About
We set out to make one watch, and keep making it.
Terry Timepiece is a small workshop with a narrow ambition: a mechanical watch good enough to outlast the person who buys it.
Our Story
It began with a watch that stopped.
A mechanical watch that had run for sixty years stopped running. The obvious thing was to replace it. The interesting thing was to open it. Inside was an object designed by people who assumed someone would one day need to get back in — every part reachable, every part replaceable, nothing bonded shut.
That watch is running again. It cost more to repair than it would have cost to replace, which is exactly the point. Somewhere between then and now, most objects stopped being made that way.
A thing built to be repaired is a thing built on the assumption it will be kept.
Terry Timepiece exists to make one watch to that older standard. Not a reproduction of anything — a modern movement, modern materials, modern tolerances — but built on the same assumption: that it will be opened again, by someone we will never meet, long after we have stopped making it.
Our Mission
Make fewer things, and make them last.
We make one reference, in series, to order. We do not run seasonal collections, we do not release limited editions to create urgency, and we do not discontinue a model to make the next one feel necessary.
A mechanical movement can be opened, cleaned and put back together, which is the whole reason to buy one. We will help you find a watchmaker who can do it, and we hold spares for the parts that wear.
What We Hold To
Four commitments, in plain terms.
Repairability over novelty
Nothing is glued that could be screwed. The caseback opens with a tool any watchmaker owns, not one only we possess.
Restraint over decoration
Antique gold appears on the bezel, the indices and the hands, and nowhere else. A detail that is everywhere is not a detail.
Honesty over specification
We publish what the watch does, not what it might survive. Fifty metres means fifty metres, and it means take it off before you dive.
Patience over pace
We would rather sell you one watch that lasts than three that do not. That is the only sense in which we are in a hurry.
The Workshop
Small, and intending to stay that way.
Watches are assembled, regulated and cased by hand in a workshop that could not scale without changing what it makes. Growth would mean more hands, more hands would mean more supervision, and more supervision would mean less time at the bench.
So the workshop stays small. It limits how many watches exist. We have made our peace with that.
See the Watch