“A pinch of this and a sprinkle of that. Witches’ brew stuff!” said Alison Moriarty, pointing at the hundreds of sachets and boxes of enamel powders in her attic workshop overlooking a forest in rural southwestern Ireland.
Although Ms. Moriarty, now 49, qualified as a watchmaker in 1996, she did not begin to teach herself enameling — the ancient technique of fusing powdered glass to metal — until 2018.
Was it, she wondered, a midlife crisis? “Maybe it was a complete bout of madness diving into this crazy rabbit hole at the age of 44 and trying to get my little dream to become a reality,” she recently said with a laugh.
Midnight Sky, a watch with a starry blue enamel dial — “the first dial that was good enough to go into a watch” — was completed in June 2024 and now is worn by her husband, Mike Moriarty. Its completion was what she recently called the “soft launch” of Moriarty Watches, although starting a brand was not really her plan at the time.
She had been looking for something to take her mind off her autoimmune conditions and degenerative bone disease.
“I became ill at 35,” she said, “and I’ve undergone numerous spinal surgeries, including pelvic surgery, between 2016 and 2023. This will be ongoing to combat the degeneration.”
Learning enameling was “cathartic,” Ms. Moriarty said, although now she limits herself to four-hour work sessions.
“I only notice I’m in pain after I finish,” she said. “It does pull your mind away.”
“I Was Hooked”
Ms. Moriarty grew up in Leixlip, a town west of Dublin. “At 17, I had no idea what I wanted to do,” she recalled — although, at one point, her skills as an equestrienne had her thinking about becoming a farrier (an artisan who shoes horses).
It was a prospect that alarmed her parents.
Then her career guidance teacher took her and a few fellow students on a tour of the Irish Swiss Institute of Horology, a school that eventually closed in 2004.
“The first thing that got me was all this tiny machinery,” she said, “I was hooked.”
She completed the institute’s three-year watchmaking course and then a five-month intensive program at the Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program, known as WOSTEP, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. In both classes, she was the only female student.
When she returned to Ireland, she recalled, she sent out “around a hundred letters” and finally got a job in a jeweler’s watch workshop in Dublin, but a union dispute blocked the appointment, and she ended up in service and sales.
She continued working in luxury watch and jewelry sales, first in Dublin and then, as she and her husband moved west, in Galway; the couple had a daughter in 2006 and a son in 2009. When her health crisis began in 2011, she couldn’t go out to work any longer, so she started to repair mechanical watches in her home workshop.
“I was in and out of hospital all the time,” she said, “and it definitely helped take my mind off things.”
Ms. Moriarty had been thinking about enameling since her student days in Switzerland, where, she said, she had been “obsessed” with the enameled watch dials at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
“But I was procrastinating” — and then Mr. Moriarty gave her a push.
“Next thing, a kiln ends up on the doorstep,” she said.
Two Techniques
Ms. Moriarty has developed a watch model: She designed the case, crown and hands, which are manufactured by suppliers, and she buys Swiss-made Sellita mechanical movements. But she disassembles each movement and recalibrates it, improving the timekeeping, she said, by plus or minus three to four seconds per day.
She assembles about two watches a month, each one made to order and starting at 4,250 euros ($4,965).
As for the enamel dials, Ms. Moriarty said she has developed more than 240 shades, each the result of experimentation with a variety of pigments and chemicals.
“Don’t ask me about amounts, I mix these single dial orders in a little 25-gram tub. It’s a painstaking process,” she said. “And I have found on this journey, that not all colors are good colors.”
She counts among her successes Aegean, a bright turquoise; Hibernia, a glittery green; and Hibana, a red named after the Japanese word for “spark.” “It’s taken me four years to come up with a red I’m happy with,” she noted. (When the customer selects an enamel color for the dial, Ms. Moriarity uses the same name for the watch itself.)
She uses two basic enamel techniques: a dry sift, adding layers of enamel grains to the dial before firing, and a wet pack, in which as many as five layers of grains are painted onto the dial, each one fired for a minute or two before the next is added.
Ms. Moriarity’s dials are a hefty 37 millimeters in diameter — so big, she said, that “there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong.” Each dial takes as long as 40 hours to make, including about six hours of sanding. Then there is a close examination under a microscope to check for flaws that might be invisible to the naked eye.
“If it’s not 99.99 percent perfect,” she said, “it doesn’t go out the door.”
Word of Mouth
Ms. Moriarty recalled being astonished when watch orders began arriving last fall. “It’s absolute word of mouth,” she said.
But she has been getting some attention in the watch world this year, with a Hibernia watch on the April cover of Horological Times, the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute magazine (and an invitation to speak this month at the institute’s symposium in Ohio).
And in May, she exhibited her watches and gave a speech at the Waterford International Festival of Time, an annual event that showcases some of Europe’s independent watchmakers, held in the city in southeastern Ireland.
(“I think Waterford really was my proper launch,” she said. “I was shocked at the amount of people to meet me because they’d been following my journey on Instagram.”)
Moriarty Watches’ first paying customer, however, received his timepiece in August 2024.
A watchmaker friend had told Hamza Masood, the business development manager at WatchCharts, a market research platform for pre-owned watches, about Ms. Moriarty, and the Seattle resident contacted her through Instagram.
Mr. Masood, 36, has been collecting watches for more than eight years, and was eager to support women in watchmaking.
“As a collector, the most meaningful contribution I can make is to put my money where my mouth is,” he wrote in an email. “I didn’t want to spend my money on just another Tudor or Rolex.”
They worked together on the design. Mr. Masood is left-handed, so “Alison suggested putting the crown on the left-hand side so I could wear the watch on my right wrist, which I love,” he wrote.
And he ordered a pink dial. The color, Candy Pink, was a blend of 11 pigments. “It ran me in rings!” Ms. Moriarty recalled. “It was so difficult to do.”
“The result is spectacular,” Mr. Masood wrote, noting that he has a lot of watches, but that “this one seems to keep coming back on the wrist.”
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