Rexhep Rexhepi: The Definitive Guide (2026)

The short version is a fable, which is part of the problem: a refugee boy arrives in Switzerland, is handed a screwdriver, and two decades later his watches outsell Pateks at auction. It is true, and it explains almost nothing. What explains Rexhep Rexhepi is a specific sequence of workshops, four of them, in twenty-four years, each of which taught him something the next one needed.

A village in Kosovo, a watch on his father’s wrist

Rexhepi was born in 1987 in Zheger, a village on the Karadak in eastern Kosovo. His father had worked in Switzerland since 1976; Rexhep was raised largely by his grandmother in a large extended family. The object that started everything was his father’s wristwatch, a Tissot, by most accounts, worn home on visits and studied by a child who had little else to study.

In March 1998 the Kosovo conflict began. Rexhepi left for Geneva to join his father. His own account puts him at eleven; several published profiles say twelve. He arrived speaking no French, into a school system that had no particular plans for him.

Patek Philippe at fifteen

He applied to Patek Philippe’s watchmaking school at fourteen, passed the entrance examination, and began his apprenticeship at fifteen, recruited in 2002 by Jean-Marc Figols, then head of apprentices. He stayed roughly five years, a three-year apprenticeship followed by two as a watchmaker, rotating through assembly, adjustment, quality control, restoration, and the finishing disciplines: perlage, anglage, the slow arithmetic of the hand.

One detail from those years matters more than the rest. Apprentices built a school watch. Rexhepi was among the few permitted to sign his own name on the dial of his, a lépine calibre bearing the Geneva Seal, and beneath it, his name. He has said since that the idea of a watch carrying a maker’s name, rather than only a manufacture’s, was planted there, at seventeen, on a piece he could not keep.

BNB Concept: complications, at speed

Around 2007 he joined BNB Concept, the Neuchâtel complications house founded by Mathias Buttet, Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini, which built complicated ebauches for a long list of brands that preferred not to say so. Rexhepi worked on tourbillons and calibre construction. By roughly twenty-one he was leading a team of ten to fifteen watchmakers, most of them older than him.

BNB went bankrupt in 2010; Hublot absorbed part of the wreckage. For Rexhepi the collapse was instructive in a way no employer intends. He had seen, from inside, that technical brilliance without commercial control is a fragile arrangement.

This is the part of the story that horology repeats and rarely examines. It deserves examining, because it is the single most misunderstood thing about Rexhep Rexhepi.

What Rexhepi actually did at F.P. Journe

After BNB, Rexhepi did what he had wanted to do for years: he sat a practical examination at F.P. Journe and passed it. He joined the Geneva manufacture around 2010 as a watchmaker on a small team. He worked on the Chronomètre à Résonance, Journe’s signature complication and, by common consent, one of the least forgiving mechanisms in modern watchmaking, and, by some accounts, on the Octa and the Chronographe Souverain as well.

He stayed between eighteen months and two years. Sources differ; nobody disputes the substance. What he took from it was less a technique than a template. Journe ran a manufacture in which the watchmaker was the brand, the decisions were his, and the philosophy was to hand a young watchmaker the whole watch and let him find the bottom of it. Rexhepi has described that A-to-Z immersion as the reason he wanted to be there.

Meanwhile, he worked evenings and weekends, prototyping, servicing, whatever paid, to assemble the roughly CHF 100,000 he had calculated he needed to open his own atelier. He left in 2011 or early 2012.

What Journe said about Rexhepi

François-Paul Journe is not a generous man with praise for other watchmakers, which is what makes the remark durable. Asked by Wei Koh of Revolution to name his favourite among the younger generation, Journe named Rexhep, then added, with a laugh, that this was

“Especially now that he’s stopped copying me.”

Read it as you like. Koh read it as pride, and the reading is hard to argue with. It is also, functionally, the most valuable sentence ever spoken about Rexhep Rexhepi, an anointing from the one person whose anointing could not be bought.

