I met Tristan Ho in October 2024, before LOTH had a name most collectors knew. I brought my Pascal Coyon along that day. Not to show off, but because I wanted to talk shop with someone serious about hand finishing. I remember handing it to him and watching him go quiet, turning it under the light.
He told me later that the meeting changed how he understood anglage. Up to that point, he thought the goal was simply to get an edge shiny. An edge finished to 3000 grit already looks bright enough to fool most people. What he saw on the Coyon was different.
It was a true mirror polish. The kind you get by working diamantine paste finer than a micron into the bevel. He says that afternoon reset his sense of what finishing actually meant. He now finishes his own anglage the same way.
I have a few photos from around that time. Watches he made before LOTH Watch 1 existed as a name. They are rougher than what he makes today.
That gap, between those early attempts and the piece he eventually launched, is the real story here. A self-taught 28 year old building Singapore's first commercially available hand-finished watch. He has come a long way in such a short time!
From Seiko mods to a bench in Loyang
Tristan's entry into watches started with a near miss. On a trip to Kuala Lumpur with his girlfriend, he almost bought a fake Rolex off a street vendor. She talked him out of it. He came home with nothing on his wrist, but with an itch to buy something real, something mechanical. That itch sent him digging into what counted as good value in mechanical watches.
That research became a rabbit hole. He kept running into brands charging steep markups on ebauche movements worth a fraction of the retail price. Rather than pay for someone else's margin, he decided to build his own. He spent months modding Seiko NH35s, buying movements and parts separately, assembling them by hand himself.
It wasn't enough. Somewhere in that period he found Instagram videos from independent watchmakers Felipe Pikullik and Minhoon Yoo. Both showed movement finishing up close, frame by frame. He describes the moment he cut his first movement bridge as the point it clicked. Everything after that was self-taught, mostly from rewatching short clips and reverse engineering the process. Mastering snailing alone took a year and a half of figuring out grinding materials and abrasive grit by feel.
He built all of this on a workbench on the second floor of his parents' terrace house in Loyang. He worked nights, after a full day job as a research assistant at A*STAR, Singapore's national research agency. He'd be at the bench until close to 2am most nights. Diagnostic tests on cells by day, bevels cut by hand after dark. That’s true motivation and dedication.
Tristan has since left A*STAR to run LOTH full time. When I asked what actually changed, he said the hours haven't really shrunk. What changed is how he spends them. Mornings and afternoons are now workshop time. Nights go to social media, R&D, and planning what comes next. He called it trading one job for a wider set of responsibilities. He said he enjoys the variety more than he expected to.
What the watch actually is
LOTH Watch 1 runs on an old stock Swiss ETA 6498, sourced by Tristan himself off eBay, listing by listing. The plates and bridges are custom machined in German silver. It's an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc that looks like silver but behaves nothing like it. Left unlacquered, it slowly develops a honeyed patina. It also corrodes on contact with skin oil, which means gloves at all times on the bench.
Tristan told me the material discipline never felt like a burden. He was already used to gloves from his lab job. What draws him to German silver is closer to permanence.
He likes that a watchmaker decades from now could refinish the surface and bring the piece back close to new. A material that ages but can still be renewed appealed to him more than something built to look perfect from day one.
The dial carries what he calls a mosaic finish, a variation on traditional grattage. He makes his own tools for it, gluing abrasive paper onto wooden sticks and cutting the tips into shape. Each stroke is applied by hand. No two adjacent strokes can face the same direction.
That forces him to plan four or five moves ahead so he doesn't box himself in. Because the process is manual, he can't reproduce the exact pattern twice. He says he doesn't want to. Every dial is a record of how he was working that particular day. Every dial is unique.
The bridges carry his signature anglage: wide, curved bevels with internal angles, cut by hand. They're deliberately thicker than the thin factory chamfers most brands use. He wanted anglage visible without a loupe. Finishing all the plates on one watch takes around 100 hours, out of 150 to 200 hours total per piece.
None of the primitive-sounding methods, hand scraping, glass plate frosting, started as an aesthetic choice. He told me plainly that in the beginning he simply didn't have the money or space for modern equipment. He worked with what was within reach. Over time he came to see the irregularities those methods leave behind as part of the point. They're evidence that a person sat at a bench and made the thing by hand. He finds that more interesting than something that looks machine perfect.
The community behind the bench
Independent watchmaking has a reputation for openness, and Tristan's account of it matches that. He was careful to draw a line for me though. Some watchmakers, like Pikullik and Yoo, taught him from a distance through their videos. Others actually put hands on his own work. Ondřej Berkus falls in the second group. Berkus refinished Tristan's mainplates during a period when he himself was relocating countries, carving out the time anyway.
Philippe Narbel gave him something different: toolmaking insight. Narbel designs his jigs for bridges slightly undersized. The jig itself then acts as a working guide, not just a template. Tristan said that small idea changed how he makes his own fixtures. Their conversations went beyond the bench too, into the business side of running an independent brand, and life in general. He said he values that as much as the technical exchange.
He's careful not to overstate his place in that world. He describes himself as still new to it. Someone who has been helped, and wants to pass that forward when he can.
Sorting out the name
Some of my photos are labelled LOTH Series 1. That doesn't quite match the LOTH Watch 1 name used everywhere else, so I asked him to clear it up. Series 1 and LOTH Watch 1 are the same watch. Series 1 refers to the first production run of twelve pieces. He used the term somewhat interchangeably with the watch's actual name. There's no separate model hiding behind the label.
What comes after twelve pieces
LOTH Watch 1 launched at SGD 6,498 excluding tax, on a 40 percent deposit. It sold out by early September, against more than double the demand. Tristan is now thinking about Series 2, though he was upfront that most of it is still unresolved. He wants the balance visible from the dial side, taking cues from the MB&F Legacy Machine 101 and Pikullik's FPA1. He's aiming for a smaller case, somewhere between 38 and 42mm lug to lug, sized for his own small wrists.
He's also rethinking what he means by in-house. To him, that starts with designing the architecture yourself, not modifying a used ebauche and calling it your own. Manufacturing every component yourself, the escapement, jewels, mainspring, hairspring, is a separate and much steeper bar. That's still far beyond his current tooling. His working definition sits in between: design his own architecture and plates, use existing components for parts he can't yet make himself. He points to makers like J.B. Viot, Ondřej Berkus and Kudoke as examples of that kind of in-house work. Their movements run on their own architecture, even where individual components are sourced.
He isn't planning a retail boutique. He likes collectors coming to the workshop where the watches are actually made. That closeness matters to him more than a polished showroom would. As LOTH grows he's leaning toward occasional dedicated events instead, rather than an open-door policy that becomes unmanageable.
What the lab job left behind
I asked what he carried over from biomedical research. His answer was temperament, not technique. Experiments fail constantly, and getting frustrated doesn't fix anything. You stay calm, work out what went wrong, and try again. He said that habit translated directly to the bench. A bevel or a jewel setting rarely comes right the first time.
It's a fitting way to think about LOTH. A brand built at home, at night, by someone with no formal training. Running on the same discipline he once used to run diagnostic tests. What sold out in five months wasn't polish for its own sake. It was a watch that showed its maker's hand in every scrape and bevel. Made by someone still figuring out, in public, how far that hand can take him.
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