Why I'm Building an App for Watchmakers

I grew up in a watchmaker's shop.

Long before I ever touched a loupe or a movement holder, I watched my dad build his career from a single bench in the Philippines. He started as a solo watchmaker. Then he had people under him. Eventually, he was running a watch supply company serving the trade. I saw every stage of that growth up close — the good days, the late nights, the scramble when things got busy, and the quiet moments when he was figuring out how to do it all better.

When our family moved to the U.S., a whole new world of opportunity opened up. My dad and I worked side by side as watchmakers at Carlyle & Co., a large jewelry chain and service center that's no longer in business. After several years there, we struck out on our own. We handled wholesale accounts. We provided service work for retail stores. We dealt with vendors, managed turnaround times, and answered to sales people who needed answers yesterday.

I got to operate the whole nine yards. And I saw — really saw — where the bottlenecks were.

The Move to Charlotte

Eventually, I moved to Charlotte and started my own independent watchmaking business. Just me. No assistant. No team.

But I wasn't alone, exactly. I had something I'd been quietly building for years while my dad and I were working together: custom software designed around how a watchmaking operation actually runs. Not how someone thinks it runs from the outside — how it runs when you're the one on the bench, at the counter, on the phone with a vendor, and explaining status updates to a store manager all in the same afternoon.

That software made the transition smooth in a way I didn't fully appreciate until later.

I didn't get overwhelmed. The stores I worked with were genuinely amazed — they had tools to check status, communicate, and get the information they needed without constantly interrupting me. Communication flowed. The admin overhead that usually strangles a solo watchmaker just… wasn't there.

I kept my hands on movements. That's the whole point, right?

The 2016 AWCI Conference

As I kept building my career, I met other watchmakers along the way. Their operations looked nothing like mine. But the story was always the same: talented people with incredible skill at the bench, drowning in admin work, losing hours every week to paperwork, phone tag, and status updates.

And most of them had just… accepted it. That's the job. That's the industry.

Then in 2016, I went to the AWCI conference in Chicago. Sitting in a room with about 50 talented watchmakers, the speaker asked a simple question:

"Who here uses a custom app to run their repair business?"

Three hands went up.

One was using a solution originally built for cellphone repair — close enough, sort of. One had something custom built back in the 1990s, still running somehow. And me — the only watchmaker who had built his own app, in-house, for his own shop.

Three out of fifty.

I sat with that number for a long time afterward. These weren't beginners. These were accomplished professionals, many of them running successful shops. And almost none of them had tools built for them.

That's when it really hit me: I could help a lot of watchmakers with what I already knew.

Listening Before Building

So I started the work. Not recently — a long time ago. And I did it the only way I know how: by listening.

Not just to other watchmakers, but to the people on the other side of the counter. The store managers who need to give customers real answers. The sales people who actually touch the watches, write up the intake, and face the customer when something takes longer than expected. These are the people whose day gets harder when our systems are clunky, and whose day gets easier when the tools just work.

Everything I've built has been shaped by those conversations.

Why I'm Opening This Up

For the first time, I'm opening my solution to the public.

I built this for myself first. Then for the shops I work with. And now, after years of refinement — years of using it every single day in my own business — I'm ready to share it with the wider watchmaking community.

Here's my thinking: if this software can help a 10-watchmaker shop manage their operation smoothly, it can absolutely help a solo watchmaker. And if it can help a solo watchmaker reclaim hours every week to focus on what they actually love — the craft — then it's worth putting out into the world.

Watchmaking is a trade that rewards patience, precision, and care. The tools we use to run our businesses should honor that, not fight against it.

This is the beginning. I'm going to use this space to share what I've learned, what I'm still learning, and how the software is evolving. I'll talk about bottlenecks, workflow, the relationship between watchmakers and the stores we serve, and the small improvements that add up to a better day at the bench.

Thanks for being here at the start.

More soon.