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- [00:00]
A
Foreign Watch fans and welcome back to Geneva watch days 2025 in the glass igloo outside the pavilion by Lac Laman. We are joined by one of our favorite friends of the fair and in real life, Mr. Josh Shapiro, all the way from the United States of America. How are you, Josh?
- [00:21]
B
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.
- [00:23]
A
It's a real pleasure. I know you two have spent lot of time together the last couple of days, so I'm going to kick this over to Alon to conduct the interview.
- [00:30]
C
Jo, it's good to see you, buddy. Good morning. We're actually streaming, so we started doing video on the Real Time show. Rob is right. I've actually seen quite a bit of you, and strangely enough, I can't get enough of you. And I've been thinking, why you are a madman. But the best there is, the. The best there is because I have a cognitive dissonance. You're such a humble, friendly guy that has a sense of humor. Yeah. And why are you a madman? You're on a pursuit that. I don't even know what the pursuit is because what a lot of people don't know. You're the first again to make a watch that can bear the title made in the US Maybe. Let's kick off there. Dear Josh, why are you the first? Because you are a young watchmaker, literally young in age. Your company has been there for quite some time, but it's young considered to the Swiss behemoths. So for their nieces that don't know. And the funny thing is, I spoke to many industry insights the last few days. They don't even know how difficult is to make a American watch.
- [01:46]
B
Yeah. Well, I started the brand about nine years ago, and I just had a feeling that someday Donald Trump would become president. I just really didn't want to pay a 39% tariff to import parts from Switzerland and wall sites. And so that's it. That's the main reason.
- [02:04]
C
What did I tell you guys? Sense of humor.
- [02:07]
A
It is remarkable. Okay. Because, like, as. As we know, I'm a watchmaker and I'm a little bit particular about certain things, shall we say? You know, you have to do it all.
- [02:16]
C
Understatement.
- [02:17]
A
Understatement.
- [02:17]
C
Yeah.
- [02:19]
A
I look at your watches, I look at your dials. I look at the way that you go through things, the processes that you've done, the diligence that you apply to every watch you make, the equipment that you've reassembled yourself and maintained. Your workshop, to me, looks like a museum Like a cultural artifact that we should all go and celebrate. In fact, if you want to sell tickets to your workshop, I'd gladly buy one. You know, that's a good idea. And yet, at the same time, and we meet a lot of people in watchmaking, everybody is. Well, almost everybody is unequivocally lovely. But some people are very, very much troubled by certain processes and ways that their minds work and locked into that. But you're not. Your work suggests that you wouldn't be. Because it's like, how do you do it if you're not? How do you put so many hours into a dial, so much care and attention to everything that you do, and still just be so relaxed and so kind and so open and so friendly? And, I mean, we met a year ago, maybe, and today you ran into me on the street, and you're just like, hey, Rob. And I was. I felt like, oh, that's my old friend.
- [03:22]
B
Yeah.
- [03:22]
A
You know, and that's, I think, for all of us, like, as watch buyers, that's what we want. We want to buy watches from people who we like. It helps when they do work that you do. But tell us about a little bit of the personal life behind it. Like, what does it take from you? Like, what. What's the strain of spending all that? Does it impact you personally? Do you find it difficult to stay as friendly and open and calm and relaxed as you are?
- [03:48]
B
Well, first off, that's very kind. My wife might disagree with you on working the set.
- [03:52]
A
I'm sure she gets the worst of it.
- [03:56]
B
Really. Early on, a mentor of mine, a guy named David Lindau, who's an incredible clock maker and has a foundation for guilloche and ornamental tomb. Fantastic guy. But he gave me stellar advice right at the beginning of this journey. And he said, there are two types of craftsmen. There's one craftsman that looks at his work and says, it's perfect. This is the best out there. It can't get any better. And that person will never get better. That person has automatically capped his skill. And there's another type of craftsman that takes a look at his work, especially his early work, and says, I have so much to learn. I have so much to grow. There's so much more to do here. And that person has unlimited potential. And so I try to keep myself in that constant learner state. And so it, you know, it started off with skeletonizing watches and then grew into making guilloche dials and then making cases. And then now we're making movements at every single part of that step is exceptionally humbling. And there's so much to learn and there's so much knowledge to learn from other people out there. And I think, if anything, staying in that mindset keeps me very, very humble. It's true, too. Like every watchmaker is humbled constantly. We're trying to do micro mechanics at a crazy, tiny level. And at the same time, we're trying to make those parts exceptionally beautiful. And so there's constant problems, constant difficulties working at this scale. And if you get cocky, it'll start showing up in your work.
