These watch brands may be lesser known outside of watch-collecting circles, their fascinating designs that build upon the long-standing traditions of watch making but totally reimagine traditional wristwatches. We take a look at some of the most innovative watch brands and their most avant-garde designs that will intrigue any onlooker, watch fan or not!

1. Urwerk EMC Watch

Founded in 1995 by Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner, the independent Swiss-brand Urwerk is known for its incredible mind-bending, ornate, and fascinatingly complex designs.

Radically unconventional, Urwerk watches barely resemble a wristwatch in any traditional sense, but their design and complications are firmly rooted in classic watchmaking techniques. To wit, Urwerk’s first watch collection, the Urwerk-101, featured a wandering hour display, a complication that dates back to the 1600s, that shows the hour with a three-armed disc that points to the minutes which are listed on an arc-shaped track at the bottom of the watch case.

Urwerk continues to surprise and delight its fans with its unrivaled creativity. And, in 2014, the brand was awarded both the Innovation Watch Prize and the Mechanical Exception Watch Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève for its EMC watch that used their proprietary in-house EMC Movement that could measure the oscillation rate of the balance wheel and display the variance on a timing indicator.

2. Roger Dubuis Excalibur Knights of the Round Table

Named after its co-founder Roger Dubuis, a highly skilled watch engineer who worked at Patek Philippe before breaking out on his own, the Swiss watch manufacturer Roger Dubuis takes a similar approach as Urwerk to combining time-honored complications with extremely creative designs.

Roger Dubuis boasts a thrilling collection of complex and intricate skeleton watches and women’s watches with dramatically stretched roman numeral hour markers. One of its standout designs is the Excalibur Knights of the Round Table which features 12 miniature knights, sculpted with immaculate detail, cast in 18K rose gold and arranged around a dial of black jade.

But what really distinguishes Roger Dubuis is that each of its watches meets the exacting standards of the Geneva Seal, a centuries-old award given by the Bureau Officiel de l’Etat Pour le Contrôle Facultatif des Montres de Genève to watches of the highest class that pass its rigorous processing and movement inspection. Roger Dubuis’s commitment to the highest level of quality and

3. MB&F HM4 Thunderbolt

Independent Swiss watch brand MB&F is named after its founder Maximilian Büsser and his coterie of friends and fellow watchmaking innovators, including Peter Speake-Marin, Laurent Besse, and Eric Giroud. Backed by the experience and expertise of this watchmaking collective, MB&F has churned out some of the most impressive and innovative watches in recent history.

MB&F divides its watch collections into three core groups: Legacy Machines, comparatively simple round watches with a signature top-center balance wheel; Horological Machines, unprecedented and unparalleled avant-garde designs with unusual watch case shapes and dials; and Performance Art, extremely limited-edition timepieces that demonstrate the watchmaking mastery of the brand.

Aesthetically speaking, MB&F’s futuristic designs draw a lot of inspiration from science-fiction and engineering. One strong example of the brand’s eccentric watches is the HM4 Thunderbolt which is modeled after a World War II-era A-10 aircrafts with its dual engine-shaped “pods” (as MB&F refers to them) that display the time and power-reserve indicator.

4. Greubel Forsey Tourbillon 24 Secondes

Before we dive into Greubel Forsey, a quick refresher: the tourbillon was developed in 1795 and patented in 1801 by Abraham-Louis Breguet. To greatly simplify, gravity can throw off the timing regulator of a watch; a tourbillon aims to counter the drag of gravity by placing the timing regulator for the escapement into a rotating cage to make an overall more accurate timepiece. Today, tourbillons are generally considered more of demonstration of watchmaking know-how than a necessity to improve accuracy.

Greubel Forsey’s watches largely center on the tourbillon escapement which the brand continues to incorporate into their designs in increasingly novel ways. One standout model for the watchmaker is the Tourbillon 24 Secondes which, without delving too far into the mechanics, features a fast-rotating tourbillon, positioned at a 25-degree angle, to make for an even more precise tourbillon.

In turn, Greubel Forsey has received industry-wide praise for its technical achievements in haute horology with multiple awards from the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève and Watch World Awards in the brand’s short lifetime.

Once you have the big names (think Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, and more from our list of 10 essential watches) in your watch collection line-up, grow your collection with some of the most important pieces from today’s new (often independent) watch brands.

