Singer

Singer started with a conversation between Rob Dickinson (founder of the Californian air-cooled Porsche restomod house Singer Vehicle Design) and Marco Borraccino, a watch designer looking for a way to bring the Singer aesthetic onto a wrist. They found their movement partner in Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, the founder of Geneva movement specialist Agenhor. Wiederrecht had spent a decade quietly developing a full self-winding chronograph movement from scratch. The three co-founded Singer in Geneva in 2017 to build watches around it.

That movement is the AgenGraphe. It puts the chronograph hands at the centre of the dial rather than on subdials, so a Singer chronograph looks like a normal three-hander until you use the pushers. Central minutes for elapsed time, central seconds for elapsed time, and the running time relegated to two small subdials. It is the layout most enthusiasts have argued a chronograph should have had for decades; Singer is the brand that shipped it.

The debut model was the Track 1 in 2017: a motorsport-inspired chronograph clearly informed by Dickinson's Porsche restomod work. Since then Singer has extended the family with the Flytrack (a monopusher flyback take on the AgenGraphe), the DiveTrack (a 24-hour central-hand dive chronograph), the 1969 (a slimmer chronograph in a vintage-proportioned case), and the Heritage line, which restores new-old-stock chronograph calibres (Valjoux 236, Valjoux 72) and finishes them to a standard the original factories never delivered.