- [05:41]
C
It's interesting. Rob, good question. Because I've hung out a lot with Josh, and he says that in his previous professional life, he was a teacher. So we hung out a lot. We met a lot of new people together, and when they asked what he fits, he actually still says, I'm a teacher. Did you notice that, Josh?
- [06:01]
B
Subconscious trauma.
- [06:06]
C
So that underlies the modesty. But the answer lies in that a teacher obviously wants to realize. The sooner you realize that you think you know everything, you realize that you don't know anything. So you to circle back because. Rob, high tap the operation question.
- [06:29]
B
Sorry, sorry.
- [06:30]
C
Right, sorry. Made in the US So you are. You made and are making your life very difficult. Yeah. So what? So nine years ago you started with skeletonizing and guillosh, and then you. That. That could have been enough. Would have. Could have been enough. You would sell same quantity, maybe more, definitely make more profit. But that's not what you're doing it for. So what happened? I mean, I mean, we have two beautiful resurgence watches here. These are made in the U.S. it says it beautifully engraved in the bridges. And you're not even doing one. You can customize them.
- [07:12]
B
Oh, yes. Yeah.
- [07:13]
C
Choose three designs of bridges.
- [07:16]
B
It's very important customer expression in our watches. It's one of the hallmarks of our brand. And the made in the US is, you know, the United States used to have an incredible watch industry.
- [07:27]
A
Yeah.
- [07:28]
B
And just like nobody likes to see an animal go extinct. Like, it's painful to see something that was once amazing dwindle and become nothing. It's the same with the American watch industry. We had an incredible industry and it disappeared. I won't go into the politics of that. And when I pick up an old American pocket watch and see how beautiful it is and know that the company that made it is now an apartment building. It's very, very, very painful. And so it was like a dream someday that maybe I could do something to contribute to this industry coming back. And I just kind of held onto that and tried to see how far I could go. Made in the USA is also an extremely difficult label. Someone can look up, if they wanted to, what it means to be Swiss made or German made from. From these other countries, but in the United States it's all, or virtually all, and they're very, very serious about that. Meaning that a tremendous amount of the components in a watch need to be made in the United States of America. So there's no cutting corners with that. And if you put made in the USA and someone reports you, then the government does a full investigation. The quality of that label is very, very high. And so it meant for us that opinions, dial lines, all sorts of things. All the components that you don't see in a watch that in big horizontal industries are made by different suppliers, all have to be made in the workshop. Heat treating has to be done in our workshop. No cutting corners.
- [09:07]
A
I have a question. From my personal experience of making watches in Denmark, which is not a nation that is modern day known for horology, Archinaut started making cases in Denmark. And the reason why was because when we went to the Swiss industry and we had the technical drawings, they thought we were crazy. They were like, there's no way we can make this crown for the price that you want us to accept. They gave us a quote, but it's three times more than we wanted to pay. So we thought, oh, we'll find another manufacturer. Initially, of course, we looked to the east, but then we fortuitously ran into someone in, in Denmark, in a pub, as we do often, a hearing aid manufacturer.
- [09:53]
B
Wow.
- [09:54]
A
So the Danes are known very much for their hearing aids. Yeah. And their tolerances are even finer than ours. And we said, is there any way that we could borrow your CNC machines to make our cases? And they said, try it. Of course, you know, they were interested. They were compelled by the idea of helping a Danish company get off the ground. And so they've been making our cases for the last like three years. And the quality is exceptional. But there are nuances in watchmaking that there aren't in other industries. Even something as refined as making a hearing aid and explaining those problems, explaining those difficulties to, to a manufacturer that does great work and has great quality and huge standards is very difficult. How did you. I guess there aren't the infrastructures in place in the US to do all the things you need to do in America. And I want to know what kind of troubles you enter into, what kind of stumbling blocks, what kind of bottlenecks you Hit while you were trying to find people that not only could do what you needed them to, but understood what you asked them to do?
