From the Finnish School of Watchmaking to a bench of our own

Finland has exactly one school for this craft: the Finnish School of Watchmaking in Espoo. I graduated from it in 2024 as a micromechanic — the discipline of making small mechanical parts exist, precisely, from raw material.

People imagine watchmaking school as rows of students bent over tweezers, assembling. There is that. But the education that changed me was subtractive: turning, milling, filing steel and brass to tolerances where a careless breath shows up on the micrometer. You learn that the part doesn’t care about your excuses. It is either right, or it is material for the scrap bin — and the scrap bin teaches faster.

The wall clock in France

The proudest work of my studies happened abroad: an Erasmus+ collaboration with the horology school in Morteau, France — one of Europe’s most respected watchmaking schools — where I had a central role in building a wall-clock movement from the ground up. Wheels, pinions, frames — a mechanism that had not existed, brought to running order by student hands. It was the first time I felt the full arc of this craft: drawing, raw material, machining, finishing, and finally, motion.

I came home from that project knowing two things. I could make a mechanism exist from nothing. And I was never going to be satisfied assembling someone else’s.

Graduating into a country without an industry

In Switzerland, a graduate walks into an ecosystem — suppliers, ateliers, a century of infrastructure. In Finland there is no watch industry waiting. You can see that as a dead end. We saw it as a blank sheet: no conventions to inherit, no shortcuts disguised as tradition, nobody to borrow credibility from. Either the work stands on its own, or it doesn’t.

Reigi had been founded in 2023, while I was still studying; from the summer of 2024 it became my whole working life. The bench in Jyväskylä is where everything you see on these pages is made. The master watchmaker’s examination still lies ahead — as it should. A craft like this is supposed to keep you a student for a long time.