Chronomètre Souverain, Chronomètre Contemporain

The debt is legible in the naming. Journe’s Chronomètre Souverain; Rexhepi’s Chronomètre Contemporain. Both insist on the word chronomètre in an era when the word has been diluted into meaninglessness, and both back it up, Rexhepi’s pieces are certified by the Besançon Observatory. Both men build in precious or specified metals rather than commodity brass. Both attach their own name to the dial and accept the consequences.

But the parallels stop at philosophy and do not extend to the object. Journe’s watches are inventions: the résonance, the remontoir d’égalité, a rose-gold movement as a signature. Rexhepi’s are refinements. Where Journe reaches for a mechanism nobody has solved, Rexhepi reaches for a symmetry nobody has bothered to achieve. His finishing, rounded bombé anglage, extensive black polishing, interior angles multiplied past the point of commercial sense, is not Journe’s language at all. It is Philippe Dufour’s.

Is Rexhepi the heir to Journe and Dufour?

The comparison was made deliberately, and by someone with skin in it. Michael Tay of The Hour Glass, who had represented Philippe Dufour, was openly looking for the next one, and it was partly at his urging that Rexhepi launched a line under his own name in 2018 rather than continuing under Akrivia alone.

The market then validated the thesis with brutal literalism. In May 2023 a pink-gold Chronomètre Contemporain, originally retailed for under US$70,000, sold at Phillips Hong Kong for HK$7.24 million, about US$924,000. Besides Journe himself, no living independent’s time-only watches command sums like that.

So: heir, with a qualification. Rexhepi inherited Journe’s business model and Dufour’s hands. What he has not yet done is invent something. The Chronomètre Contemporain II’s deadbeat seconds and the 2026 flyback chronograph are superbly executed; neither is a mechanism the world had not seen. Rexhepi is thirty-eight. Journe was forty-two when the Résonance appeared. The comparison is not yet closed.

Why “Akrivia”

From the Greek ακρίβεια, exactitude, precision, strictness of observance. Rexhepi founded the company in 2012 at twenty-five, initially with a co-founder, Etienne Deschamps, formerly of Chopard, who left early. The first watch appeared in 2013. In its first year, Akrivia sold none.

Xhevdet Rexhepi, the other brother

Xhevdet Rexhepi, born 1990, is Rexhep’s younger brother and, like him, Patek-trained. He joined Akrivia around 2015 and worked at the bench there for the better part of a decade. In January 2023 he revealed his own first watch, the Minute Inerte, at roughly CHF 80,000, under his own name. Searches for “Rexhep and Xhevdet Rexhepi” reflect a family that now occupies two positions in independent watchmaking rather than one.

One street in the Old Town

Akrivia moved to Geneva’s Old Town in 2017, into premises on the Grand-Rue with windows onto the cobbles. What has happened since is the least discussed and most consequential development in the company: it has quietly become vertically integrated, one workshop at a time.

2019, a micromechanics and case-making workshop, established with Jean-Pierre Hagmann, the legendary Geneva casemaker who had made cases for Patek Philippe’s most important complications.

2023, Braceletiers Akrivia, an in-house strap atelier.

Spring 2024, an in-house grand feu enamel dial workshop, removing the last major external dependency.

Movements, cases, dials and straps are now made across several ateliers on a single street. Headcount is difficult to pin down: SJX reported around twenty staff in 2024, and 2026 coverage cites a substantially larger figure across all workshops. Rexhepi owns the whole thing. There is no outside investor.

Two names, one bench

The distinction confuses people, so state it plainly. Akrivia is the avant-garde line, tourbillons, chiming jump hours, sculptural cases, movements you read like architecture. Rexhep Rexhepi is the classical line, grand feu enamel, Roman numerals, thirty-eight millimetres, movements built for symmetry rather than spectacle. Same bench, same hands, two entirely different arguments about what a watch should be.

Akrivia AK-01 (2013)

The first Akrivia: a flying one-minute tourbillon with a monopusher, column-wheel chronograph and roughly four days of power. The movement was a reworked BNB ebauche, the same architecture Hublot had used, rebuilt and decorated with Manufacture Haute Complication. Around forty-three millimetres, 12.9mm thick. Roughly ten in steel, five in red gold. Launch price approximately CHF 160,000 to 200,000. One sold for about US$1.23 million at Phillips in November 2024.

