About five years ago, when the watchmaker Love Hunter started working full-time on building his own brand, he knew that his timepieces would be inherently different from much of the competition. Instead of using the computer-operated machinery that many labels rely on — or opting for predominantly supplied parts, as most new brands do — Mr. Hunter, who has been known as Love, a nickname for Lovell, since childhood, was determined to make the vast majority of the components of his watches himself, avoiding high-tech tools and technology.
“This was always the goal, to create something with my own hands,” he said, sitting in the lounge of his workshop in this small city about 70 miles, or 115 kilometers, northeast of New York City.
He listed the watch parts that he makes with conspicuous pride. They include “every wheel, every screw, every bridge, every spring, the dial. And even the dots that go on the dial. The hands, everything,” he said. The few exceptions include crystals and mainsprings, both of which come from American supply houses, and straps by the French watchband specialist Jean Rousseau, although Mr. Hunter aims to eventually make those in-house, too.
This month, Mr. Hunter, 47, aims to deliver the first timepiece produced by his namesake brand. There is a single model, a classic round watch with an Art Deco-inspired dial that, yes, Mr. Hunter designed and is making. The timepieces are available in either titanium or gold, with or without a skeleton back, and dials that are 42 or 44 millimeters in diameter. Each is powered by a mechanical movement that is made in-house, with a proprietary jump hour mechanism.
Prices range from $50,000 to $115,000, depending on materials and size. Each timepiece is made to order; five preorders have been placed.
The headquarters of Love Hunter Watches are in a location considerably less lofty than those prices suggest, inside an unmarked storefront in a no-frills strip mall. Mr. Hunter works with one employee: Mick Hunter, 24, one of his three children, who helps with tasks like tool production and will be finishing each watch, by hand.
The studio includes about two dozen machines, primarily vintage ones. There are, for example, lathes to make parts like screws and gear cutters, and milling machines to make components such as hands and the main plates that serve as each movement’s base.
For many luxury watch brands, even top-tier labels, manufacturing machines operated with computer numerical control, or C.N.C., are commonplace. At Love Hunter Watches, nothing is automated. There are computers in the workshop, but Mr. Hunter uses these for sketching and documenting the specifications of parts instead of production. Some of his machines are manually powered.
He procured the equipment from sellers like Muller Machines, in Brügg, Switzerland; Precision Matthews, in Coraopolis, Pa.; and the online auction sites BidSpotter.com and eBay. One lathe is on loan from the Plumier Foundation, an organization based in Saltsburg, Pa., dedicated to teaching traditional crafts.
“He’s just scrappy,” David Lindow, one of Plumier’s founders, said of Mr. Hunter by phone. “He found what he needed and he’s doing it without all the fancy Swiss machinery — he’s bought pretty humble machinery, and he’s tweaking that machinery to make it work.”
Mr. Hunter’s techniques are proving to be part of the brand’s appeal to clients.
“Once I heard about what Love was doing, I was like, ‘No way,’” said Richard Duckett Jr., a collector who has preordered one of Mr. Hunter’s timepieces, by phone. “He is doing it the traditional way.”
“Before I saw the watch, I fell in love with his process, with what he was doing,” Mr. Duckett added.
Mr. Hunter has been fascinated by timepieces and how they run since he was a little boy growing up in Harlem and the Bronx in New York City. There were always alarm clocks in the family home — Mr. Hunter, the ninth of 10 children, was raised primarily by his father, a preacher — and he received his first wristwatch, a digital Casio, when he was around 7 years old.
“I wanted to build watches before I knew what Swiss watches were, before I knew what Rolexes were,” he said. “I didn’t know any of that. I wanted to build something that I could put on my wrist and see it tick.”
He attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School, a vocational school in the Bronx, where he studied architectural drafting. After earning his diploma in 1996, he worked briefly at Tiffany & Company’s Fifth Avenue store, officially renamed the Landmark, and the luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman.
The following year, he was hired as a salesman at the flagship branch of Tourneau, the watch retailer now known as Bucherer 1888.
Mr. Hunter worked for Tourneau for six years, holding different positions at three of its Manhattan locations. It was, in a sense, a place for his education as well as sales. As Mr. Hunter put it, “Tourneau is where I got the full immersion into all of the different watchmaking companies.”
He was especially good at selling Breitlings. At one point, he said, he was the top-selling salesperson of the brand’s watches in the United States.
Nonetheless, he was younger than most of his colleagues. Also, Mr. Hunter, who is Black, did not look like many of the people he worked with.
“The most insults I’ve ever gotten in my life regarding my race was at Tourneau, because my fellow salespeople, they couldn’t understand it,” he said. “I didn’t belong. It was 1997, 1998, and I’m a teenager, 19 years old, selling high-end watches and doing well. It just didn’t fit.”
In 2003, he left to attend the Lititz Watch Technicum, a Rolex-owned watchmaking school in Pennsylvania, which closed last year. To pay for necessities during his studies, Mr. Hunter relied on food stamps and government assistance, which also covered the price of his watchmaking tools.
After earning his WOSTEP certification — from the internationally-recognized Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program — in 2005, Mr. Hunter began working on the movement that powers his watches today. (It is officially called the Love Movement, a name that inadvertently suggests a 1960s hippie crusade, or an album by A Tribe Called Quest.)
About 10 months later, he joined the after-sales department at Breitling, servicing mechanical watches at its U.S. headquarters in Wilton, Conn., about 25 miles southwest of where his own brand is now based.
After working on his own design during the pandemic, Mr. Hunter left his position at Brietling and founded Love Hunter Watches. The company is self-financed, and funded in part by sales of the watches he collected during his studies and work, including all but one of his Breitlings and a Rolex.
Mr. Hunter is one of a growing number of Black watchmakers in a field that has not traditionally been known for its inclusivity. Still, he hopes what makes him noteworthy are his horological skills and his nascent brand.
“When I look at myself, I never ever look at myself as a Black watchmaker,” he said. “I never have. I look at myself as a watchmaker.”
Tony Cenicola is a Times photographer.
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