Because the independents are typically uninhibited by big corporate politics, they can invest their time and effort into taking creative license in both design and movements. The results are stellar, with many of the young brands (some founded or purchased and re-born just within the past decade or 20 years) introducing cutting-edge and avant-garde luxury watches that most likely will be the next generation of must-have icons for collectors and watch lovers.

7 Iconic Watches for the Modern Collector

Richard Mille RM 11-03 McLaren Automatic Flyback Chronograph

For the gear head who loves incredible precision, fine mechanics, and cutting-edge materials, Richard Mille is a must-own. This brand, which was founded in 1999, is known for its use of high-tech materials and its inventive movements, some complete with tourbillons suspended by cables. Almost any Richard Mille will become iconic, but we love the RM 11-03 McLaren automatic flyback chronograph, inspired by Formula 1 technologies.

HYT H1

HYT is the first to use a watch’s worst enemy — liquid — to display the time. (To wrap your head around this revolutionary and mind-bending technology, read about HYT here.) While there are several great iterations, including the HYT Skull Bad Boy, the 2012 debut model, the HYT H1, outfitted with bellows and capillaries, will most likely be the one to hold its value.

MB&F HM6 Alien Nation

Founded in 2005 and led by watch industry veteran Max Busser, the whimsical brand MB&F’s philosophy is, “A creative adult is a child who survived.” MB&F is all about collaborations with great watchmaking minds and the space-age looking timepieces it creates are not only three-dimensional (meaning the dial has recessed and raised levels to its detail), but also offer unique concepts, like the tiny alien sculptures housed in the HM6 Alien Nation watch, destined for iconic stature.

F.P. Journe Dead Seconds Tourbillon

For those who love absolute classic watchmaking with modern mechanics, look no further than F.P. Journe. Founded in 1999 by master watchmaker and inventor Francois-Paul Journe, F.P. Journe’s watches are a significant but worthwhile investment. Our top pick is the (appropriately named) Dead Seconds Tourbillon, with the “dead seconds function” that ensures the seconds hand will stop on each second indicator for the duration of the second.

Greubel Forsey Double Tourbillon 30° Asymétrique

If you want to own one of the most horologically precise instruments in the world, invest in a Greubel Forsey Double Tourbillon 30° Asymétrique. While co-founders Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey worked together on inventive concepts for five years, the actual founding of the Greubel Forsey brand wasn’t until 2004. Since then, the brand has created nearly two dozen movements and half a dozen inventions. So advanced is this brand that it is difficult to pick one iconic piece, as most will go down in history as exceptional, but we recommend one of the brand’s earlier developments: the Greubel Forsey Double Tourbillon 30° Asymétrique.

Bovet Amadeo Series

Bovet’s roots date back centuries and the brand was defunct for years before being revived in the late 20th century by Pascal Raffy in 2000. After Raffy took ownership of the brand, Bovet immediately set about taking the world by storm with creative and complex watches that appeal to contemporary collectors with an affinity for timepieces—namely pocket watches—from a bygone era. One key collection is the Amadeo series with patented technology that enables the watch to deftly transform from a wristwatch to a distinctive pocket watch to a bedside clock.

Ressence Type 3
Ressence is an intriguing brand and holds a special fascination among engineering and science lovers. Originally founded in 2010 in Belgium, Ressence’s name is a cross between Renaissance and essence, and the concept behind its designs is unique; the watch features a patented time display that uses graphic elements (including disks and rings) to form the dial. While it looks complex, it is simple to read the time. The one that may reach “Iconic Status” is not the first one, but the Type 3. The watch is one of the first to eliminate the crown. Additionally, while it uses a mechanical ETA movement, the timepiece features two separate sealed chambers, one filled with oil below the dial, and the other containing the base caliber filled with air. No other watch can claim this distinction.

Laurent Ferrier Galet Series
Founded in 2010, by the master watchmaker Laurent Ferrier, the eponymous brand is squarely focused on creating haute-horlogerie timepieces, hand-building a few hundred highly-limited timepieces each year. The timepieces he creates are classically elegant, often incorporating artistic elements. The standout series is the simply beautiful Galet collection. In the Galet, Laurent Ferrier incorporates a Tourbillon Double Hairspring timepiece in a superbly understated package. In fact, if one glances at the watch, its complexity is totally non-existent, as Ferrier eliminates the tourbillon aperture on the dial. The beauty within is not immediately showcased; it is a quiet secret that only the owner knows.