Editorial
The Hand Made 1 is not a marketing claim. Greubel Forsey's watchmakers draw and coil the hairspring by hand, a skill that has nearly vanished from the industry, and roughly 95% of the movement is assembled and finished without machine intervention. Each piece is genuinely unique in its details.
Greubel Forsey introduced the Hand Made 1 in 2020 as a direct response to what founders Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey saw as the industrialization of even high-end watchmaking. The project required training watchmakers in forgotten techniques, including hand-drawing the hairspring wire from alloy stock. The 43.5mm white gold case houses a movement where hand-beveling, hand-anglage, and hand-polishing are applied to every surface visible under magnification.
The exercise produced a watch that functions as a working record of what Swiss watchmaking looked like before the lever press and CNC mill. Greubel Forsey caps production to the pace the craft allows, not to market demand.
No two Hand Made 1 pieces are identical in their finishing details, which is the point but also means side-by-side comparison is difficult when evaluating pre-owned examples. The hairspring is hand-formed, so any future regulation or replacement requires a watchmaker with an extremely rare skill set. White gold at 43.5mm sits large on smaller wrists, and the case proportions reward trying it on before committing.
Pricing is opaque because so few trade hands; published retail gives limited guidance on secondary market value. Verify provenance carefully since the watch's reputation attracts diligent fakes of lesser quality.
