“My goal was to answer the question, if we existed fifty years ago, what would that look like?

I met Andrea Furlan at a panel during Geneva Watch Days on watchmaking design for women. We exchanged pleasantries and then I expressed my disappointment for not being able to see the showroom during Geneva Watch Days. He asked me when I was leaving for back home and we set an appointment for Monday, the morning of the day of my flight. The panel was interesting, I enjoyed it. I noticed that he was locked in, too. A male watch designer amongst a sea of women, listening for answers alongside us.

It can be easy to simplify Furlan Marri as yet another glorious micro brand, creating homages to the timeless classics that we all love and admire. My experience on the sales floor had lead me to assume that such was the Patek 1463 case.

“This reminds me of the watch my grandfather used to wear.” “I think my boss has a similar one.” Or a terrified teenager shrugging off of the Sabbia Rose because they assume it’s full gold. In this economy?

Visiting the workshop was, fully and utterly, the cherry on the top of an absolutely transformational Geneva Watch Days experience. I did not come prepared. Obviously, I was expecting to try on some cool watches. I was not expecting however, to have my nose in my phone the whole time, taking note after note, typing like a madman, as Andrea talked me through each and every painstaking detail that he designed, alongside renowned collector Hamad al Marri. Walking past their GPHG award, framed fan artwork, and the NYT article, he lead me to the back, to his own workspace, as full of as much memorabilia as a child’s bedroom, if that child was an insanely intense watch fanatic. My friends in the industry will understand this to be a compliment on my part, and I hope that you, as a reader will agree. Each piece of memorabilia was directly hemmed into the history of his watches, to the point to where I honestly couldn’t tell which came first, the watchmaker or the mecaquartz enthusiast.

So speaking of mecaquartz, let’s talk about it. Mecaquartz, if you don't know, was born out of pure spite. During the Quartz Crisis of the '80s, when battery power was busy gutting Swiss watchmaking from the inside out, Frédéric Piguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre refused to let the industry lose its soul along with its market share — so they built a movement that kept quartz accuracy but bolted a genuine mechanical module onto it, just so the chronograph pushers would still feel like something. It is a romantic relic of an industry fighting for its identity back, and it makes sense that Andrea would be obsessed with it.

Now Furlan Marri doesn't produce a Swiss mecaquartz caliber — theirs comes out of Japan, by way of Seiko — but what he's built around it, down to the "Tasti Tondi" round pushers borrowed from Francois Borgel’s design language, is an entire mythology stitched onto a movement most people had forgotten existed. Talking to him about it felt less like a product briefing and more like listening to someone defend a friend's honor.

During Geneva Watch Days, I also had the exceptional pleasure of chatting with Mr. Jack Forster, a man whom I have revered since the start of my career in watches. After I challenged him to a game of Snake, on a very old flip phone, we had a very exciting chat about mine own generation’s approach to collecting watches, and how it has been altered by the economy. It’s a topic that I have been pondering for quite a while, so you can imagine how quickly I jumped at the chance to give him my opinion. It was honestly less of an opinion, more of a fear. That the younger generation of watch collectors are rising up, less interested in the mythological aspect of what it means to own a Swiss watch, and more interested to achieve a quick, perceived status symbol. If you have read The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, you are familiar with today’s society’s struggle with keeping up with consistent myths, and therefore, important lessons of society, and historical approaches to morality. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. One of the reasons that I respect homage pieces is for this very reason— I feel that it pays tribute to the mythology of the Swiss watch industry, without taking away from the name. It democratizes legendary Swiss watchmaking, and keeps the dream alive. My visit to the Furlan Marri studio proved to me that no one is working harder to keep the dream alive for us young folk, than Andrea Furlan and Hamad al Marri.