Last year, we took a deep dive into the world of independent watchmaking by exploring the various awards, prizes and programs available to watchmakers aiming to build a reputation for themselves in the industry. One of the highlighted prizes in that article is the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives, an award that celebrates makers just starting to establish a name for themselves by aiding their development with a one-year mentorship program and funding for the winner. That winner for the 2026 edition of the prize being Hazemann and Monnin.
Hazemann and Monnin is an independent brand founded in Switzerland in 2024. Although while the brand is new the watchmaking minds behind the brand, Alexandre Hazemann and Victor Monnin, have known each other for much longer as they met while attending the watchmaking class at Edgar Faure high school in Morteau, France.
Their submission to the Watch Prize was the School Watch, their inaugural project. It has a regulator style display with individual hours, minutes and seconds, but the piece’s party trick is the synchronisation of the instantaneous jump hour hand with a striking chime mechanism. So that once an hour, on the hour, the watch chimes as the hand jumps forward.
The two watchmakers also wanted to express their personal tastes and so the School Watch is produced in two variants. Hazemann’s is purely technical with openworked subdials to reveal their inner workings while Monnin’s is more aesthetic with malachite and mother-of-pearl subdials.
These are exactly the types of independent watchmakers that projects like the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives should support. Fresh minds with a distinctive vision and goal who need a bit of a boost in name recognition and funding to find their feet. A worthy winner indeed.