- [11:00]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the real simple and quick answer to that is we couldn't find suppliers in the US So we had to do it ourselves.
- [11:10]
A
Okay.
- [11:11]
B
Early on, there was a company that specialized in small medical components that was working with some watch brands to make watch components. But the difficulty, especially in making movement components, is you might pay these companies tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to do all the beginning prototype work for a movement. But anytime you're working with the movement, it's not one version you're making. You're making multiple iterations to get out all the issues and bugs in that. So it becomes extremely expensive to work with suppliers. I have no idea about watchmaking and to have that R and D process. So I knew right away that that's not going to fly in the US there's no one here that has the expertise in Switzerland. They know what they're doing. The industry never died here. They have that continuity. So if you go to them and you say you want a custom bridge for XYZ movement, they know that movement inside and out, and they know how to make that bridge with the least amount of issues possible. A supplier in the US that's, you know, making needles has no idea how to make a watch component. They might have machines that are capable of it. Completely lack the expertise.
- [12:31]
A
You know, there's a term that I heard once from a friend of mine who works in engineering. I'd never heard it outside of his industry, and I'm not even sure if he made it up, to be honest. But it stuck with me all the time. We talk about the longevity of components and what we mean by that is their material lifespan. But he mentioned that there's one thing in engineering that we should always consider, and that's the long ability of a component. Have you ever heard this? It's incredible. So what he means is how long a component will last when it's interacting with other components around it. And it always stuck with me in watchmaking because friction is our worst enemy. We're trying to minimize friction constantly. That's the goal with accuracy. That's the reason why we have jewels. It's the reason why we have the coaxial escapement that was Daniel's main dream, to reduce friction to the point at which it didn't exist.
- [13:23]
B
Harder than polished pivots.
- [13:25]
A
Yes, exactly. Exactly. All these tiny little things that we do to try and make the watch just fly and just live so there's no interruption to its function. And it stuck with me because tolerances, we talk about tolerances a lot. I think it's a word we throw around and people know what it means. But in practice, knowing what it means is a very different thing. Because if you're fixing a car, an old car, not a modern. I had no idea how to fix an electric car, like zero. I had something as simple as a smart car in the last 10 years. And every time it broke down, it was never a mechanical issue. It was always a technology like a digital soft ratio. Yeah, but if you're fixing an old car, you pop the hood, you look at the, the cogs and the wheels and the engine, you figure that out. But those things are so massive. Those cogs, those wheels, everything that works in the car or a tractor, they never cause each other problems. But in watchmaking, I've been in situations where I'm assembling movements on my desk and I've got all the components laid out in front of me and I've got like four or five of each component. So four or five third wheels, four or five center wheels and whatnot. And sometimes you have to pick and choose, because when you reduce the tolerance as so much as we do, and we get down to this level of microengineering, you can have two perfectly good components that pass the tolerance test, but they don't interact with one another because their long ability is non existent. That must be a headache when you're trying to do stuff like that from the, from scratch. You know, basically like reinventing the wheel, like to make it work for you. What kind of investment and time and training does that take? And how many sleepless nights are we talking? Have you slept in the last 10 years?
- [15:10]
B
Sometimes I sleep, other nights not. But you're absolutely correct because a huge issue. Not an issue, but a huge reality of watchmaking is we're working in microns, which means we need measuring equipment a lot of the time in sub microns. So one of our CNC machines is accurate to the sub micron. And so we have to have an $80,000 measuring machine to be able to measure what the million dollar CNC machine is doing. And you know, we have drawings that specifically outline like, the tolerance levels that we need to be in. And you know what, if the tolerances are out of tolerance, it doesn't matter how finely finished or how expensive that part was to make. It's a watch, it doesn't work. Yeah.
- [15:55]
C
That automatically answers the question why the ticket price is the ticket price. And we'll deal with that. Maybe.
- [16:02]
A
I'm not sure it does. I, I, I think the ticket price.
- [16:04]
C
Is far too reasonable to be quite.
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A
Frank, because I, you know, I, I know what it's like making watches when we buy movements in. This is incredible.
- [16:11]
C
Exactly. And, and you get, you teed up it perfectly to what it does. Do you want to take it further or should I jump in?
