On a recent Wednesday, Qian GuoBiao was working fast in his multiroom atelier in Dongguan, in southern China.
The self-taught watchmaker and repairer was busy refining his latest timepiece, to be unveiled at Time to Watches in Geneva on Tuesday: a 39-millimeter, stainless steel hand-wound mechanical watch with an in-house openwork skeletonized movement, two heat-treated blue hands and an interchangeable green leather strap priced at 29,000 Swiss francs (around $37,000).
An 18-piece special edition, with a gold colored hand-engraved textured dial and black leather strap at the same price will also be unveiled.
Called the AB-05 Skyline Original and the AB-05S Skyline Sun, the watches will also be available to preorder from the brand’s website and Instagram page. Mr. Qian, whose name is pronounced CHI-yen guo-BEOW, said in a video call last month that he expected to deliver them by the end of this year.
This is the brand’s first time at Time to Watches, a watch fair that showcases more smaller, independent brands than Watches & Wonders, and its first time showing in Geneva. “Now there are more new works,” said Mr. Qian, 51, who spoke through a translator.
The brand will present other models at the fair, including its AB-04 Split Seconds Chronograph, limited to five pieces, and the AB-03 Double Balance Wheel timepiece, which competed in the men’s complication category at last year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
Mr. Qian, however, will remain in his Dongguan studio working on his watches, each of which is numbered in the order of its making and prefaced with the letters AB, which stand for his internet nickname, A. Biao, he said.
His watches “don’t look like something we’ve seen before,” said Geneva based Alexandre Ghotbi, deputy chairman of watches and head of watches in Europe and the Middle East for the Phillips auction house, who discovered Mr. Qian’s work online.
“The shape of his bridges, the layout of the dials, the layout of the movement architecture doesn’t look familiar to someone who is used to European watchmaking,” Mr. Ghotbi said. “It looks more innovative than European watchmaking, which is a bit more traditional.”
According to Thierry Nataf, president and chief executive of the Luxury Consulting Company in Paris, Mr. Qian “is among the first generation of Chinese watchmakers that are really trying to follow the tradition of independent watchmakers that was created in Switzerland.”
A decade ago, “we didn’t have at all an independent Chinese horological authorship like that, and working in an artisanal way to try to create legitimacy,” said Mr. Nataf in a telephone interview. “China was volume, low price and I think that suddenly it’s a sign that Chinese watchmaking is beginning to develop its own authors,” he said, adding that he expected to see Chinese masters within 20 years.
In addition to Mr. Qian, there is Zhang Jianmin, who has been creating experimental designs for CIGA Design since 2016; Lin Yong Hua, whose brand LYH creates quirky concept watches; and Qin Gan, which focuses on classic designs. Being based in China makes them more creative, Mr. Qian said, as “manufacturing in China is more difficult than abroad and so we have to rely on craftsmanship,” he said, so we “learn from each other.”
Mr. Qian’s love of watches began in childhood, he said, when he wore a Shanghai Watch, a brand worn by the likes of China’s leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. His fascination developed as a teenager, when he became interested in machinery and studied manufacturing. Now, he has a collection of around 200 timepieces, including a rare 38-millimeter, self-winding Patek Philippe with two wood marquetry rabbits on the dial, which he owns because he was born in “the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese horoscope,” he said.
Born in Zhejiang Province in eastern China, Mr. Qian moved to Dongguan, a manufacturing city around an hour’s drive north of Shenzhen, in 1993, to work in one of the city’s many factories. He became a technician, producing molds for mass-market consumer goods like televisions and refrigerators.
In 2000, he began repairing watches for colleagues after fixing one of his own. By 2002, referrals from these colleagues and requests from fellow users of a Chinese web forum called Ming Biao Tong (which roughly translates as Luxury Watch Forum), where he posted his work, meant that he “had too many repairs I had to do,” he said. So, that year, he quit his job at the factory and set up his watch repair business.
In 2006, he opened his atelier and in around 2018 he began making his own watches. “In repair, it’s for other people, the creative work is for myself,” Mr. Qian said, although, he added, “the majority of work done is on watch repair.”
His nine-strong team “is responsible for repairs, and I will do more of the creative work and also repairs for very high-end watches,” he said.
Moving from repairing to making watches is tougher than Mr. Qian has made it seem. “There’s one thing to repair things as they exist, it’s another thing to rethink things,” said Rama Chorpash, associate professor of product design at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Making watches outside the industry’s traditional European heartland also has its challenges.
“In Switzerland, there is a full supply chain for watchmaking,” Mr. Qian said, listing “people who produce screws, people who produce the rubies, people who make the springs.”
“All of these are rare in China,” he said. “So generally, we make what we can ourselves.” (His brand makes almost every part except the cases, which he sources from factories in Dongguan, and the leather straps, which he buys from a manufacturer in nearby Guangzhou, which also makes straps for watches by Audemars Piguet, Rolex and Cartier.)
Another challenge is sourcing equipment “to produce the precise components in my atelier,” he said. So he finds lathes and other machines through friends, and contacts.
“Sometimes, I will go to Switzerland for watch shows and also visit secondhand stores,” he said, as “the level of precision even for antique equipment is very high, coming from Switzerland.”
Even though he lives in a high-tech city, his process remains traditional. He draws drafts of his ideas with a pencil on paper, and a compass. “Then I will produce a sample and then I will test it” with machines, he said.
Alongside more new movements, Mr. Qian plans to improve his watch shapes and introduce new materials like copper, brass or gold. He hopes to expand his team to allow him “more space to do more creation,” he said. “But not too many because it’s hard to manage.”
As for the repairs, he intends to keep doing them alongside the making, because he enjoys the work and because it brings in more money. “I have a lot of long-term customers,” he said, who have “high-end expensive watches like Patek Philippe, and one of these would cost tens of millions of Chinese yuan.”
As for presenting his models at Time to Watches, he said he hoped it would mean more “people around the world could see my work and know me.”
The post He Taught Himself Watchmaking and Left the Factory Floor Behind appeared first on New York Times.
