Boutique watchmaking – and watchmakers don’t come more boutique than the handful of artisans behind the Cavasino FT60-S – is big business: and growing. In 2024, according to Growth Market Reports, the global independent watchmaking scene was worth USD $2.35 billion (out of an industry total of about 53.7 billion), and that figure is expected to almost double by 2033.
Visibility of lesser-known brands via digital platforms, along with the scarcity appeal, are clearly huge factors – a third, though, is an increasing emphasis, particularly amongst younger consumers, on our commodities having unique narratives. In the case of the Cavasino FT60-S, that “origins story”, as Hollywood would put it, begins in 1990s Marseille, and the brand’s eponymous founder, Didier Cavasino, growing up as a mechanics obsessive. Poring over the intricacies of gearboxes and engines as well as watch movements, he also harboured a fascination with his great-grandfather’s life calling of designing commercial scales.
Attending the École des Arts & Métiers in Metz, Didier later earned a master’s degree in project and quality management in Germany. But it was in Switzerland that he found his calling: the tourbillon. Increasingly, fixated on the architectural beauty and mechanical symmetry of an invention brought to fruition by John Arnold and Abraham-Louis Breguet at the end of the 18th Century, Didier curated a band of elite Swiss artisans – masters in the likes of hand-bevelling, tremblage, circular graining and black polishing – and came up with a piece which is the result of “hundreds of hours of manual work”, in the maker’s own words, “by artisans who share a deep reverence for the art of timekeeping”.
All 196 components of the Cavasino FT60-S, including surfaces not visible through the domed sapphire crystal on the back – from bridges to gears and screws as well as the tourbillon cage and micro-rotor – have been assigned a unique aesthetic, and finished using techniques from Côtes de Genève to hand-bevelling via delicate sandblasting and circular satin finishing.
Detail of the flying tourbillon in the Cavasion FT60-S and of the movement,
which features a rigorously symmetrical architecture that will certainly appeal to collectors.
Meanwhile, the Cavasino FT60-S’s dial, elegantly framed by a grade 5 titanium case, is in white gold, its hand-hammered main plate finished with translucent enamel.
The tourbillon’s journey to obsolescence, of course, is as complete as the typewriter’s. Métiers d’Art add precisely as much to a watch’s functionality as spray paint does to a car’s. And that’s the whole point. Indulgence – unadulterated “Because-we-can”-ism – is the force that drives mechanical watchmaking’s ongoing appeal in an era where we have the time in our pockets.
With independent makers nailing that ethos with such finesse, little wonder young, discerning consumers – in search of pieces they can expound on, rather than simply flaunt – are buying in.
Author: Nick Scott
If you are a fan of independent watchmaking, you may enjoy reading our review of the MB&F SP ONE, the Bell & Ross BR-X3 Night Vision and the Laurent Ferrier Classic Tourbillon Teal.
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