- [16:21]
B
Go ahead, go ahead.
- [16:22]
C
Because I have a segue on the $1 many machines. We have mutual friends with friends who are the aha. And you guys came here last year to launch that partnership, that collaboration where you basically were the center of attention, which you usually don't like as a person because you are a madman. They came to you, the partners of the ah, friends for Ming, because they wanted Tantalum bracelet. And you have an obsession with Talentana. So start off with that. What is your obsession with Cantatalon?
- [17:00]
B
So it's a, it's a great question. So originally in the Infinity series, we started out, we were just making dolls and hands. We were buying in the case and buying in the movement. And as I had this dream of restoring American watchmaking, I wanted to continue to push the envelope in a way that would get respect from my peers in an international sense. So we went really far with guilloche dials, you know, hand turned guilloche dials. During the classic way, I tried to take it to the next level with the Infinity weave. And in the world of case making, there's no more difficult case material to work with than tantalum. So we did our Tantalum limited edition with Infinity series. And it was the first serious run of cases we had done. We did it in tantalum. And for us, that made us feel that there's nothing special in the water in Switzerland. You know, we're in the United States. Yes, we did guilloche dials. Others have done that. Now we feel like we can do case making at an extremely high level. And that kind of prepared us for the next step, which is the hardest of all, which is doing movements completely under one roof. Now nothing can really prepare oneself for that. It was much harder than we could have ever possibly imagined. But working with Tantalum was extremely challenging. But now that's something that, you know, we invested a ton of money in and have that expertise and so we can offer it in the resurgence. You know, we made cases for Ming, made that bracelet, and there's other projects we can do now with this very difficult material. So a quick one on one of.
- [18:42]
C
Tantalum, take us from or where is it found? What is it? What family? Is it in the precious metals or is it a precious metal in the families? And why is it difficult to work? So platinum, we know, behaves a bit. I always take the metaphor of clay. So it scratches differently. It's harder to make an alloy of it. You need 5% to make it softer. Whereas gold, for those that maybe are not familiar, 18 Karat Worldwide is a bit of the bar. So you'll see 750 out of thousand engraved in cases, let's say, are jewelry. Walk us quickly through time, Tao, please.
- [19:19]
B
Sure. I got a good metaphor for it. If you have a carrot and you're peeling a carrot, the carrot is most horological metals. Gold, steel. You know, those slices of carrot come off very easily, very nicely. So imagine you now have a gnarled root and you use the same tool that you were peeling the carrot with, and you try to, you know, take slices of this gnarled root off with your knife. That knife, it might be able to do it, but it's going to get dull really quickly and it might snap eventually as well. So tantalum doesn't want to make a chip is what it's called in the industry. And as a result of that, it wears out tools really quickly. And the issue with that is tolerances are extremely important in watchmaking. So if the tool that is cutting the material is not removing enough of it, you're not going to have a part that's to tolerance and you're going to go through your tools really quickly. So that's the difficulty. And there's a big sort of misconception out there. People assume tantalum is hard, but where that confusion comes from is it's hard, difficult to machine. It's actually not that much more hard as a material than 18 karat gold. But it's very difficult to work with. It's hard to work with.
- [20:50]
C
But people also confuse the term hard because the sort weight is high. So if you have the same mass, we always compare sterling silver to gold to platinum. Correct. If you have the same mass, it has a higher sort weight. The funny thing is we have a pursuit of lightness in watermelon, so we use titanium. Sometimes you just like the heft of precious metals on, in your hands, on your wrist. I love the grayness of tantalum because it reminds me of titanium. I love the weight. So it gives you a precious metal vibe. It's Again, cognitive disagree.
- [21:31]
B
So it's as dense as 18 karat gold. And along with that, it has, like, this dark blue cast to it. And then there's. Watchmaking is a lot about our imaginations. So collectors specifically like their watchmakers to suffer as much as making their watches. Like, the more they hear, oh, this guy spent 10,000 hours making one component of this. Wow. He really put in his heart and soul. Oh, tantalum. It's so difficult to wear, and I have it on my wrist, so, I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but it's definitely part of it. You know, like, someone had to put in a lot of work to make this for me.
- [22:16]
C
And you're right, I encountered that analogy or philosophy as well with wearers of watches. But I think we're also going into an era of stealth wealth. So it's.
