This final episode marks the end of our fabulous adventure, so unfortunately no crazy visit this time, but a little summary of this great experience and a bit of an opinion too. 

As you have probably understood, one of the main goals with TheWATCHES.tv is to be as inclusive as possible. I want to open all the doors of not only these fancy brands, but also all these other indispensable players of watchmaking and take you along and show you what it’s all about. 

On a personal note, I have to admit that this Watchmaking Roadtrip has been a fabulous experience and I feel quite proud of having brought this project forward. I hope the watchmaking industry also understands the purpose of what we do and I can tell you that all the people and brands that we visited on this season have been rather thankful on this fresh and new insight that we managed to bring to you. I’m pretty convinced that these episodes will continue to generate some nice views and I really want to thank everyone that participated in this journey; the participant themselves, these great guys that you got to meet better, the brands and other players of this industry we love so much and my little team that you don’t see that often in front of the camera. Thanks to all and again it’s all and only about people!!!

Watchmaking was the super high-tech of its time

Watchmaking has been very very secretive for a very long time and still is and it’s partly understandable. You really have to project yourself a bit in the past and what was at stake at the time. The mastery of time and the science behind watchmaking can seriously be compared to some of today’s super high tech projects, whether in the field of medicine, science, communications and today these players are also rather secretive about what they do and they protect themselves with patents and so forth, though I quite like these open source projects that we see more and more, but I naturally understand the business dimension of everything. 

The impact of watchmaking

Anyhow watchmaking has had an immense and direct impact on the development of our societies, mastering time has enabled so many significant things that today we kind of simply take for granted and we forget about it. For instance, I’m an aircraft pilot and when I did my training, it was only the beginning of GPS and for instance on some of these instrument approaches that you would do going through clouds before landing, well you really had to rely on time, often it was a digital clock, but time was at the core of making it safely to the runway or not. A mechanical watch was part of your Minimum Equipment List (MEL), such as a good old school magnetic compass. Today, with modern instruments and GPS, all this is much easier and this is great great, but what I mean by this is that not so long ago the mastering of time represented something super important and today we think it’s just normal. 

So I’m not this nostalgic type of kind, I don’t look in the mirrors and say how great things were back then. I’m an optimist and enthusiast, I embrace the future, but in our ever more so digital world and with the triumph of immediate consumerism and programmed obsolescence, I believe that this mechanical object on your wrist maintains a healthy and very important link to our past, where we come from and celebrates in one-way human ingenuity and ultimately keeps my hope alive for a better future. Yes, I can be a bit of an idealist too…

So I love the craft, I love what it represents and I’m convinced that even in 200 years where hopefully we could all fly like superman and other crazy things, well I’m convinced this live mechanical object will keep its indispensable emotional and meaningful reason of being.

Opening up the industry

So this high-tech dimension and the stakes behind watchmaking really represented something different at the time and today I know we’re not saving lives when we talk watchmaking, but I seriously think it’s time for the industry to open up a little and have us, meaning you and me, understand better what makes this fantastic craft so special. That’s my mission and I want to share this with as many people as possible and this Watchmaking Roadtrip precisely reflects this. 

Don't hesitate to share your thoughts about this journey and we'll hopefully manage to pull it off again in 2017, still so many things to see and share!

Some great memories from the 2016 Watchmaking Roadtrip adventure: