Lee Byung Ken stared at the guts of a Patek Philippe watch through a loupe held against his eye by a wirelike band.
“This had some water damage, so there was moisture below the bezel,” he said of the Nautilus Automatic model in rose gold with a diamond bezel. “Good thing the diamonds weren’t in danger.”
Another Patek, a chronograph, sat on a tool-cluttered table nearby — although nothing in his small 10-foot-square watch repair shop was very far away. “There was dust on the dial since it’s more than 10 years old,” he explained. “I had to disassemble it and then piece it back together. It’s like a puzzle.”
His fascination with clocks and watches started at age 16. “I lived next door to my uncle, who had a big mechanical desk clock, which I took apart and reassembled when he was on a trip,” said Mr. Lee, 76. “He never found out.”
A couple of years later, he attended a local watchmaking academy (which closed decades ago) and worked at a few of the watch repair shops around Seoul, mostly helping with mainspring repairs. “At that time, it was a very difficult to replace them, so I learned how to fix the bent springs,” he explained. “There was a big demand for this skill.”
In 1972 he opened his own shop in what was called “Clock Alley,” a bustling warren of clock and watch merchants and repair shops that was leveled about two years ago to make way for a luxury housing and retail development. That was when he, and about 10 of the alley’s other shopkeepers, moved their businesses to Sewoon Square, a mall of watches, jewelry and electronics stores that was not far away, and in the same Jongno district of central Seoul.
Mr. Lee works alone, keeping the shop open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and often working on weekends, too.
“My way of thinking is that these watches are assets, and I can’t hold onto them for too long,” he said. “The demand is growing, and if it takes too much time to turn these around, I might lose business. So I work weekends.”
“And I have no plans to retire,” he added, with a smile, before pulling the loupe back down over his right eye and returning to those watches.
Moving to Mechanical
A few miles away, in the Sindang-dong neighborhood, Bo-Young Jung and Jing-gi Choi at the Bestime Hongsung Company have a total of more than 60 years’ experience repairing watches. And over that time, they say, there has been a significant change in South Koreans’ watch-shopping habits.
“Back when we started, there was a huge demand in South Korea to repair digital watches,” said Mr. Jung, 57, the company’s technical general manager. But, since the country’s economic boom began in the early 1990s, he continued, “that has changed rapidly to luxury mechanical watches.”
Now, said Mr. Choi, 61, the company’s co-founder and manager, several brands “don’t need to hire people here to do repairs. They outsource to us. We service their watches here. Most of our business comes through those brands.”
He said the company routinely works with four houses — Franck Muller, Swarovski, Fendi and Maurice Lacroix — and one large Swiss dealership, Kirchhofer.
“Kirchhofer has Korean-speaking employees in Switzerland,” Mr. Jung said. “They sell watches to Korean tourists and then gives them our name for repairs back here in South Korea.”
That, combined with the clients who come to them from local luxury shops, has transformed Bestime Hongsung to its total of 10 workers today.
About 30 years ago, Mr. Choi also created his own line of tools for watch repairs, called TimeLab. Now he sells them, ranging from the simplest of tools to large tables for the serious watch repairmen, to customers in about 20 countries. But in the main business, it’s all about the day-to-day maintenance of a luxury watch.
“We do a lot of cleaning, but we also do a lot of intricate work,” Mr. Young said. “The movements need to be cleaned and serviced every five to seven years. It’s like a car.”
A Preference for Vintage
In the Seodaemun district, another of central Seoul’s bustling business districts, Choi Heesupe, 28, is the owner of a one-room repair shop called The Time.
Given his location — as well as his business’s presence on YouTube, Instagram and his blog — most of his customers tend to be young technology and finance executives. And, he said, many of the watches they bring in for repair are vintage mechanical models, particularly Omegas (He does work on quartz-powered watches, too).
“Smart watches are now an accessory on the wrists of teenagers, but those same teenagers are looking for luxury watches as adults,” he said. “This is one of the reasons I think there is still a future for the luxury watch repair industry.”
Mr. Choi said he had always liked vintage watches, and from a very early age he wanted to be able to repair them. “I graduated from Dong Seoul University in 2019 with a degree in horology and jewelry, with a focus on watches,” he said, “but I was not able to learn the skills you would gain at a watch school in Switzerland. So, I studied the manuals provided by the Swiss company ETA [which makes watch movements] and learned from a few repairmen working in the field in South Korea.”
After a few years of selling watches in department stores and doing some repairs on his own, he opened his shop in June 2023. “I wanted a location with a large floating population that was properly mixed with companies and residential spaces,” Mr. Choi explained. “The older areas have many repairmen, but many lack the newest technology.”
He bought up-to-date equipment, including the Elmasolvex RM watch-cleaning machine; a Witschi ProofMaster, used to test the water-resistance of watches; and a Watch Expert G4, used to test some time-keeping accuracy aspects of mechanical watches.
The shop is a one-man operation, with Mr. Choi sitting at a table facing the shop’s large front window. “All watch repairs are done by me here in the store,” he said. “I work with a polishing technician off-site but otherwise I do everything else here.”
In July, for example, some pieces he worked on included a Vacheron Constantin Overseas, a Rolex Datejust and a vintage Omega Seamaster.
Being 28 certainly has given him a window in the famous youth culture of South Korea, he said.
“These days, it is popular for Korean YouTubers and actors to change the dial color of vintage watches to personalize them,” Mr. Choi said. “Some of my customers want them changed regularly, and others only once. It’s definitely a trend I’ve noticed.”
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