Konstantin Chaykin

Several times my hands dropped and I wanted to smash it all to hell with a hammer.

He had no mentor. No formal horological education. No watchmaking school in his country to attend even if he had wanted one. What he had was a radio technician’s diploma from a Leningrad telecommunications college, two years of military signals service in South Ossetia, and a systematic way of thinking about how things work — skills forged in Soviet electronics that turned out to transfer, with startling precision, to the architecture of mechanical time.

The radio boy and the garbage dump #

In a country attic outside Leningrad, a boy discovered his father’s collection of radio magazines. The discovery ignited an obsession. He began building radio receivers from components salvaged at garbage dumps — not as a hobby, but as a discipline. At pioneer camp, he learned Morse code and used it to communicate with strangers across the world. The signals traveled thousands of kilometers from a device he had assembled from discarded parts. For a Soviet child with no access to international travel, radio was the first proof that what you build with your hands can reach beyond every boundary that contains you.

He graduated from the Leningrad Telecommunications Technical College with a radio technology diploma. The education was practical, Soviet-style: circuits, signals, systems. It taught him to think about mechanisms as interconnected architectures — how a signal moves through a system, how each component serves the whole, how failure in one element cascades through everything downstream. He did not know it yet, but he was learning the foundational logic of watchmaking.

Military service followed. Two years as a signals operator in the Russian army, including deployment to South Ossetia, sharpened the discipline. He returned wanting to study art — specifically, to attend the Repin Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Financial reality had other plans.

Iron doors, kitchen knives, and the first $10,000 #

The post-army years were the gap that makes the later pivot dramatic. In his twenties, with artistic ambitions and no money, Konstantin took work as a locksmith making iron doors. When that proved insufficient, he became a door-to-door knife salesman — a job he held for three years. The artistic ambition was deferred, not abandoned. But the years of manual labor and itinerant sales taught him something the Repin Academy never could have: how to survive on stubbornness alone, how to endure rejection as a daily condition, and how to build commercial instincts from nothing.

The pivot arrived through a friend. Around 2000, Ruslan Nikiforov invited Konstantin into the watch reselling business. Within a year, the partnership earned its first $10,000. They registered Watch Maximum in 2001 and opened a chain of retail stores called Mashina Vremeni (Машина Времени — “Time Machine”). A knife salesman had discovered the trade that would consume the rest of his life.

But reselling other people’s watches was never going to satisfy a man who had built radio receivers from garbage-dump parts. The same systematic curiosity that had driven the boy in the attic — how does this work, and can I build one myself? — now fixed itself on mechanical movements. On October 23, 2003, Konstantin began building his first own-movement mechanism: a tourbillon table clock.

Soviet textbooks and CorelDRAW #

The decision to build a tourbillon was, by any rational measure, absurd. Russia had not produced a tourbillon since before the 1917 revolution — a gap of 175 years. There were no watchmaking schools in the country. No supplier ecosystem for components. No YouTube tutorials, no online forums, no community of independent Russian watchmakers to consult. The Swiss houses that produced tourbillons trained their craftsmen for years under master watchmakers who had themselves trained for years.

Konstantin had Soviet-era watchmaking textbooks and a graphics program called CorelDRAW. He designed the mechanism on screen, cannibalized parts from a Soviet table clock, and began the work. It took more than six months. The hammer moment came not once but repeatedly — the sustained psychological pressure of working alone on a problem that every rational indicator suggested was beyond his capacity. He did not have the vocabulary to describe what kept him going, so he borrowed a Russian expression that translates roughly as “stupidity and bravery” — the implication being that at a certain point, the two become indistinguishable.

The Foundation tourbillon table clock was completed in early 2004. It worked. A visit to the Breguet exhibition at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg crystallized what had been instinct into ambition: if Abraham-Louis Breguet could reinvent timekeeping, so could a radio engineer with the right combination of discipline and nerve.

The first commercial sale came in 2006 — a Muslim calendar module mounted on a Buben and Zorweg mechanism, for $10,000. That same year, an extraordinary commission arrived: an astronomical Easter clock for Patriarch Alexius II of the Russian Orthodox Church. The resulting Resurrection Computus Clock — 750 parts, one year of labor, the most complicated clock ever made in Russia at the time — sold for $50,000, which Konstantin acknowledges was far below the work invested. He was building a reputation, not a profit margin.

The Swiss who flew to see for themselves #

In 2007, Konstantin brought his Easter Computus Clock to Baselworld, the world’s most prestigious watch fair. The response from the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants — the AHCI, the world’s most exclusive body of independent watchmakers — was not admiration. It was disbelief. The academicians refused to accept that an unknown Russian had built such a complicated mechanism alone.

AHCI President Peter Uibmer flew to St. Petersburg to physically inspect the workshop. He needed to see the workbench, the tools, the evidence. Skepticism of this intensity was not personal — it reflected a genuine institutional assumption that haute horlogerie could not emerge from outside the Swiss ecosystem. Konstantin had to convert that skepticism into trust through the only means available: the work itself.

