Five High-End Watch Collaborations I’d Love To See Happen

When I went hands-on with the Ulysse Nardin × Urwerk UR-Freak late last year, I walked away genuinely surprised, and that doesn’t happen to me much anymore. I never saw that partnership coming. Ulysse Nardin had never made a collaboration watch in its modern history, and Urwerk has always felt like a creative universe of exactly two people. Yet the moment the UR-Freak existed, it seemed inevitable. The Freak’s rotating carousel and Urwerk’s wandering satellites were clearly meant to orbit each other all along.

Crucially, it wasn’t a logo swap either. The two teams engineered a new caliber with around 150 new components just to make their signature ideas coexist. That’s a real collaboration, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. If two brands that different can produce something so coherent, what other pairings could do the same? What follows is my wishlist of five collaborations between high-end brands that I’d love to see happen. Consider it an open letter to five pairs of CEOs.

The rules of the game

Before we start matchmaking, let’s define what makes a great collaboration. After all, the watch world is drowning in bad ones. A colorway and a co-branded case back don’t count. Judged against the UR-Freak, two things matter. First, the pairing has to surprise you. If you could have predicted it from a marketing plan, it’s a partnership, not a collaboration. Second, the two brands need a shared obsession that they approach from different angles. Ulysse Nardin and Urwerk had both spent decades rethinking how a watch displays time; they’d just never compared notes. With that in mind, here are my five, saving the most realistic for last.

A. Lange & Söhne × Grand Seiko: the finishing summit

These are, for my money, the two great finishing cultures operating outside the Swiss mainstream, and they’ve never had a reason to talk to each other. Glashütte gives us German silver, hand-engraved balance cocks, and black polish so perfect it turns steel into liquid. Japan gives us Zaratsu-polished cases and dials that capture birch forests and snowfields. The vocabularies couldn’t be more different, but if you ask me, the underlying religion is the same — quiet perfection over spectacle.

What makes the pairing click conceptually is that both brands built their modern identities through discipline rather than noise. Lange was refounded in 1990 and had to prove that Saxony belonged at the top table of watchmaking. Grand Seiko spent decades being dismissed as “just a Seiko” before the collecting world caught up. Both know what it’s like to out-finish the establishment from the outside.

Honestly, a design mashup of these two sounds terrible, and that’s not what I’m after anyway. What I want is more of a summit. Imagine a single time-only caliber designed together, with components traveling between Glashütte and Japan so that each team finishes the other’s work. Or maybe it shouldn’t be one watch at all. Picture a pair of them, one assembled in Saxony and one in Japan, sharing the same movement but each finished by the other side. Whether Grand Seiko’s finishers could resist regraining a three-quarter plate their way is exactly the kind of question I want answered. I can’t think of a collaboration that would teach us more about what “finishing” actually means in 2026.

De Bethune × Ming: chasing the light

Every De Bethune watch I’ve handled does something wonderfully strange with light. Mirror-polished titanium, flame-blued surfaces, dials that look like deep space photographed from a passing ship… Denis Flageollet builds movements like a scientist and cases like a sculptor, and the result always feels lit from within.

Ming, meanwhile, was founded by a photographer, and it shows. Ming Thein composes watches the way he composes images, with gradient dials, floating sapphires, luminous materials used as design elements rather than as utility. Both brands are obsessed with light. They just come at it from opposite ends — De Bethune through metallurgy and mechanics, Ming through optics and composition.

Yes, they play in different price brackets, and that’s exactly what makes the idea interesting. What happens when a photographer gets to compose with De Bethune’s palette of blued titanium and silicon? And what happens when Flageollet’s laboratory has to serve someone else’s eye?

If I were pointing them anywhere, I’d point them at the night. De Bethune already builds starry skies from tiny white-gold pins, and Ming treats lume as a compositional tool rather than an afterthought. A watch conceived entirely around what it does after dark is the obvious shared territory.

Image: A Collected Man

Kari Voutilainen × Credor: finishing the bridge

This one is cheating slightly because half of it already exists. Philippe Dufour famously advised the craftspeople at the Credor Micro Artist Studio, sharing the finishing techniques that shaped the Eichi. Voutilainen, for his part, has worked with Japanese lacquer masters for years, putting some of the finest urushi work in the world on his dials and movements. The bridge between Swiss handicraft and Japanese handicraft has been under construction for two decades. Someone just needs to officially walk across it.

