Dominic Liew shares about his passion for independent watchmaking, which started more than a decade ago
Dominic Liew has been collecting watches for the past 15 years—nearly half his life. But the 31‑year‑old radiology resident’s love of watches stemmed from as early as the age of 5. As a child, Liew was a fan of the Power Rangers television series and had a fascination for the watch‑like device, called the Wrist Communicator, that the superheroes used to communicate with one another and the Command Center, as well as teleport. He had toy replicas of the Wrist Communicator then and later, when he was old enough to tell the time, he moved on to the trendy Baby‑G watches of the early 2000s.
But Liew’s more serious watch collecting journey began when he was 16. After completing his GCE O‑level examinations in 2008, Liew was promised a congratulatory gift of his choosing from his parents. He decided on a watch; after trawling through online watch forums, he found himself completely enraptured by what he discovered. “I realised that mechanical watches are actually not that different from the watches I loved as a kid, watches that could ‘talk’ to you,” recalls Liew. “They have a life of their own. They don’t operate on batteries; they operate on a spring that stores potential energy converted into kinetic energy that somehow tells the time, the date and so much more. I found it all extremely fascinating”.
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Eventually, he settled on a Rolex Submariner (no date) Reference 14060M, his first luxury timepiece. “It was such an amazing thing and back then, I remember saying I would never need another watch again,” Liew says with a laugh.
Those were famous last words. It would be barely four months before he acquired his next watch and the rest is history. For the next few years, he bought from the big brands such as Rolex and Patek Philippe, and in 2011 acquired his first timepiece from the independent brand Parmigiani Fleurier. But it was only in the following year, when he bought his first MB&F, the HM3, that his passion for independent watchmaking really took off. “I’d been eyeing the HM3 since I first saw it a year and a half prior at (luxury watch retailer) The Hour Glass’s boutique in Ngee Ann City, which I used to frequent,” says Liew, who now shops at the Ion Orchard boutique, which showcases more independent brands. “It looked unlike anything I’d seen before. My wish was to get the HM3 when I turned 30; instead, I got it at 21,” he says. At the time, Liew was known to be the youngest ever in the world to own a MB&F timepiece.
From then on, he started receiving invitations to events with independent watchmakers, which opened his eyes to the scene that he fell in love with—long before the rise of independent watch brands in the past four to five years—and continues to be passionate about today. “Hearing about the brands’ and founders’ stories and struggles, and how they persevered by keeping to their visions and seeing them through back then was very admirable to me because I feel that it takes a lot of guts,” Liew shares. “These independent watchmakers made something different because they felt that whatever was in the market at that moment was not representative of them and what they could do. That’s why [MB&F founder] Maximilian Büsser came up with all those unusual shapes and started this avant‑garde, new wave of watchmaking. I saw a whole different world of watches, one of real craftsmanship and artistry with a lot of soul, and I really wanted to support it.”
