A Return to Fundamentals: Oscillon and the Monastic Art of Watchmaking
Friendship, Obsession, and a Love Letter to the Craft
Every once in a while, a watch sneaks up on you. You’ve heard the name, maybe even the watchmakers, but you don’t yet know the “what.” That was my experience with Oscillon. I had the good fortune of spending time with the duo behind the brand, Dominique Buser and Cyrano Devanthey, and quickly discovered their singular approach to watchmaking: a curious blend of friendship, craftsmanship, creative restraint, and near-monastic devotion. Somehow, it just works.
When they showed me their workshop — which they call the “cathedral of Oscillon” — the name felt fitting. Their approach is reverent, patient, and deeply rooted in the traditions of the craft.
I think they only way to truly explain Oscillon is to frame their philosophy, and I often return to the words of Felix Baumgartner of Urwerk:
“Today, most of the watchmakers, they are not watchmakers. They are watch assemblers. To make a watch you have to have an understanding of construction, theories, mathematics, but you also have the feel of manual machines, which are used to construct, to produce, to design movements, which is the base of watchmaking.” 1
Cyrano and Dominique are certainly not assemblers. They are deep thinkers, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, collectors, tinkerers—and, above all, obsessed. Spending time with them feels like falling in love with watchmaking all over again.
Background
Dominique and Cyrano met in 1990 at watchmaking school. Two years later, while walking to buy beer, they stumbled into a conversation that would define their lives.
Dominique Buser recalls “We had, once, a discussion whether it would be possible to still do a watch by hand. Only old machines, no CNC machine. Almost thirty years later we arrived. We did it.”2
Cyrano remembers the beer, but not this specific discussion. That spark of conversation became an obsession: saving machines from the dustbin, restoring them, and proving that a watch could still be made by hand. An obsession with an idea, an ideal of watchmaking, led to the work Dominique and Cyrano engage in daily.
To show their commitment to craftsmanship, quality and continuous improvement, Dominique jokes that: “we have a lot of ‘outlet parts’ in our workshop. That means we started with a part, and then it wasn’t good enough, and we had to restart.”
Before joining forces, Cyrano left watchmaking school to work for Les Ambassadeurs in Zurich, and then spent 12 years at Omega, first training watchmakers locally and then internationally, including 5 years as the head of the tourbillon workshop.
Dominique pursued additional studies in physics, then in 2005 collaborated with Felix Baumgartner of Urwerk on the Harry Winston Opus 5. This opened a door for Dominique to pursue a career of concept development and engineering for Urwerk. In 2009 Cyrano joined Dominique, as there was a backlog engineering and construction projects. Reunited, and pooling their restored machines and experience, they realized they had not just the dream, but the tools to make it possible. Now they had to find out if they were up to the task.