Uibmer saw the workshop. He saw the work. In 2008, at ViennaTime, the AHCI accepted Konstantin as a candidate member — the first Russian ever proposed for membership. By 2010, he was a full member, the only Russian in the academy’s history.

But validation came with a Faustian bargain. That same year, Moscow watch-jewelry company Nika invested approximately $3 million for a 70% stake in the manufacture. Nika installed professional managers. Staff ballooned from a lean operation to thirty employees. Payroll consumed 70 percent of production costs. Konstantin found himself gradually sidelined toward a purely creative role — the inventor in his own company, stripped of business authority.

In 2009, he had already parted ways with Nikiforov. The Mashina Vremeni retail stores stayed with his former partner; Konstantin took equipment and registered LLC Konstantin Chaykin as a solo manufacture. He had chosen the uncertain path of independent creation over the security of retail. Now the Nika investment threatened to repeat the same pattern in a different form: someone else controlling the business he had built with his hands.

The life that nearly ended twice #

The personal cost accumulated in ways the professional timeline does not capture. When The Naked Watchmaker asked Konstantin what the hardest moment in his life had been, he did not cite the tourbillon, or the Swiss skepticism, or the investor crisis. “I had a difficult period in my life when I divorced my first wife,” he said. The 12-to-14-hour daily work schedule he maintains, his self-described inability to take vacations longer than one week, his admission that he wishes he “could find more opportunities and time for my family” — these details sketch the outline of a man whose dedication to his craft has extracted a personal price that no patent count or auction result can offset.

Then came 2014. Russia’s economic crisis — the ruble collapse, Crimea-related Western sanctions, domestic recession — triggered an existential reckoning at the manufacture. Nika’s owners proposed the simplest solution: shut it down entirely.

Konstantin’s response was not negotiation. It was refusal. “For you we are only a business, but for me this is life,” he told his investors. “You can stop investing, but then I will take everything into my own hands.”

He cut staff from thirty to fourteen. He returned equipment to Nika. He took back operational control — marketing, sales, social media, everything the professional managers had handled. He accepted only five to seven orders per year. The manufacture survived, barely, in a form stripped to its minimum viable core.

Three years of austerity followed. In 2016, his AHCI peers elected him President — the first Russian to lead the world’s most exclusive body of independent watchmakers. Then, four months before Baselworld 2017, the movement for his planned exhibition watch failed. The AHCI President had no functioning watch to show at the industry’s most important fair. Under extreme pressure, Konstantin conceived something entirely new: a watch with an anthropomorphic face whose expression changes every minute through rotating disc indicators. He named it the Joker. The 99-piece debut run, priced at EUR 6,990, sold out within weeks at Basel. The creative method that had carried him from Soviet textbooks to the AHCI — work under impossible constraints until something unprecedented emerges — had produced its most commercially powerful result. But the Joker’s business story belongs to the brand. For the founder, it was vindication: proof that the path of self-taught invention, stripped of investor comfort and institutional support, could produce work the market recognized as irreplaceable.

The outsider becomes an arbiter #

Konstantin served as AHCI President until 2019 — a radio engineer from Leningrad presiding over Swiss masters through the very years that produced the Joker and transformed his manufacture.

The GPHG Audacity Prize followed on November 9, 2018 — watchmaking’s equivalent of an Academy Award, awarded to a self-taught Russian with no formal horological training. The prize validated not just the Clown watch that won it but the entire unorthodox path: radio engineering, Soviet textbooks, CorelDRAW, the hammer he almost swung.

Recognition compounded. The WIPO Gold Medal for Inventors in 2020 made Konstantin only the second horologist in history — after Nicolas G. Hayek — to receive the honor. In 2022, the Temporis Hall of Fame inducted him alongside Philippe Dufour and Kari Voutilainen, two of the greatest living watchmakers. The Russian Federation named him Distinguished Inventor. An asteroid — 301522 Chaykin, discovered by astronomer Leonid Elenin in 2009 and officially named by the International Astronomical Union in 2021 — became a permanent celestial marker for a watchmaker whose complications chart the heavens from a wrist.

The 100th invention patent was registered in 2025 — more than any individual watchmaker in history. That same year, the ThinKing prototype, the world’s thinnest mechanical watch at 1.65mm, sold for CHF 508,000 at Phillips Geneva. And the GPHG, whose Audacity Prize he had won seven years earlier, invited him to sit on the jury. The outsider had become an arbiter.

“If you want to earn a lot quickly, then forget about the path of an independent watchmaker,” Konstantin has said, “because this is far from the most profitable business, for which on the contrary you need to devote an incredible amount of energy, time and yourself. Perhaps this is one of the most difficult ways that you can choose.”

He chose it anyway. A boy who built radios from garbage-dump components and communicated with strangers worldwide via Morse code grew up to hold more invention patents than any watchmaker who ever lived — all without a single day of formal horological education. The systematic thinking forged in Soviet radio engineering, the stubbornness tested through three years of selling knives door to door, the refusal to swing the hammer when every rational indicator said the tourbillon was beyond him — these are not the credentials the Swiss watchmaking establishment expected. They are the credentials that produced a hundred inventions, a Hall of Fame induction, and an asteroid bearing his name.

Last updated: April 5, 2026