-handed models, based on the BOLDR field-watch platform and sporting titanium cases, equipped with an automatic movement from Seiko; and their GMT-enabled offshoot,s the Series 1 Dual Time, also with Seiko self-winding calibers. The military-style nylon straps are made in the U.S.A.

Brand: BeauBleu

Model Featured Above: Ecce Smalt

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French designer Nicolas Ducoudert established BeauBleu in 2017, drawing upon his experience in the automotive and luxury goods industries to create the unique look of the company’s watches, identified by their circular-shaped hands that seem to float above the dial. BeauBleu watches are conceived, designed and assembled in Paris, and outfitted with mechanical automatic movements from Japan’s Miyota. The three main pillars include the Ecce Lys, with rose-gold-toned cases and grained dials; Ecce Smalt, defined by embossed blue dials with gradient effects; and Ecce Vesperal, with monochrome metallic-brushed cases and dials.

Brand: Cincinnati Watch Co.

Model Featured Above: Guild Mechanical

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Founders Rick Bell and Mark Stegman founded Cincinnati Watch Company (originally a venture called Build Your Own Watch) in 2018 with a mission to bring the watchmaking trade back to their midwestern home city. Former AWCI executive director and WOSTEP-trained watchmaker Jordan Ficklin came aboard to help launch the company in 2020. The company assembles all its timepieces in-house, equipping them with movements from Switzerland and Japan. Its first timepiece was the Union Terminal Watch, whose design celebrates the historic train station in the “Queen City” that is also one of the United States’s icons of Art Deco architecture. Another historically inspired watch, the Guild Mechanical, pays tribute to another facet of Cincinnati’s horological past, the “Time Hill” guild hall that was once the home of the Gruen Watch Company.

Brand: Echo/Neutra

Model Featured Above: Averau 39 Moon Phase

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Industrial designer Nicola Callegro and aerospace engineer Cristiano Quaglia — both watch aficionados from Italy — joined forces to create Echo/Neutra, via Kickstarter campaign, in 2019. Based in the Italian Dolomites, Echo/Neutra produces watches that pay tribute to the mountain range of their origin and specifically to the city of Cortina d’Ampezzo, host of the 1956 Winter Olympics. The Cortina collection, which consists of three-handers, chronographs, and GMTs, contains Swiss-made mechanical movements and features the emblem of the ‘56 games on the dial; the chronographs are powered by a hand-wound Sellita while the GMTs feature an automatic Soprod. Another popular collection, the Averau, is described as a “contemporary field watch” with an automatic Sellita caliber animating both the three-hand-date and double moon-phase models.

Brand: Islander

Watch Featured Above: Greenport 

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The house brand of New York online retailer Long Island Watch Co., Islander makes affordable everyday tool watches with (as you might expect from the name) an emphasis on diver styles. The collection is wide, and also includes classical pilot and field watches; many of the watches, which carry the names of Long Island communities such as Greenport, Manhasset, and Bridgehampton, include what the manufacturer calls “hallmarks of quality” found in more expensive brands, including sapphire crystals, screw-down crowns, ceramic inserts for the rotating dive-scale bezels, and mechanical self-winding movements from the likes of Seiko and Miyota.

Brand: Isotope

Model Featured Above: Hydrium Pro NSFW Purple

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Isotope Watches, founded in 2016 by Portuguese immigrant Jose Miranda, operates out of the town of Henfield, England and makes its watches in Switzerland. Miranda, a lifelong watch enthusiast who nevertheless sold many of his personal watches to fund his brand, took inspiration from revolutionary watch concepts like the IWC Pallweber and Gérald Genta’s early jumping-hour watches, as well as the designs of the Art Deco “Streamline Moderne” era. This influence is still evident in today’s Isotope timepieces, like the Hydrium series of dive watches and the Old Radium models that take inspiration from 1940s pilot’s watches.

Brand: Ollech & Wajs

Watch Featured Above: M-110

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One of the very few Swiss watch brands based in Zurich, Ollech & Wajs traces its history all the way back to 1956. It was the first Swiss watchmaker to make a dive watch water-resistant to 1,000 meters and the first to do direct-to-consumer mail-order business; its tool watches were worn by military troops during the Vietnam War and by NASA scientists during the Space race. After many decades of such milestones, the founding families sold the company to its current owner in 2017. The watches produced by the brand — like the motorsport-inspired Rallychron, the Ocean Graph dive watch with decompression-scale bezel, and the P-104 pilots’ model with slide-rule functionality — channel the spirit of their vintage ancestors, and are all fitted with automatic movements from ETA and Soprod; OW is one of the rare Swiss makers that has never put a quartz movement in a watch.

Brand: Paulin

Watch Featured Above: Ohno Automatic

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Scotland-based Paulin, launched in 2013, assembles all of its watches at its workshop in Glasgow, and takes great pride in the transparency it offers to prospective buyers on the sources of the brand’s parts. The watches are truly a global collaboration: anodized aluminum dials made in Germany ands finished in the U.K., cases and crystals from China, hands from India, movements from Switzerland and Japan, straps from a 70-year-old family tannery in Germany. Paulin watches are notable for bold colors and playful designs, like the Ohno Automatic featured above, which is powered by a Swiss-made La Joux-Perret caliber and whose dial features a visual tribute to the free-form typography of California’s Ohno  type foundry, a Paulin partner.

Brand: Straum

Model Featured Above: Jan Mayen Glacier White

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Oslo-based Straum was the brainchild of two Norwegian students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, with a shared appreciation of outdoorsy activities and talent for digital CAD prototyping. Their first entrepreneurial project, an experimental piece of camera equipment, was shelved in favor of making a new line of watches inspired by the Norwegian wilderness and its natural wonders. The flagship Jan Mayen collection, accordingly, features dials with a cracked pattern evocative of the landscape of the Beerenberg volcano; previous models, like the sold-out Opphav, had rippled-texture dials that called to mind the ridges and valleys of the nation’s glaciers.

Brand: Xeric

Model Featured Above: Scrambler

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Watch collector and re-seller Mitch Greenblatt teamed with his entrepreneurial brother Andrew to form the e-commerce business Watchismo in 2007. After several successful years, the brothers teamed with a designer Daniel Hunsaker to form their own watch brand, Xeric, which since its founding in 2013 has launched 20 successful Kickstarter campaigns for its products — including the most-funded timepiece in the platform’s history. With a mandate to “make time fun again,” Xeric watches are made in California and wildly unconventional in design and mechanics, with quirky complications like wandering hour displays, orbiting moon-phase hands, and linear chronograph indications echoing the look of gauges on a race car dashboard, as on the popular Halograph models. Japan’s Miyota supplies most of the movements, which range from quartz to automatic to a sub-$2,000 tourbillon.