In 2017 Reuben Schoots spotted his friend’s Seiko SKX007 dive watch and became fascinated with how it was made. He had no idea that seven years later he would be creating his own watches in the garage-turned-atelier of his home in Canberra, Australia.
“As I was leaving school, I really felt that I wanted to do something for myself,” Mr. Schoots said. He tried a few short-lived business ideas, including running an online vintage men’s wear shop for a year, but nothing lasted until the watch idea came along.
Mr. Schoots started his namesake business in 2018, and now is working on Series Two, a seven-piece limited-edition iteration of the watch that he debuted as Series One in May 2023.
That initial 41.5-millimeter stainless steel watch was made from a combination of parts he purchased, pieces he made and a Swiss manual-wind movement that he modified. The one element from Australia was the kangaroo leather strap in oxblood, a burgundy shade that he felt would match the purple-blue hands he had made.
Eric Ku, the co-founder of the online auction house Loupe This, said the time-only Series One had a simple movement but “the finishing of it is really beautiful,” referring to the engravings on the movement and “the dial execution with that meteorite-looking pattern in the center and then having that two-tone effect.”
“I didn’t expect it from someone who was self-taught and doing this on his own, and I wouldn’t expect it at this price point,” Mr. Ku said. (Last summer, Loupe This sold a Series One model for $26,100.)
For Series Two, Mr. Schoots, 30, has been making the hands, dials, cases and most of the manual-wind mechanical movement. And he plans to offer more interchangeable leather straps sourced from Australia, including one made of soft emu leather with a pattern that he said “looks almost like a spotted egg.”
Priced at 57,500 Australian dollars (about $37,725), they are available on his website and Instagram, although five of the seven models have been sold so far, he said. (He intends to distribute them by the end of this year, he said, but “there are a million steps in the process and sometimes things go quickly and sometimes they don’t.”)
Like his initial model, the simple design of Series Two includes a seconds sub-dial at 6 o’clock to “offset the nameplate at the top,” he said, and create a classic look.
A D.I.Y. Effort
To make his watches, Mr. Schoots said, he first had to make some of his own equipment, including a tool sharpening unit and a pivot polisher. “In Australia, there were no machines or tools here for watchmaking as there is no history of watchmaking here,” he said.
And, he noted, “Australia’s been, since the ’60s and ’70s, essentially moving out of manufacturing. So our manufacturing capacity and industry here is very small and not really a focus.” (Manufacturing in Australia was 5.4 percent of its gross domestic product in 2022, according to the World Bank.)
Besides, Mr. Schoots said, the local market prefers “a battery watch or Apple Watch, and manufactured in China” to mechanical timepieces. He wears a dark gray Garmin GPS Instinct ($299.99) in the workshop because its fiber-reinforced polymer case “doesn’t shatter when you are leaning against hard materials,” he said. And it can track his running times.
As he started his brand, the Canberra native spent most of his savings on a lathe that cost 2,500 Australian dollars and outfitting the garage. (Now, he said, he funds the business through watch sales, and assembles the watches inside his house “just in case, in the workshop, there is any dust.”)
“I wanted to know how to make a watch from raw material,” he said, so he read “Watchmaking,” the manual written by the English horology master George Daniels. And he got advice on toolmaking from a local engineer and toolmaker, Lindsay Drabsch, whom he met in April 2018 at an event organized by the Canberra chapter of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, which has its headquarters in Columbia, Pa.
Experts say that Mr. Schoots chose a difficult path, not only teaching himself how to make timepieces, but also improvising workarounds such as programming a C.N.C. (computer numerical control) machine to perform like a rose engine to produce guilloché patterning.
“Learning without masters, without teachers, the art of the precision; how to regulate, let’s say; how to build the machine, a small mechanical machine that measures the time accurately, is incredibly difficult,” said Thierry Nataf, president and chief executive of the Luxury Consulting Company and a former Zenith president and chief executive. It is a very difficult art to master, he added, and even at big Swiss brands, “it’s an apprenticeship that’s not easy at all.”
From 2019 to 2022, Mr. Schoots ran Canberra Clocks, an antique clock repairs business, to practice what he called “a very similar skill” while also earning an income. He closed it to concentrate on his watchmaking.
Mr. Schoots’s design process has been unconventional, too. Case in point: For his Series One model, he didn’t make any technical drawings. “I made it completely out of what was in my mind,” he said, which required him to remember all of the technical details — “all of those things all of the time.” He decided that was “just a silly way to work, basically.”
For Series Two, he sketched each component, then turned them into 3-D design software models and then technical drawings.
Trial and Error
Mr. Schoots acknowledged that working so far away from Switzerland and other watch hubs has made it difficult for him to acquire knowledge. “Sometimes I wish I could just ask somebody how to do things, as there’s so much problem solving,” he said. “And sometimes things can seem so foreign and there is no off-the-shelf solution.”
“Anything that’s not specifically watchmaking related, I’ll look on the internet and YouTube,” he said, but otherwise, “it’s just trial and error.” On the upside, watchmaking in Canberra means that he is “not bound to any tradition,” he said.
And the time could be ripe for Mr. Schoots’s watches as handcrafted, limited production timepieces are “really appealing to a subset of collectors right now,” said Mr. Ku of Loupe This.
Nate Borgelt, head of watches in the Americas for Bonhams auction house, agreed, adding that the real market for Reuben Schoots watches is “the horologically minded collector, the one who appreciates the craft that Breguet put into his watches when he was alive,” and “who is interested in the process rather than the product.”
And the increasing number of Australian brands — including the Sydney watchmaker Nicholas Hacko; the Bausele brand, which puts sand, dirt and other bits of Australia in its crowns; and the skeleton style of Creux Automatiq, also in Sydney — give “people an idea that you can buy a watch from Australia,” he said.
Within three to five years, Mr. Schoots plans to move into a bigger space, with a showroom, in an industrial suburb of Canberra and to hire some watchmakers, either by enticing a trained person to move to Australia or starting with one person “who loves watches and wants to learn this art,” he said. “I’ve had a few people over the last few years ask, and so maintaining contact.”
More pressing, however, he needed to end the interview, as he intended to make 40 screws by the end of the day.
Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/fashion/watches-reuben-schoots-canberra-australia.html