Articles
At the Memorigin Workbench
An atelier visit, a specialist finishing partnership and a new approach to materials reveal the different kinds of knowledge behind a Memorigin watch.
A workbench changes the scale at which we understand a watch. From a distance, the object has an outline and a style. Closer to the making, it becomes a set of relationships: surfaces meeting, components sharing space, and decisions that have to work together.
Opening the atelier
Memorigin’s October 2025 anniversary report describes guests entering its tourbillon research and development atelier. The technical team explained movement architecture and assembly at close range. William Shum, JP, also introduced watches from different chapters of the brand’s history.
The value of such a visit lies in the opportunity to ask a better question. Instead of looking only at the finished face of a watch, a visitor can consider how the visible arrangement relates to the components within. The people explaining the object become part of how it is understood.
Hands and tools, close up
The company’s archive photographs of movement assembly offer a related perspective. Hands and tools occupy the foreground; the watch becomes a small working space. It is a reminder that the final object is the result of decisions made at a much closer distance than most of us usually see it.
The wider bench view and the close movement view describe two different scales of attention. Tools and loose components occupy the workspace; in the watchmaker’s hands, the movement becomes the focus. These undated workshop photographs show the setting without assigning a particular model or operation to the scene.
Knowing whose expertise to invite
The work also extends beyond a single bench. For MEMOIRE Aspirare, presented in 2024, Memorigin worked with Swiss Koncept on the development and refinement of a movement. The published project account assigns the hand finishing and assembly of each Aspirare to that specialist partner.
This is an important distinction within the making of a watch. Design development, movement architecture, finishing and final assembly are related responsibilities, but they are not interchangeable descriptions. Aspirare’s story becomes more interesting when the contribution of its Swiss partner is made clear.
Another specialist relationship was announced in April 2025 with Austrian strap maker HIRSCH. That project addressed a different part of the watch: the strap’s textile surface and rubber backing. It brought material knowledge into the brand’s wider consideration of how a watch is worn.
The detail continues onto the wrist
A movement can invite close examination while a strap establishes the experience of wearing it. Considering both broadens the idea of craftsmanship. It includes the parts we choose to display and the parts we feel throughout the day.
Memorigin’s workbench story is therefore a story about people and the boundaries between their skills. The brand brings an idea into development, works with technical knowledge and, where a project calls for it, invites another specialist to contribute.
There is pleasure in knowing a little more about those relationships. A finished watch becomes easier to appreciate when its different decisions can be seen individually, then understood together. The bench gives us that closer view, and the wrist gives the work its continuing purpose.