Akrivia AK-02, AK-03 and AK-04 (2015 to 16)

The AK-02 stripped the AK-01 back to a tourbillon with hours and minutes. The AK-03 Tourbillon Chiming Jump Hour introduced Akrivia’s first fully in-house calibre: tourbillon, jumping hours and a passing-strike sonnerie with a silence function, stacked on a single vertical axis for symmetry. It was a GPHG nominee in 2015 and priced around CHF 180,000. The AK-04 Régulateur is the same calibre without the chime.

Akrivia AK-06 (2017)

The pivot. Akrivia’s first watch without a tourbillon, and the one that proved Rexhepi did not need one. Hand-wound in-house Calibre AK-06: hours, minutes, small seconds, power reserve, hacking seconds with zero-reset via a heart cam. 41mm by 9.9mm; steel, titanium, red gold and platinum, about twenty-five pieces per metal. 18,000vph, a hundred-hour reserve, Breguet overcoil.

It launched at CHF 79,000 in steel. On 10 May 2026, at the Phillips Geneva Watch Auction XXIII, a steel AK-06 hammered at CHF 2.4 million and sold for CHF 3 million, US$3.9 million, exceeding its high estimate by 140 per cent, in the highest-grossing watch auction ever held. It is the record for the maker.

Chronomètre Contemporain (2018)

The breakthrough, and still the definitive Rexhepi. Hours, minutes, and a small seconds at six set in a gilded ring; a grand feu enamel dial, white on platinum, black on rose gold, organised in an Art Deco sector layout. 38mm by 9.5mm. Manual Calibre RR-01, single barrel, hundred-hour reserve, hacking and zero-reset, certified at Besançon. Fifty pieces: twenty-five in each metal.

It won the GPHG Men’s Watch Prize in 2018. It retailed at roughly CHF 55,500. Six years later a platinum example took about CHF 1.16 million at Phillips Geneva.

Chronomètre Contemporain II (2022)

First shown as a unique Only Watch piece in 2021, then serialised. The CC II adds a deadbeat seconds, a hand that ticks once per second, driven by its own barrel and going train through a flirt-and-star mechanism, so that the timekeeping train is never asked to pay for the theatre. New Calibre RRCC02: twin barrels, German silver, free-sprung balance, 3Hz, eighty-two-hour reserve. 38mm by 8.75mm; platinum with black enamel, rose gold with white. Cases by Hagmann. Fifty per metal. CHF 125,000. A diamond-set variant followed at around CHF 150,000.

It won Rexhepi his second GPHG Men’s Watch Prize. The 2021 Only Watch prototype sold for CHF 800,000.

Chronomètre Antimagnétique (Only Watch, sold 2024)

A unique steel piece with an entirely new movement: indirectly-driven central seconds, central balance, gold wheels, seventy-two-hour reserve, hacking and zero-reset. 38mm by 9.9mm, a Faraday-cage case construction with a removable outer caseback, and a black grand feu dial in a deliberately scientific register.

Estimated at CHF 100,000 to 150,000. On 10 May 2024, at Christie’s in Geneva, it sold for CHF 2.1 million, about US$2.3 million. Nobody had predicted it. Note that the figure of “US$4.3 million” attached to Rexhepi in 2024 coverage is a combined total across three watches sold that week, not a single result.

Louis Vuitton × Akrivia LVRR-01 (2023)

Louis Vuitton’s first collaboration with an independent, under Jean Arnault. A double-faced platinum case of roughly 39.5mm, made by Hagmann; an inverted in-house calibre with monopusher chronograph, passing-minute sonnerie and a five-minute tourbillon; two barrels, seventy-two-hour reserve. A tinted sapphire front dial with six gold pliquà-jour cubes, and a white grand feu enamel reverse. Louis Vuitton merged its own logo into the Akrivia wordmark, the first time it had done so with anyone. Ten pieces, CHF 450,000. A GPHG Chronograph finalist in 2024.

