Independent watchmaking has been quietly earning the attention of serious collectors for years, and the Krayon Anyday is one of the clearest recent examples of why. Understanding what makes a piece like this significant requires stepping back from the mainstream conversation about luxury watches and looking at what collectors who already own the icons are reaching for next.

What the Krayon Anyday Actually Does

The Anyday is the third watch from Krayon, a small Neuchâtel atelier founded by movement engineer Rémi Maillat and his wife Fei. Where their first two pieces — the Everywhere and the Anywhere — tracked sunrise and sunset times at any location on earth, the Anyday takes a different and arguably more practical direction. It is the world’s first mechanical planner watch, displaying every day and date of the current month simultaneously on a peripheral track around the dial. A crescent-shaped pointer hand indicates the current date, weekdays and weekends are visually differentiated by color, and the entire mechanism advances automatically from month to month without requiring intervention more than five times a year.

The in-house Calibre C032 driving the complication contains 378 components. A smaller cam accumulates energy over 24 hours to produce instantaneous date jumps at midnight, in 1/1000th of a second. A larger snail cam turns once every 31 days to handle the end-of-month transition. The watch runs at 3Hz with a 72-hour power reserve. Cases are 18k gold, production numbers are estimated at around 50 pieces per year, and the retail price sits at approximately CHF 88,000. Sixteen watches had been delivered to collectors when the piece was first widely written about. Each is assembled, regulated, and finished by a single watchmaker.

This is the kind of detail that does not appear on a mainstream watch forum thread very often, and it is the kind of detail that collector-minded buyers are increasingly seeking out.

Why Collectors Who Own Rolex and Patek are Looking at Independents

The mainstream collector path is well-worn: a Rolex entry point, a Tudor or two along the way, eventually something from AP or Patek Philippe as the collection matures. For a certain kind of collector, that path eventually leads somewhere the big brands cannot follow. The Submariner and the Royal Oak are extraordinary watches, but they are also watches that tens of thousands of people own. The collector who has been in the game long enough starts to want something that says more about where they are in their relationship with horology, not just their ability to acquire a desirable reference.

Independent watchmaking fills that space in a way nothing else does. Brands like Krayon, MB&F, De Bethune, F.P. Journe, and Greubel Forsey exist outside the commercial pressures that shape what the major houses produce. They are generally run by watchmakers rather than brand managers, they produce in extremely limited numbers, and they pursue complications that would never clear a committee at a large corporation. The Everywhere, which mechanically calculates sunrise and sunset times for any location on earth, won the GPHG Innovation Prize. The Anyday reinvented the calendar watch from first principles. These are not variations on existing ideas.

The secondary market reflects this. Krayon pieces rarely appear for resale because owners tend not to sell them, and when they do surface at auction, average prices have exceeded $200,000. For a brand producing roughly 50 watches a year and still relatively unknown outside serious collector circles, that retention rate says everything.

What Makes the Independent Space Worth Paying Attention to Now

The micro brand moment is not new, but it has matured. Early independent watchmaking carried real risk for collectors — service questions, brand longevity concerns, resale uncertainty. The independents that have survived and grown over the past decade have done so by building track records, developing in-house service capabilities, and earning the kind of collector loyalty that translates into strong secondary market performance.

What the Krayon Anyday represents in this context is the independents moving into territory that is genuinely original rather than derivative of what the major houses have already done. A watch that no other brand on earth produces, in a format that is both mechanically extraordinary and practically useful, made by a team of twelve people in Neuchâtel. That combination is rare at any price point.

At TNS Diamonds, we carry a curated selection of both established and independent brands alongside our core inventory of Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Vacheron Constantin. If the independent space is something you are exploring, browse our current watch inventory or reach out directly. These are conversations worth having with someone who tracks the market closely.

Thinking about selling or trading to fund your next acquisition? TNS makes that process straightforward — honest appraisals, competitive offers, and no pressure.