- [22:30]
B
It.
- [22:30]
C
I think that it's. If you know, you know, thing. And now that. That you've. Guys, you've set the trend. You partnered with aaj, a nice one. That's coming out soon. There's another friend of ours, made an interesting watch, and I was amazed they chose for tantalum. I remember tantalum. You remember the Omega seamasters from the early 90s, late 80s, where they mixed three metals in the seamaster?
- [22:59]
A
I've fixed many of them in my life. Yeah, Great.
- [23:02]
C
That's my first encounter with tantalum. And I love the blue U because we make at my family business for 50 years. Jewelry. I love platinum. My ring is platinum. And I went very deep down the rabbit hole. I found a casting company in New York when I used to live there, and we use cobalt instead of iridium to blend down the platinum and the. The. Whereas in Europe, they used to use nickel, which is not allowed by EU regulations anymore because it needs to be hyper.
- [23:33]
A
Hyperalgic. Allergenic, I think. Is the hypo. Hypoallergenic? Yeah.
- [23:38]
C
I think I lost my tunnel. You in the grand ductophore. Yeah. And hardness and the blueness of the cobalt. So that also speaks to me. So I would choose tantalum over titanium for the color because people would find titanium too.
- [24:00]
A
The color. That's the thing. So I don't like coatings. I don't mind the aesthetic of a black watch, but I don't. There's something about the. The sort of artificial nature of it that really I would. It's not disgusts. That's a too strong a word. But it puts me off because I like purity. I like the celebration of material. So I, I remember working with a jeweler in Glasgow. They were a stockist of Nomos at the time. Oro, they're called. They were on Wilson street at the time. They now moved a little bit out of. Out of the center. One of the guys that owned it, Wes, he was a jeweler himself and he wore this earring that was like a squashed piece of gold. It was just gold. It was brushed, hand brushed. And it was. The form was completely organic. And I loved that. I absolutely loved that. I thought that that was what I want to see in watchmaking a little bit more. And that's what tantalum does for me. It brings a color that otherwise doesn't exist naturally. But blue is a rare color in nature. You know, it's one of the rarest dyes that one can find. It's why like, purple was the color of Greek senators and blue is the color of the royal family in Italy and so on. And why we have royal Bl. Cause it was expensive to get. And you get that with that natural warmth of the material. It's for me. Peerless. I'm sorry to interrupt. I have to say this is an episode unlike any other. You're talking, you're talking more like a jeweler than I've ever heard you talk before. You're talking about sort weights and these things that like, we need to create glossary for this episode alone. I mean, come on, Josh. I mean, this is brilliant. Like, this is quality stuff. It's the longest episode we've recorded here at Geneva watch days and it feels like the shortest already.
- [25:40]
C
And we need to cut it short.
- [25:42]
A
No, no, no, no.
- [25:42]
C
We. And, and we. It's a mea culpa because we have been dying to have Josh on the show. It was our fault. Time zone differences. And we promise we'll have at least one more, an hour full episode with Josh. And maybe we should do a 10 part series with. If he wants to. And we.
- [26:03]
B
We done out of the teaching game.
- [26:05]
A
Well, but we can't. We can't stop just yet because we have a question, please, from one of our listeners who's watching right now in Life. Robert Tan has asked you. He's wondering why they chose zirconium for the dial on the infinity. Is it just a particular color effect? Oh, that looks straight mixture.
- [26:23]
B
Yeah, that's exactly what I want to talk about next. Fantastic.
- [26:26]
A
Let's go.
- [26:27]
B
So we were talking about material. So I'd say my passion for making watches and movements, restoring American watchmaking, all that Number one. Number two is I love exotic materials. You know, we've worked with meteorite in the past, worked with tantalum. So one of my newest favorite materials is zirconium. Zirconium, not the ceramic, is a metal that's right next to titanium on the periodic table. And it's not quite as light as titanium, and it's not quite as strong as titanium. So it doesn't get used as much in the industry. So we've been using it for dials for a little bit now. And the cool thing about zirconium is, is you heat it up to a red heat, and when it cools, it oxides to a dark charcoal color. And I hate using plating with guilloche dials. If you do the plating and it fails, the dial is scrap. So when we discovered this with zirconium, it's nothing new. Knife makers have been doing it. I was thrilled. And so our latest resurgence that the guys are looking at right now, we also made the case out of zirconium, and then he treated it to a dark color as well. It guilloches nicely. It can turn black. And we've also been experimenting with its blues as well because it can also blue. Super nice. So this whole trip I've been excited to share all the neat things we've been doing in zirconium. And that's my new favorite alloy.