Chronograph Flyback, RRCHF (2026)

The newest, announced in early April 2026 and the first chronograph to carry his name alone. A new hand-wound, integrated flyback chronograph with an instantaneously jumping minute counter, column wheel and lateral clutch. 21,600vph, seventy-two-hour reserve, around 320 components in a movement 6.3mm thick. 38.8mm by 9.7mm; platinum with storm-blue grand feu enamel, or 5N rose gold with black. Dial and strap made in-house.

CHF 150,000 before tax in either metal. Not numbered, but limited by capacity. Reported demand exceeded 1,700 requests.

Prices before tax, as at launch. Specifications compiled from Atelier Akrivia and auction catalogue descriptions.

There is a reason a Rexhepi movement photographs the way it does, and it is not the photography.

Most fine movements are finished where the eye lands. Rexhepi finishes where it does not, the undersides of bridges, the flanks of components buried three layers deep. His movements are designed around strict vertical symmetry, which sounds like an aesthetic choice and is in fact an engineering constraint: symmetry forces bridges into shapes that generate dozens of interior angles, and an interior angle cannot be produced by a machine. It has to be cut and polished by a human being with a piece of pegwood and a great deal of time.

The vocabulary: bombé anglage, where the chamfer is rounded rather than flat, doubling the difficulty. Black polishing, where steel is worked against a zinc plate until it reflects at only one angle and appears void-black at every other. Côtes de Genève, perlage, hand-engraving. A single watch takes approximately three months. This is the entire explanation for an output of fewer than sixty pieces a year, and, indirectly, for everything that has happened to the prices.

Two dependencies deserve naming. Jean-Pierre Hagmann, born 1940, made Akrivia’s cases from 2019 and received a GPHG Special Jury Prize in 2024; he died in 2025. And the grand feu enamel dials, fired at over 800°C, unforgiving, with a failure rate that is the reason enamel dials are rare, were outsourced until the atelier opened its own enamel workshop in spring 2024.

GPHG Men’s Watch Prize, 2018, Chronomètre Contemporain.

GPHG Men’s Watch Prize, 2022, Chronomètre Contemporain II. Two wins in the same category in five years.

GPHG 2024, the LVRR-01 was a Chronograph category finalist. It did not win.

Publicly admired by Philippe Dufour, Kari Voutilainen and François-Paul Journe.

Two answers, and the gap between them is the whole story.

Retail prices before tax. USD conversions indicative at mid-2026 rates.

The secondary market

A CHF 79,000 steel watch sold for CHF 3 million eight years after it left the atelier. That is a multiple of roughly thirty-eight, and it is not an outlier so much as the extreme point of a consistent curve.

The scarcity arithmetic

Fewer than sixty watches a year. Roughly 1,700 requests for the flyback alone. Around 350 to 500 Rexhepi and Akrivia watches in existence in total, after fourteen years. Set that against a global population of collectors for whom CHF 150,000 is a discretionary purchase, and the auction results stop looking like exuberance and start looking like arithmetic.

The constraint is not marketing. It is a man’s hands, three months per watch, and a refusal to add a second shift.

Begin with the honest answer: you probably cannot buy one at retail, and no amount of money changes that in the near term. What money changes is which of the other two doors you walk through.

The allocation

Allocation is not a queue. There is no list you join by paying a deposit and no ordering by seniority of enquiry. Rexhepi and his retail partners place watches with collectors they know, or who are vouched for, and the placement reflects a judgement about where the watch will live. One collector told Robb Report he waited seven years for his Chronomètre Contemporain II. Two to three is more typical for those already inside the circle. Purchase history at other brands is worth nothing here.

Authorised retailers

The network is deliberately minute. A Collected Man in London and The Hour Glass in Singapore are the names that recur; the atelier also places pieces directly. Approaching either with a considered, specific interest, a reference, a metal, a reason, is a materially better use of a first contact than a general expression of enthusiasm.