That someone should be Kari. His guilloché, balance wheels, and teaching instincts (he has spent years training the next generation) make him the natural counterpart to a studio that treats watchmaking as a meditative craft. And Credor remains criminally underappreciated outside Japan. A collaboration like this would introduce the Micro Artist Studio to thousands of collectors who have never heard the name.

The concept watch writes itself — a hand-wound caliber developed between Môtiers and Shiojiri, urushi and guilloché sharing one dial, every component finished to a standard neither side would soften for the other. And if they wanted to be really ambitious, both sides know how to make a watch chime. The Micro Artist Studio built its reputation on the Spring Drive Sonnerie, and Kari has decimal repeaters in his back catalog. A joint chiming watch, with two cultures’ ideas of what a bell should sound like, would be the kind of thing I’d lose sleep over. Just imagine these two craft cultures meeting as equals.

Bvlgari × Piaget: finishing the argument

For the better part of a decade, these two have been locked in the most entertaining arms race in watchmaking, trading world records for thinness like prizefighters trading rounds. Piaget’s Altiplano Ultimate Concept compressed a mechanical watch into two millimeters. Bvlgari’s Octo Finissimo series has claimed record after record across tourbillons, chronographs, and perpetual calendars. Each brand’s engineering department must have a dartboard with the other’s logo on it.

That is precisely why they should team up. Imagine the two record holders pooling everything they’ve learned about case-as-mainplate construction, wafer-thin gear trains, and the dark art of making a 2mm-thin watch survive real life. One joint watch, one final record, co-signed by both names, and then they both retire the rivalry undefeated.

There’s extra motivation now too. Richard Mille crashed their private party with the RM UP-01, and Bvlgari had to claw the overall record back. If I could steer the concept, though, I wouldn’t chase another bare-caliper record at all. I’d want the thinnest watch someone could genuinely wear every day, water resistance and warranty included. That’s a harder problem than shaving off another tenth of a millimeter, and both sides know it.

It will never happen, of course. Bvlgari answers to LVMH and Piaget to Richemont, and luxury groups don’t share their toys. But that corporate impossibility is exactly what earns this pairing its place on a wishlist. The UR-Freak taught us that competitors can build something together and both come out bigger. And I’d bet the engineers on both sides have thought about it more than their bosses would like.

Greubel Forsey × Fam Al Hut: the one that might actually happen?

I’ve saved this pairing for last because it’s the only one with a real pulse. On paper, it sounds absurd. Greubel Forsey has spent more than 20 years in La Chaux-de-Fonds turning the inclined, multi-axis tourbillon into a complete artistic language, from the Double Tourbillon 30° to the Quadruple Tourbillon. Fam Al Hut has existed for barely two years. And yet, the young brand from Chongqing arrived with the Möbius Mark 1, the smallest biaxial tourbillon wristwatch ever made, and walked off with the Audacity Prize at the most recent GPHG.

Same obsession, opposite ends of the timeline. One side has decades of accumulated mastery; the other just went for it. That’s the UR-Freak dynamic all over again. And the roles practically assign themselves: Fam Al Hut has proven a multiaxis tourbillon can be small, and Greubel Forsey has proven it can be perfect. A compact, wearable, double-signed tourbillon would give each side something the other doesn’t have.

And here’s the thing: it’s not just my fantasy. When Marko Kocina asked Greubel Forsey CEO Michel Nydegger in a recent interview which watch brand he’d like to collaborate with, Nydegger didn’t reach for a safe answer. He named Fam Al Hut. For the head of one of haute horlogerie’s most uncompromising houses to name a two-year-old Chinese independent is remarkable in itself. Everyone respects Greubel Forsey; the surprise is that the respect clearly flows the other way too.

A multiaxis tourbillon conceived between La Chaux-de-Fonds and Shanghai, carrying both signatures? Twenty years ago, that sentence would’ve been unthinkable. Now, it might be one phone call away, and I really hope somebody makes that call.

We can but hope these watch collaborations come to pass…

Here’s the open secret the UR-Freak reminded us of: collaboration has always been part of high-end watchmaking. Complications specialists, dial makers, case makers, and movement suppliers have quietly shaped “in-house” watches for as long as the industry has existed. The only new thing is putting two names on the dial and being proud of it.

So consider this my letter to these 10 CEOs. Some of these pairings are corporate impossibilities, some are romantic long shots, and one, if a certain interview is anything to go by, might already be brewing. Now it’s your turn: which two brands would you lock in a workshop together? Let me know in the comments.