In August 2024, when the Brazilian watch designers Rafael Guimarães and Antonio Almir Dos Santos Neto unveiled the first hand-enameled watches by their fledgling brand, Statera Watch Co, they were astounded to receive a preliminary order from Geneva.
“We made a small party here,” Mr. Guimarães said in a recent video interview from their atelier in southern Brazil. “You are selling watches to the place where people have the tradition of making watches.”
So this month Mr. Guimarães, 42, plans to be in Switzerland to deliver the order: a 39-millimeter steel ST02 — Esmalte Grand Feu watch with a deep-black enameled dial and a Swiss automatic movement (18,900 Brazilian reais, or $3,290).
Mr. Dos Santos Neto, 39, intends to stay in Maringá, a small city about 400 miles west of São Paulo, working with their apprentice on some enameling. (They also employ a watchmaker, who does assembly, and a case maker, who works remotely from a small city north of São Paulo; and they have a contract with a part-time watch finisher.)
Friends since childhood, the two designers had careers before they moved into watches: Mr. Guimarães was a salesman, most recently selling software systems to real estate agents, and Mr. Dos Santos Neto was a veterinarian.
They describe themselves as longtime watch enthusiasts, but the idea of starting their own brand didn’t arise until the pandemic, when they discovered that prices had doubled for the vintage Omega Speedmasters they wanted. “So why not make one?” Mr. Dos Santos Neto recalled saying, adding that he was “a little bit bored” as a vet.
There is no watch training or industry in Brazil, so two years ago they began teaching themselves skills such as dial design and enameling by buying “all the books available on Amazon,” Mr. Guimarães said. They also met with industry experts in Switzerland; organized video training, such as several sessions with a Welsh enamel master; and attended a course on case finishing at the Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program, better known as WOSTEP.
About Balance
In 2021 they used their savings to start the business, working on it part time until January 2024, when 1 million reais from an investor, who now owns 10 percent of the business, meant they finally felt it could be their sole focus. They both design and do enamel work, with Mr. Guimarães also looking after sales and marketing and Mr. Dos Santos Neto handling the suppliers, quality control, shipping and finances.
They chose Statera as the brand’s name because the word “means balance in Latin,” Mr. Guimarães said, adding that “one of the most recognizable parts of the watch is the balance wheel.”
In 2022, they introduced the ST01 collection, with its 41-millimeter black-dial Calculus and green-dial Emerald models; the dials were made by a supplier in France. And in 2024, the ST02 — Esmalte Grand Feu was released in 37 and 39 millimeters, featuring enamel dials in bright ivory, deep black and royal blue that were made in-house. A version with a transparent dark-blue dial, named Caeruleum, was added late last month.
The men use pencil and paper to sketch their designs, which are transferred to Photoshop by a designer friend, and then into a CAD (computer-assisted design) system so an independent watchmaking specialist can produce technical designs and specifications. Those specs are emailed to their suppliers in Brazil, Switzerland and China for prototypes and, eventually, parts production.
The Statera atelier has two kilns, to fire the enamel dials at 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit.)
“Everything is difficult about enameling,” Mr. Dos Santos Neto said in Portuguese, with Mr. Guimarães translating. “After three or four layers, it gets really tricky as it can crack.”
(Taxes also present a challenge to the fledgling brand — Brazil’s standard import tax is 100 percent “over the price of the product plus shipping costs,” Mr. Dos Santos Neto said. So “sometimes when we need something to arrive quick because we’re needing, we have to pay very high for it,” he said.)
Design Inspiration
Maringá’s environment has inspired their designs. The men said that the city’s greenery, including the evergreen araucaria trees, prompted the Emerald model in their debut collection.
They use a stylized silhouette of the giant pine nuts, or pinhão, that fall from araucaria trees, as the markers at three, six and nine o’clock on the ST02 dials, and a split variation at 12 o’clock — the same shape used for the Statera logo, which Mr. Guimarães said represented the “two people behind Statera.”
But running a business from Maringá has its drawbacks, Mr. Guimarães said, noting that there are no direct flights to Europe or to many other Brazilian cities, so he almost always has to fly to São Paulo first.
Breno Possas is a marketing consultant in São Paulo who organizes monthly meetups for members of RedBar Brazil, part of the global RedBar community of watch enthusiasts. In October, he arranged for the Statera founders to present their work to about 25 of its 108 members.
Mr. Possas, 41, whose own collections includes a rose gold Vacheron Constantin Patrimony and what he characterized as a hard to find Universal Genève Dato-Compax from 1945, said it was difficult for start-ups such as Statera to achieve success. “It’s very challenging here in Brazil to make something different,” like producing dials, he said. “It’s not a very developed market here.”
The Watch Scene
South America as a whole continues to be one of the Swiss watch industry’s smaller markets, besting only Oceania and Eastern Europe in annual exports, according to statistics from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. In 2024, the continent accounted for a little more than 500,000 units, a 7.4 percent decline over 2023 totals.
But in Brazil there is a small, yet growing local watch scene dominated by mass market brands such Technos, which has multifunctional timepieces and smartwatches that sell for as much as 1,710 reais, and Seculus, which experiments with ceramic and carbon-fiber models, one of which sells for 1,279 reais.
Terranova, which debuted last year in Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil, has focused on the country’s allure. Its first collection, named after Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach, included a 39-millimeter steel watch, powered by a Seiko automatic movement and with machine-painted green waves on its yellow dial, at 2,899 reais.
Douglas Emerich, 36, the brand’s founder, noted in an email that he had spotted a growing market for homegrown watch brands “driven by increasing content creation in social media by local influencers.”
Brands such as Mido and Tissot have been entering the market, he wrote, along with “new microbrands surfing the wave of the microbrands boom in U.S. and E.U.” As a result, he said, he plans to introduce a second collection next year.
Statera has plans, too, and has been working with a watchmaker on a new movement to power its third collection, scheduled for release in August (Mr. Guimarães declined to identify the person). Next year, the men said, they hope to open a new workshop outside of the city center to bring their case-making operation and a private salesroom under brand control.
But that is not the extent of their ambitions. They would really like to make Maringá like Glashütte in Germany — “a small city with a lot of watch brands,” Mr. Guimarães said.
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