Auction

The only reliable route to a specific reference on a specific timeline. Phillips, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have all handled significant Rexhepi lots; Phillips has handled the most important ones. Provenance is documented, condition is catalogued, and the price is whatever the room decides. Expect to pay a multiple, and to compete in public against people who have decided the same thing you have.

Private sale, and the grey market

Specialist brokers move these watches quietly and continuously. The premium is typically two to six times retail depending on reference and metal, the timeline is weeks rather than years, and the entire transaction rests on the intermediary’s access and integrity.

Listings on open marketplaces, Chrono24 among them, are dealer inventory, not atelier allocation. Prices there reflect what a dealer hopes to achieve rather than what the market has cleared. Treat them as a sentiment indicator, verify provenance, papers and case condition independently, and understand that a Rexhepi with a polished Hagmann case has lost something no service can restore.

The useful frame is generational. Above Rexhepi sit the founders of modern independent watchmaking, Dufour, Journe, Voutilainen, Roger Smith, whose reputations were built over forty years. Below him is a cohort that arrived in the last decade: Petermann Bédat, Simon Brette, Sylvain Pinaud, Raúl Pagès. Rexhepi is the hinge. He is the only member of the younger group whose work is priced, and treated, as though it belonged to the older one.

Output and secondary figures are indicative estimates drawn from published reporting, not audited disclosures. Independent makers do not publish production data.

Passion Asset Advisory brokers watches of exactly this kind, so read the following with that in mind. We would rather state the disclosure than write around it.

The bull case is a matter of record. Supply is capped by a physical constraint that cannot be relaxed without abandoning the thing being bought. Demand has grown roughly twenty-eight-fold against supply on the flyback alone. Two GPHG prizes and Journe’s endorsement supply the institutional validation that separates a maker from a moment. And the buyer base for top-tier independents has broadened from a few hundred collectors to a global pool of capital that treats them as a distinct asset class.

The bear case deserves equal air. Prices for the Chronomètre Contemporain more than doubled between the first generation and the second, at CHF 55,500 and CHF 125,000, and some collectors argue the second movement gave back a measure of the first’s obsessive detail. Auction results of the 2024 to 26 vintage were achieved in an exceptional market for independents. A CHF 3 million steel watch is a claim about scarcity, and scarcity is a story the market can revise. The maker himself is one man, uninsurable against, and there is no succession plan in public view.

What can be said without hedging: these are among the finest hand-finished watches made by anyone alive, they were bought by their first owners at prices that now look like errors, and none of that constitutes a forecast. Nothing in this article is investment advice. Value your own conviction above anyone’s multiple.

As of mid-2026 the flyback chronograph is the current release, announced a week or so before Watches and Wonders and immediately oversubscribed. Hagmann’s death in 2025 removed the atelier’s greatest single craft asset and its only irreplaceable one; how case-making evolves without him is the open question of the next five years.

Rexhepi turns thirty-nine this year, controls four workshops on one street, and has said plainly that he does not intend to scale. His stated ambition is an honest product at an honest price, a phrase that reads differently when the honest price is CHF 150,000 and the market pays twenty times it. He describes the coming decade as the one in which he shows what the atelier can actually do.

On present evidence, that is not a promotional line. It is a schedule.

Written and researched by Alex B for Passion Asset Advisory, a Prague-based advisory and brokerage practice specialising in independent horology and collectible mechanical watches. Published 8 July 2026. Reviewed quarterly, and within seventy-two hours of any major Geneva auction.

Disclosure. Passion Asset Advisory buys, sells and brokers watches by the makers discussed in this article, including Rexhep Rexhepi and Akrivia, and may hold or seek positions in them on behalf of clients. Nothing here is investment advice or a solicitation. Prices, production figures and waiting times are as reported at the date of publication and change without notice.

Method. Specifications are drawn from Atelier Akrivia and from auction house catalogue descriptions. Auction results are as reported by the houses, inclusive of buyer’s premium. Where sources disagree, on arrival age, employment dates and annual production, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

Related: best independent watch brands, F.P. Journe vs Patek Philippe, sell an independent watch, independent horology advisory.