Jewellery & Watch News
Arguably one of the most unique luxury watch brands of all time, ArtyA push the limits of traditional watch craftsmanship with extraordinary, provocative, and creative timepiece designs. Their exhilarating talent for manufacture, technology and design is one of the many reasons we at C W Sellors are so incredibly excited to announce we are now official UK stockists of ArtyA watches. To celebrate our new alliance, we thought it was time we introduced you to the short yet fascinating history of the ArtyA watch brand.
Founded in 2010, ArtyA watches are still a fairly new contender to the luxury watch world and yet they have had no trouble standing out from competition with their impressively unique and imaginative designs. Yvan Arpa, founder of ArtyA, deserves an entire feature of his own with his history and past career largely responsible for the genius you see in the ArtyA watch collections. Considered one of the world’s most audacious and avantgarde watch creators, Yvan Arpa began his career as a mathematics professor before joining the Richemont Group in 1997 for Baume et Mercier as Managing Director for Switzerland and Sales Director for Europe and Asia.
His love for watchmaking quickly developed and in 2002 he became the Managing Director for Hublot, significantly driving the launch of the Big Bang collection. As one of the Swiss watch brand’s flagship models, the Big Bang and its technically and aesthetically daring design certainly marked the beginning of Arpa’s love for unconventional watchmaking. This belief is only further strengthened when in 2006 he became the CEO of Romain Jerome, another revolutionary watch brand that created luxury timepieces inspired by superheroes and cartoon characters engineered from unique materials like real-life moon dust and rusted steel from the Titanic.
Then in 2010, Yvan Arpa created his own company known as ArtyA which instantly became characterised by its unconventional use of raw materials. From real butterfly wings to bullets, fossilized dinosaur droppings to real spiders, boxes struck by lightning to tobacco leaves, nothing is off limits in the design of ArtyA watches. Just as extraordinary, these designs are incredibly rare with many of the pieces limited to only a handful or just one single piece making them highly coveted by collectors.
Today, ArtyA remains entirely independent and is still managed by Yvan Arpa and his wife Dominique who is accountable for some of the elaborate dial designs seen in the ArtyA watch collections. Their factory is based in the watchmaking centre of the world, Geneva, Switzerland, where no more than ten people handcraft the designs entirely in-house. It is also here that ArtyA have established their own manufacture, something very few Swiss watch brands can attest to, engineering their own tourbillon, minute repeater and perpetual calendar movements. Recently, the luxury Swiss watch brand also revealed their first COSC certified in-house movement, a huge accomplishment for any independent brand.
The ArtyA watch collections can currently be divided into six different families, each completely unique in their mission. Ranging from 38mm to 47mm in size, each ArtyA watch goes by the “Son of” brand name including Son of Sound, Son of a Gun, Son of Earth, Son of Gears, Son of Arts and Son of Love. As official UK retailers of ArtyA watches, you can now explore all of these collections on the C W Sellors website alongside our incredible interest free finance and free next day delivery options. Learn more about ArtyA watches here.
