The watch industry in Finland

I make watches in Jyväskylä, a city whose last clock factory closed decades ago. When people ask about the watch industry in Finland, the accurate answer takes some telling: this country produced one of Europe's great rural clock dynasties, skipped industrialisation almost entirely, and then — through one small school — supplied the world with some of its finest living watchmakers. Here is that history as I understand it, with the sources checked.

Who were the Könni clockmakers?

The Könnis were a family of blacksmith-clockmakers in Ilmajoki, Ostrobothnia, who built clocks across four generations from roughly the 1750s to 1865. The founder, Jaakko Jaakonpoika, born in 1721, bought the Könni homestead in Peltoniemi village in 1757 and ran clockmaking and smithing alongside farming. His son Juho Könni (1754–1815) expanded the workshop and invented a semi-automatic gear-cutting machine the family called the keervärkki. The artistic peak came with the next generation, the brothers Jaakko Juhonpoika (1774–1830) and Juho Juhonpoika (1782–1855).

The range was astonishing for a farm workshop: pocket watches, longcase clocks and tower clocks, and beyond timekeeping, guns, locks, carriages, surgical instruments and saw blades. The most famous single work is the tower clock of the Government Palace on Senate Square in Helsinki, built by Jaakko Ala-Könni in 1822. Total production was modest by factory standards but remarkable for a farm: estimates run from tens of clocks in the first generations to hundreds in the later ones — perhaps close to two thousand in all, which counted as near-industrial output in a country that had not yet industrialised.

The tradition ended in 1865, when the last master, Juho Jaakonpoika Ala-Könni, died leaving no sons to continue. Cheap imported clocks had already eaten into the market before that. What survives is considerable: a museum in Ilmajoki, a family association founded in 1947, and a place in the culture itself — Könni clocks have been called Finland's first brand, and they appear in Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers.

One story deserves flagging precisely because it travels so well. The Könnin kuokkamies — a hoeing automaton said to have cleared fields on its own until a farmhand forgot to turn it and it marched into a river — is folklore. The family association and every serious source present it as a folk tale, and so do I. The documented machines are impressive enough.

Was there clockmaking in Finland before the Könnis?

Yes, but it arrived from outside. Professional clockmakers in 1500s and 1600s Finland were itinerant foreigners, mainly from Germany, with others from Tallinn, Sweden and Norway. The first permanently resident clockmaker, Laurens Meyer, was called from Vyborg in 1627 to build a replacement tower clock, which he completed a year later. Through the 1600s, tower clocks spread across Finnish towns, mounted on town halls and churches, striking the hours and half-hours.

Training followed the old apprentice–journeyman–master path, and the trade kept flowing toward opportunity: records suggest that in the 1890s more Finnish watchmakers worked in tsarist St. Petersburg than in Finland itself.

Did Finland ever have a watch industry?

A wristwatch movement has never been mass-produced in Finland — that is the plainest fact in this whole story. Finland briefly had a clock industry, born of circumstance. Under wartime import restrictions, roughly twenty firms sprang up in the 1940s making wall and table clocks: the Valmet instrument factory in Tampere, Vallilan Kellotehdas in Helsinki with its Ready wall clocks, and Kelloteollisuus Oy here in Jyväskylä under the Syke name, among smaller makers. Over half of these closed within a decade, only two lasted past twenty years, and the rest collapsed once imports reopened. The whole episode lasted about as long as a single watchmaker's career.

Is Leijona a Finnish watch factory?

Leijona has always been an import brand — a fact worth stating clearly, because generations of Finns assumed otherwise. The watchmaker Johan Werner Lindroos (1870–1937), a wholesaler and retailer in Tampere, founded the brand in 1907. He imported Swiss watches sold under a lion trademark and registered the Finnish translation, Leijona, at a time when Finnish-language names carried strong national feeling. In November 1918 the brothers Jalo, Urho and Oiva Perkko founded Oy Perkko Ab, bought Lindroos's business the following February, and the Perkko family owns Leijona to this day.

