A journey that began with curiosity, paused for years, and ultimately became the foundation of ETIEN.

It Started with a Spoon

Every watch has a beginning. Ours did not start with a movement, a sketchbook, or even a watch.

It began with a spoon.

Many years ago, dining at a restaurant in Hong Kong, I noticed something unusual about the handle resting beside my plate. It was decorated with enamel — deep in colour, impossibly smooth, and unlike any painted surface I had encountered. The colour did not sit on the metal. It seemed to belong to it.

I could not stop looking at it.

That small object planted a question I would spend years trying to answer: how could something so beautiful become a permanent part of metal? This was not paint, not lacquer, not anything I could easily name. There was a quality to it — a permanence — that I found difficult to walk away from.

The meal ended. The curiosity did not.

I began reading everything I could find. Books, museum references, archived articles — each one revealing more of a craft that stretched back centuries. Enamel, I discovered, was not a coating in the conventional sense. It was powdered glass that, under intense heat, fused permanently into metal.

The idea seemed almost impossible.

Glass becoming one with metal.

I needed to see it for myself.

Learning by Experiment

Years later, curiosity became practice.

My setup was modest: a handheld torch, copper blanks, white enamel powder, and very little money. A proper kiln felt like a commitment I wasn't ready to make — I had no idea where any of this might lead. The torch let me begin with almost nothing at stake.

Most weekends were spent at the workbench. There was no formal apprenticeship, no structured curriculum — a short enamelling course in Malaysia, and beyond that, an endless cycle of experiment and failure. Like many modern makers, I learned from books, from online resources, and most of all from the material itself.

Every firing answered one question and raised several more.

The greatest revelation was watching powdered glass transform under heat — softening, flowing, fusing permanently to copper. Something so fragile becoming so durable. It seemed almost alchemical.

Reality, of course, had its own lessons to teach.

Cracks became my most familiar companion. Pieces that looked perfect emerging from the flame would fracture as they cooled. Colours shifted unexpectedly. Surfaces refused to behave. Failure was not the exception — it was the rhythm of the work.

One experiment eventually produced a small butterfly, fired onto white enamel.

Looking at it today, I see every flaw. The print lacks precision. The colours are uneven. The surface holds imperfections that would disqualify it immediately as a watch dial.

I have never considered throwing it away.

That butterfly represents something far more valuable than a successful piece of craft. It marks the moment I realised my experiments were beginning to reveal what enamel could do. Not pride in what I had made — but the distinct excitement of discovering something new.

Sometimes progress is not measured by perfection. Sometimes it is measured by curiosity surviving another failure.

When Life Takes You Elsewhere

Like many passions, enamel eventually gave way to other demands.

Work took precedence. Weekends filled in. Gradually, the torch and copper blanks were packed away. For several years, I hardly fired another piece.

It would be easy to read that as an ending.

It wasn't.

Curiosity has a way of waiting. Though I was no longer at the workbench, my interest never fully disappeared. Whenever I encountered fine enamelling — in a museum, in a book, in passing — I stopped. I looked. The fascination remained, quietly, in the background.

Some passions don't disappear. They simply wait for space.

A Different Kind of Beauty

In 2016, I travelled to China and visited an exhibition of Fabergé eggs.

Until that day, almost everything I had worked with involved opaque enamel applied directly over metal. What I encountered in that exhibition changed my understanding of the material entirely.

For the first time, I saw transparent enamel layered over guilloché.

The effect was extraordinary. Light passed through the glass before reflecting from the engraved metal beneath. The pattern seemed to shift with every change of angle. The enamel did not conceal the metal — it revealed it, animated it, gave it a depth that felt almost alive.

I stayed far longer than I had planned.

The spoon, years earlier, had made me curious about enamel. Fabergé showed me what enamel was truly capable of.

Without knowing it yet, that afternoon planted the seed that would become ETIEN.

Beginning ETIEN

When ETIEN was founded in 2021, the vision was already formed.

The original ambition was grand feu flinqué enamel — transparent glass fired over guilloché, precisely the effect that had stopped me cold in that exhibition. The direction was never in question. The challenge was execution.

Grand feu enamelling demands patience, accumulated experience, and a willingness to embrace failure as part of the process. It is not a finishing technique applied at the end of production. Every firing carries genuine risk, and every layer introduces a new opportunity for something to go wrong.

That reality became costly very quickly.

A flinqué dial begins with a silver base. Before any enamel is applied, the silver must be carefully prepared and engraved with a guilloché pattern. By that point, hundreds of dollars are already committed to a single blank. Then comes the kiln — a few minutes that determine whether every hour of that work survives.

Or disappears.

A crack. Contamination. An unexpected colour reaction. An unpredictable firing.

The entire dial becomes scrap — not only the enamel, but the silver, the guilloché, the time.

For a young independent brand, repeatedly losing completed blanks during development was unsustainable.

The Cold Enamel Years

The answer came from an unexpected direction.

I discovered a cold enamel system developed in Europe that achieved visual results remarkably close to traditional vitreous enamel, at a fraction of the risk. It offered a path forward — a way to continue building ETIEN while the financial cost of repeated kiln failures no longer threatened to end the project before it began.

The years spent experimenting with grand feu proved unexpectedly valuable. Many of the practical skills transferred naturally, and the transition was smoother than I had anticipated.

Cold enamel allowed ETIEN to move forward. Collectors responded positively. The brand took shape.

But something always remained unfinished.

Every cold enamel dial reminded me of what I had originally set out to make. Whenever I looked at them, I found myself returning to that Fabergé exhibition — the depth, the luminosity, the way light passed through glass before reaching engraved silver beneath.

Cold enamel solved the immediate problems. It never replaced the original ambition.

Returning to Grand Feu

Eventually, I accepted something I had probably always known.

If ETIEN was to become the brand I had imagined, returning to grand feu was not optional.

Not because cold enamel had failed — it served an essential role in ETIEN's development and gave the brand the foundation it needed. But it could not deliver what I had always been working toward: the depth of transparent enamel over guilloché, the permanence of glass fused to metal, the subtle passage of light through layers that took years of practice to fire successfully.

That was always the destination.

The return proved less daunting than expected. The years of experimenting, failing, and slowly refining my understanding of the material had been preparation without my realising it. The journey had never really stopped. It had simply taken a longer route.

Why ETIEN Exists

Grand feu enamel demands patience. It accepts failure as a condition of progress. It refuses shortcuts. From a purely commercial perspective, there are far easier ways to produce beautiful watch dials.

But ETIEN was never founded to pursue the easiest path.

It exists because of a fascination that began with a single enamelled spoon — grew through years of weekend experiments and torch-fired failures — paused while life moved on — and was transformed, irrevocably, by an afternoon spent studying Fabergé eggs in a gallery in China.

Every stage of that journey shaped what ETIEN became.

The butterfly that was never good enough to sell. The modest workshop and the torch. The years away from the bench. The Fabergé exhibition. The difficult decision to embrace cold enamel. The long return to grand feu.

None of these moments, taken alone, created this brand. Together, they did.

The butterfly still sits in my workshop. Technically, it is one of my worst pieces. Emotionally, it may be the most important — a reminder that craftsmanship rarely begins with success. More often, it begins with the willingness to ask what might happen if powdered glass met fire, and to keep asking long after the first answer turns out to be wrong.

That curiosity continues to guide ETIEN. Every grand feu dial we create is, in its own way, a continuation of that very first experiment.