Top 5 Microbrands To Discover In October 2025
6 min read
In all honesty, there aren’t many people who think that just because they like watches, they’d be good at making them as well. Amongst those who’ve ventured this route, a few have been able to realize this aspiration and, in doing so, a fine product as well.
Fundamentally a very distant aside to the inception of a traditional Manufacture, a microbrand is anything but an entity rooted in the past. It’s most of the time, if not every time, forward-looking. And more importantly, with founders still in their 30s, this is what represents the future of our industry.
These devoid of historical constructs and design heritage brands thrive on a direct-to-consumer operational philosophy with internet as their primary leverage. As the industry’s biggest development in recent years, microbrands occupy a pricing and quality void uncatered to by high-end luxury watchmakers and unattained by affordable entry-level manufacturers.
So, in continuation of our monthly series on microbrands, we’ll focus on five brands that tastefully incentivize the culture of collecting.
BA111OD
It’s a perplexing realization that a brand literally non-existent six years ago now has a catalog filled with manufacture complications, flying tourbillons, skeletonized watches and chronometer certified timekeepers. BA111OD’s journey started in 2019 when Thomas Baillod, a native of La Chaux-de-Fonds, founded the brand.
While the Baillod family connections with horology date back to 1775, the modern incarnation is a social-community-based sales model where affordability of technically competent watches is an objective realized by smart optimization of e-commerce, distribution and via a community of “Afluendors” (ambassadors, influencers, vendors).
The resulting yield of BA111OD’s community-driven transparent business is hallmarked by the most affordable Swiss-made tourbillon and certified chronometer. The portfolio spans an impressive septet of chapters or collections and thrives in creative complexity of the pieces, all of which have a distinctive crown at 4 o’clock.
All in all, there are plenty of reasons to keep a look out for the next chapter at BA111OD which has briskly earned a reputation as a creative Swiss newcomer with disruptive and unrestricted ambitions.
Price: ₹65,000 - ₹11,60,000 approx.
Brew Watch Co.
A watch brand based in an NYC apartment. A funding from 142 backers to help realize the said brand. And a mom to help with its business stuff. This is anything but an ideal recipe to incept a marque in an industry where judgements are strict even for hundred thousand dollar-worth products with half of a decade’s worth of development.
So, how can a former NJIT industrial design grad sustain a brand that’s literally named Brew?
The answer, again, is the cut-out-the-middleman marketing approach followed by such brands. By minimizing the supply chain steps to achieve a stronger value proposition, Jonathan Ferrer materialized a distinctive retro but totally modern aesthetic through his 2015 opus - the Brew Watch Co.
Conceived at a cafe in New York City, Brew Watch Co. is a horological synonym to Jonathan’s obsession with cafes and caffeine. The Brew collection’s non-round aesthetic inspiration by industrial espresso machines finds a lodging in a quartet catalog with hues and highs of '70s watch design. With time-only, time-and-date and chronograph models making the caffeine-powered accessible lineup, the collections are synonymous with the current zeitgeist of watch affinity and leverage a balance of aesthetic relevance and novelty.
But coffee aside, the stimulus from the Super Metric, Metric, Metric Lite and Retrograph series at Brew Watch Co. is very desirable and hopefully much more sustainable than instant coffee.
Price: ₹33,000 - ₹44,000 approx.
Spinnaker
Spinnaker has a dominantly nautical inspiration defining its catalog. Founded in 2013 by a group of watch enthusiasts from Hong Kong, this is a brand where quality, quirks and affordability exist in equal measures. Here, the narrative of horological creativity is shaped by an aquatic influence and among the dozen that make up the catalog, well, all 12 are inherently dive watches of some sorts. There exist GMTs and chronograph models as a bonus!
It however isn’t another dive-esque watch brand as aquatic competence peaks at a very decent, and more than you I could ever require, 300 meters. Despite the presence of strong aesthetic consistency within the portfolio, it is the brand’s quirky collabs that exist as surprise heavy-lifters.
Statement looks, impressive functionality and equally impressive pricing are what I attribute to Spinnaker watches. As a smaller player on the larger watch scene, the brand’s offerings count for so much more when you’re buying at a budget.
Price: ₹24,000 - ₹74,000 approx.
Ardra Labs
The best thing about problems is that they are the reason of flourishing curiosity and creativity amongst our kind. From inventing the wheel to literally snacking in space, human inventiveness knows no bounds. And that’s a given of solutions, which are often necessities. One such problem of horological grade was creatively resolved by Nava Krishnan, founder of Ardra Labs.
For a very long-time, the non-one-hour offsets from the standard GMT zones were very much relegated as ‘unimportant’ by watchmakers. Here, the solution was the wearer’s sole responsibility to round up or down, by requisite minutes, the time for a non-standard GMT zone. Ouch!
Nava, a resident of Washington, D.C. with parents hailing from South India, explored the possibilities of an uncompromised GMT timekeeper which could perfectly keep track of GMT zones with 30- and 45-minute offsets. This was the mission-statement for his brainchild - Ardra Labs and success was realized in the form of the Delta Type.
The Delta Type is a PAN-GMT timekeeper with ample artistic, creative and symbolic cues allowing the users to read 30-minute and 45-minute offsets to standard GMT zones. This is achieved by means of a line-style “double dot” element matching the tri-color GMT pointers.
The Ardra Labs Delta Type with a patented PAN-GMT complication is one of the many reasons why microbrands demand interest.
Price: ₹2,15,000 approx.
Fears
In 2016, Nicholas Bowman-Scargill - a British gentleman and a former apprentice watchmaker at Rolex, revived what his great-great-great-grandfather Edwin Fear started back in 1846. Named after the street in Bristol where the original gig started some 179 years ago, the revived Fears introduced Redcliff - the brand’s first wrist watch in the twenty-first century.
Today, the overall horological yield at Fears spans four collections of dress-style watches with a decent value-for-money appeal. These designed and built in the UK watches are part of the Brunswick, Redcliff, Arnos, and Haute Collections.
This storied brand with four generation’s worth heritage is definitely one to keep an eye out for.
Price: ₹2,80,000 - ₹4,20,000 approx.
Small Operations, Big Success
Be it the democratization of machining processes, growing investment potential in small-scale businesses or simply a touch of delightful lunacy sweeping the world, micro watch brands are now very much an established entity in the greater watchmaking landscape.
Agreed, microbrands aren’t going to be troubling the “giants” anytime soon. But they’ve realized a charming objective of making a watch for enthusiasts by enthusiasts. What their founders love about the hobby is materialized in their creations as a pleasantly refreshing package.
Perhaps that’s the secret to their success!
