Handmade in Cape Town
Sixty processes take a Bettél watch from drawing to finished piece — nineteen in wood, eleven in leather, thirty in hand assembly — in our family workshop in Muizenberg.
Shop the collection
The first Bettél watches were sketched by hand, in pencil on paper, on the flight home from Indonesia — no drawing board, no instruments, just the sketches the designs still come from. What the bench needs is different: the scrap of paper here carries the steps in order, numbered — round the edges, drill twelve holes, drill press, file. Sixty of them, all told, before a watch is finished.
Each case starts as a block of Kiaat, a South African hardwood. It is roughed out by machine, then finished by hand — the holes drilled, the edges rounded, the painting done at the bench. The machine gets the shape close; hands make it a watch.
Drill bits and cutting heads of every size stand ready at the bench — the drilling and rounding are all done here by hand.
Movements arrive new and ready — Miyota quartz, Japanese, across most of the range, and Japanese self-winding automatics in the Albatross Automatics — and each is set into its case by hand, with tweezers. The photograph is of a different one entirely: the Swiss movement behind our very first automatic, found in an antique shop and written off as beyond saving, then repaired and cased by hand.
Before it leaves the bench, every watch is checked over by eye under a lamp, with cases, dials and straps laid out alongside it.
Wood is a natural material, so every case — and every wood dial, in white beech or American walnut — carries its own colour and grain, no two ever quite alike.
Bettél assistant
An assistant, not a person — I'll fetch a human when you need one.