GENEVA — The watch that Léa Fontanet wears is 38 millimeters across, steel, with a cream dial, a hand-wound movement visible through the back and a strap she changes depending on her mood. It cost 1,450 Swiss francs, about $1,700, which is a great deal of money for a 27-year-old nurse in Lausanne and almost nothing in a city where the window displays on the Rue du Rhône begin at 20,000.
“My phone tells the time. The watch is not about the time,” she said, over coffee near the lake on Saturday. “It is the only thing I own that someone made with their hands and that will still work when I am 70. I like winding it. I like that it needs me.”
Ms. Fontanet is part of a shift that the Swiss watch industry, which has spent most of the past 15 years moving upmarket, is only beginning to measure. Exports of Swiss watches priced under 3,000 francs at wholesale, a segment the industry had largely written off as the territory of smartwatches, rose 14 percent by value in the first eight months of 2026, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, while exports above 3,000 francs were flat. In units, the entry segment accounted for 83 percent of all mechanical watches shipped.
The growth is coming less from the established houses than from a crop of small brands, many founded since 2018 by designers and engineers in their 30s, selling directly online with lean collections and prices between 800 and 2,500 francs. They use movements from a handful of Swiss suppliers that have, since a competition ruling in 2020, been obliged to sell to anyone. They do their marketing on video platforms. And they have found a customer the industry had assumed did not exist.
“The assumption for 20 years was that under-35s would never buy a mechanical watch, so we stopped making them anything to buy,” said Matthias Keller, who founded a brand in Biel in 2019 after a decade as an engineer at a large group and whose waiting list for a 1,900-franc diver is now five months. “Then a generation grew up with everything on a screen, and it turned out that some of them wanted one object that was not.”
The large groups have noticed. Two of them have relaunched entry-level lines this year, and one has reopened a factory in the Jura that it had closed in 2016. Retailers in Geneva, where most of the shop floors are devoted to watches priced like cars, report that their small sub-2,000-franc sections now draw the most foot traffic, often from customers who end up spending more on a second visit.
The segment is not without critics. Some collectors argue that the independent brands are assemblers rather than manufacturers, buying cases and movements from suppliers and adding a dial. Mr. Keller does not dispute it. “I did not invent the escapement, and neither did the brands that charge 30,000,” he said. “I designed something I would wear, made it in Switzerland, and sold it for what it costs. That used to be the whole industry.”
Ms. Fontanet, for her part, has started looking at a second watch. “A dress one,” she said. “Something for when I am 40. I would like to have had it for a while by then.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 8 of the European edition with the headline: Watches Under 2,000 Francs Are Selling to Buyers Under 30, and Geneva Is Paying Attention.