- [27:55]
A
Does it blue evenly? Very evenly. Okay. Interesting.
- [27:58]
B
It's magic.
- [27:59]
A
How do you prefer to blue? Do you. Do you hand blue with a flame or in an oven or so we do all three.
- [28:05]
B
We are all three methods that are common in watchmaking. Like on that watch you're holding, the resurgence, the steel components, they're all purple. We did those the old fashioned way. We did that on a piece of brass. Open flame, eating to a purple. The. The case and the dial, we did with a torch. Just torch directly on it. And then for getting blue with zirconium, we've both done it with a hot plate torch and in an oven.
- [28:37]
C
Do you see him firing up guys that girls and guys watching. Do you see him getting fired up? The timetalem he was getting worked up. But that's an old love. You see the new flame.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah, the pun is perfect. I mean, we were chatting off of air. Like, I love bluing. I love hand bluing. That was the one thing, apart from fixing quartz movements that nobody cared about, that I was good at when I was a watchmaker. But it takes such that the delicate touch and that look you know, you've got to look into the material. You got to see when it's about to go, because you don't just predict.
- [29:07]
B
Where it's going to go.
- [29:07]
A
Exactly. And purple is a hard color to get. It's my favorite that you can get from heating you is just before the sort of royal blue that people get on the screws. And if you go too far, you go into the royal blue, then you go into the cornflower blue, then go back to basically white steel, hitting that mark to get a homogenous purple on the. Honestly, this is the nerdiest podcast we've ever done. I absolutely love it. This is great. We're talking about actual watchmaking. People say, what's the Real Time shows like Raison Tetra. It's like, this is it. This is to talk about these things that we do. And people say, why are watches expensive? Because it's easy to get that wrong.
- [29:42]
C
We think we're teachers as well, you guys as well.
- [29:46]
B
That's what a podcast is. You're educating people about something new.
- [29:49]
C
So we always say we're here to share the knowledge and the passion. That's it. That's a raison d' apple for the Real Time show. Rob, our guest is waiting. Is waiting outside. He's here. He actually exists.
- [30:01]
A
He exists.
- [30:02]
C
He's a real exist. I missed him yesterday.
- [30:04]
A
Well, he did a lot of work yesterday. He was on the podcast all day yesterday. So you'll enjoy watching that. Back here.
- [30:10]
C
Josh, as always. Pleasure, man. This is wonderful. I don't want to end it.
- [30:15]
A
No.
- [30:15]
C
Many will see this as a little teaser.
- [30:18]
A
Yeah.
- [30:19]
C
An amuse for Amuse Bush.
- [30:23]
B
Genuine. I appreciate your time. This is wonderful. Great way to start the day.
- [30:27]
A
I have to ask one quick question.
- [30:29]
C
Let's go.
- [30:31]
A
We have another question from a listener, and this is pertaining to exactly what we're talking about. Nikolai from Copenhagen, Nicolai Lund. He asks, what is the temperature when zirconium turns blue higher or lower than steel? And is the tolerance higher than on steel?
- [30:47]
B
So it has a longer bluing period. It stays that nice blue color for a longer period of time. And I'll be completely honest, when I do it, I'm doing it on the heating plate, and I am going way high on the temperature so that it gets there quicker. I don't know what our team is doing for the oven temperature for the consistent blue that we're getting in the ovens, but it's a little bit higher than with steel.
- [31:20]
A
We should do a live show in Josh's workshop. Very wonderful filming all your stuff.
- [31:25]
C
Cali dreaming.
- [31:27]
A
Absolutely amazing. All right, Josh, thank you so much, man. Pleasure. Always.
- [31:31]
B
Thank you.
- [31:32]
A
We need to get on the mic again immediately. So all of you listening and watching, follow, like, subscribe, comment. We'll see you in about 45 seconds for more content.