The watches themselves were Swiss mechanical pieces under a Finnish label, shifting to Japanese quartz movements from the mid-1970s and later partly to Chinese production. By most accounts Leijona has been Finland's best-selling watch brand for over a century. In October 2021 the story looped back on itself in a way I enjoy: the Leijona Heritage 1907 collection, mechanical Swiss-made watches produced in collaboration with Kari Voutilainen in Môtiers, with models named Jalo, Urho and Oiva after the brothers.

What is the Finnish School of Watchmaking?

The Kelloseppäkoulu, founded in Lahti in 1944, is the institution that explains modern Finnish watchmaking. Its first class of eleven students began under the watchmaker Erkki Saras, and the original curriculum drew on the Glashütte horology school in Germany. In 1959, when new school buildings were completed, it moved to Tapiola in Espoo, and it has worked in Leppävaara since 2007. It is run by the Foundation for the Advancement of Watchmaking, charges its students no tuition, and teaches watchmaking and micromechanics alongside a two-year English-language Independent Watchmaker course with international placements.

For a small school it casts a long shadow. Monocle has profiled it, The New York Times covered it in 2025, and its alumni include Kari Voutilainen, Stepan Sarpaneva, Torsti Laine, Antti Rönkkö and watchmakers who have worked at Greubel Forsey. I trained there too — I graduated as a micromechanic in 2024, and there is more about that on the maker page.

Who is Kari Voutilainen?

Kari Voutilainen, born in Rovaniemi in 1962, is the most decorated Finnish watchmaker in history. He graduated from the Finnish School of Watchmaking in 1986, took WOSTEP's complicated-watch course, spent 1990 to 1999 restoring high-grade pieces at Parmigiani's Mesure et Art du Temps, then taught at WOSTEP before founding his own atelier in Môtiers, in the Val-de-Travers, in 2002. His first collection appeared at Baselworld in 2005, the same year his Masterpiece 6 became the world's first decimal minute repeater. He has since won ten Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève awards, built a vertically integrated group — the Comblémine dial factory, Voutilainen & Cattin cases, a guilloché workshop — and in 2021 became CEO and co-owner of the revived Urban Jürgensen. His annual output is, by most accounts, under sixty pieces.

Who makes watches in Finland today?

A handful of independents, each with a distinct signature, plus two electronics giants. Stepan Sarpaneva, born in Turku in 1970 into a family of designers, graduated from the school in 1992, worked for Piaget, Parmigiani, Vianney Halter and Christophe Claret, and founded Sarpaneva Watches in 2003 at Helsinki's Cable Factory; his moon-face dials are recognised worldwide. In 2004 he added S.U.F Helsinki for Finnish-assembled series watches. Antti Rönkkö in Espoo, after fourteen years at Nokia Research Centre, presented his own calibre AR1 in the Steel Labyrinth in 2013. In Rajamäki, Simo Ylitalo has run Rajamäen Kellotehdas since 2007, building automatic wristwatches to order as a one-man operation. Torsti Laine, who entered the school in 2011 after a career in computer science and won the A. Lange & Söhne Watchmaking Excellence Award in 2014 while still a student, makes his guilloché-dialed watches in the watchmaking towns of Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. Aarni builds wooden-cased quartz watches under the Design from Finland label.

Then there are the machines most Finns actually wear: Suunto, founded in 1936 by the compass inventor Tuomas Vohlonen, still develops and manufactures sports watches in Vantaa, and Polar Electro, founded in 1977 by Seppo Säynäjäkangas, pioneered the wireless heart-rate monitor and has been building training watches ever since. That is Finland's large-scale watch manufacturing — electronic, and world-class at it.

Put together, the mechanical output of every Finnish independent amounts to some hundreds of pieces a year. Whether that counts as an industry is a fair question; the benches exist either way, and they are busy.

Where does Reigi fit?

Reigi is one atelier in that handful. I founded it in Jyväskylä in 2023, and every watch is designed and built in one workshop: I brush and polish the octagonal steel case by hand, build the dial, and start from a Swiss ETA 6498 movement that we buy, then strip, modify and refinish in-house. The dial of our first watch, The Octagon, carries a hand-woven sterling-silver mesh — to our knowledge the first on a wristwatch dial. The details of how each piece comes together are on the craft page, and I have written separately about why we build in Finland.