Krayon

In 2017, the young watchmaker Rémi Maillat and his independent atelier Krayon became a sensation in the watch community. Krayon’s debut model called Everywhere is unprecedented in the history of wristwatches because this watch can calculate the time of sunrise and sunset anywhere in the world, i.e with the possibility to adjust the place.

A third-generation watch engineer, Maillat began his career at Cartier under the guidance of Carole Forestier, where he worked for several years. While working at Cartier, Maillat had a hand in creating highly complicated watches, but he did not have the opportunity to realize his idea of ​​a mechanical sunrise/sunset indicator. Establishing his brand allowed him to embody and put his ideas into practice.

In 2014, Maillat founded his own independent atelier Krayon (the name alludes to the French word crayon, meaning "pencil"), and started to implement his bold ideas. And the first such idea was related to the USS (Universal Sunrise Sunset) mechanism - a mechanical calculator that can calculate the solar day using the parameters entered using patented differentials.

While working at Cartier, Maillat had a hand in creating highly complicated watches, but he did not have the opportunity to realize his idea of ​​a mechanical sunrise/sunset indicator.

The watch owner can set the longitude, latitude, and current UTC zone in 30-minute increments using just a single crown and one button. Accordingly, the time of day and night is displayed on overlapping sapphire discs, located around the circumference of the dial. 

The mechanism was striking in its complexity – in total, the USS caliber contains almost 600 components. Immediately after the premiere, Maillat nominated the model for the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève in the Calendar category, but back then the judges did not have time to carefully study the new project, so it went unrewarded. But in 2018 judges righted the wrong and a new, even more luxurious version of Everywhere, called Horizon, took the GPHG Innovation prize.

Krayon, a small family-run atelier, currently produces two models: the highly sophisticated Everywhere and its simplified version, Anywhere, which is based on the same patented sunrise and sunset indication system, while featuring an utmost simple-to-read dial.