A few weeks ago I blogged an introduction to Eva Leube and her first watch. Here is part two, an interview with Eva, in which she talks about how she came to live in Australia, and more about how she created "Ari".
AP : Manly is a very unexpected place in which to find a Swiss trained independent watchmaker. How did you come to end up in Sydney?
EL : While on a Rolex vocational training course in Geneva in '99, I was offered work within the company in Sydney. I arrived in Australia in 2000 for the first time. 2004
saw me going back to Switzerland once more to work for Ulysse Nardin
and Thomas Prescher, during which time I also married my Aussie
boyfriend. He
found it too cold in Switzerland so by the end of 2007 we were back in
Sydney with our new son Ari and I started my own business.
AP : You worked at Thomas Prescher for a few years. To what extend do you think that period has influenced your approach to watchmaking today?
EL
: My watchmaking career started off with many years of repair and
restoration work for Antique stores as well as for Ulysse Nardin, Rolex
and other workshops in different parts of the world. These were great years, also very educational and important in forming a good foundation. But in 2005 Thomas Prescher introduced me to all aspects of the very different world of independent watch-manufacturing.
From the start, Thomas has been very generous and open sharing his knowledge, experience and his new ideas. We
built his complex mechanisms, including double-retrograde time
indication and multiple-axis flying tourbillons part by part, all by
hand. I learned a lot from him and went home every night with a great sense of achievement. It
gave me a whole new appreciation for traditional watchmaking of the
past and for the old masters that have paved the way with their
inventiveness and their fantastic work over the past centuries.
AP : Have you always wanted to be a watchmaker?
EL : I always wanted to learn a craft. My mother told me that, growing up, she had often visited a watchmaker near her family home. I immediately liked this idea. Her father must have given us the technical mindset. He was a physicist who told us that we will be able to understand any sort of mechanism if we just looked at it long enough. He had a wood turning lathe in his house and showed me how to use it when I was little. We used to make things like candle holders and nutcrackers together.
I
started my apprenticeship when I was 16 years old, gained my masters
certificate in watchmaking at the age of 23 and find that I still love
my profession, with its technical challenges and creativeness. Watches tell not only the time but also a story about the period they were built in; about the technical advances and fashions of that time.
AP
: I alluded earlier to the unexpectedness of there being an AHCI
candidate in Sydney (or Australia, in fact, as we are not known for
being a “horological hotbed” as it were). Do
you think that the “tyranny of distance” is an issue nowadays, or does
the internet, social media etc mean that distance and where the
watchmaker is, are no longer issues?
EL : The internet and social media certainly help to market a product. They
quickly got me in touch with many international watch enthusiasts which
might have been a drawn-out process ten years earlier.
Concerning the manufacturing process, I would have had more outside help available if I lived in Switzerland or Germany. But the positive side of building my watch here in Australia is that it turned out very uniquely “me”. Doing
my own drawing, milling, turning, case making, etc has been so exciting
and rewarding that I probably would have chosen the same path had I
lived in Europe. It is the most time consuming but also the most creative way to build watches.
AP : You named your first watch after Ari. Was this quite a natural decision or did you have other names in mind?
EL : When my son Ari was born in 2007 I set up my own business and started building the watch that had long been in my head; he has been my little and yet very important milestone.
