It is unusual for a new independent watchmaker to capture the imagination of big league watch collectors who own or are familiar with the best timepieces that watch brands have to offer. And to that extent the tiny Swiss watchmaker Berneron — it made just a couple of dozen pieces each year over the last two years since it started in 2023 — is a bit of an exception. It’s Mirage series of watches, which could well have been designed by Salvador Dali, was voted the best watch of 2024 by a GQ panel of watch aficionados beating a whole bunch of timepieces from mainstream producers.

While very innovative in its styling, it was, in esssence, a regular two-hand calibre and there wasn’t great deal to talk about there apart from the design. Recently, however, Berneron has changed that with its Quantieme Annuel annual calendar watches. The readout is in a cross formation with hour-minute-second read top to bottom and day-date-month left to right. At first glance one could mistake it for something that came from A. Lange & Sons. But it did not. It came out of a new manufacture in the Swiss canton of Neuchatel. And it looks impressive but quite understated as well.

At the heart of the new watch is the in-house Calibre 595 which features a unique ‘cross architecture’ in the form of a double regulator (one for the time and the other for the calendar) consisting of four instantaneous jumping apertures, two sweeping hands, and a retrograde date. So both hands and counters jump to change and don’t move progressively like usual watches. Which needs an instant surge of energy at times. Storing and delivering that energy without affecting the accuracy of timekeeping had been a real challenge for this project, as in some cases (such as midnight on December 31) all five jumps occur simultaneously. The solution was a construction in which the movement stores energy in four different places over the course of 12 hours, 24 hours, seven days and 31 days to activate the various jumps. And it does not have to be set during a full year. Just regular winding is enough.

While all of that sounds quite esoteric, and it is somewhat, it does not lose sight of usability. Particular attention was paid to make reading the date and time easy and intuitive, while regulators can often be a a touch difficult to read with different dials showing the hours and the minutes. In fact, the way the watch is read, in straight lines from top to bottom and left to right is an effort to make it easy to use. It is also easy to set using the crown and a pair of pushers on either side of its platinum case which has a flip cover or the sapphire crystal on the back that can be opened with a pusher on the crown. The case has been been given the protection of a thin layer of stainless steel in places that are prone to dings and scratches.

Berneron, which is a family-run company founded by Sylvain Berneron and Marie-Alix Berneron with their own savings, aims to make two dozen watches of each of its collections every year. It also wants to introduce a watch model a year. It sees its watchmaking capacity going up to 600 a year by 2035. That kind of explains the Quantieme Annuel’s eye-watering price of 140,000 Swiss francs (about Rs 1.55 crore, give or take).

 Pictures courtesy Berneron