Man Of The Hour: Wei Koh’s love letter to horology

SINGAPORE – Mr Wei Koh has never merely told time. He has also spent two decades shaping the culture around it.

At 55, the son of ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh has channelled his boundless curiosity into a global lifestyle empire.

Mr Wei Koh founded Revolution, a leading watch magazine with eight international editions, and The Rake, a British men’s style title. Together, these have grown beyond print into multimedia brands spanning digital platforms, retail ventures and television.

His latest venture, Man Of The Hour – premiering on Discovery Channel on Nov 4 – is an eight-part series that travels from Los Angeles to Geneva, Paris and Singapore to meet the makers, families and iconoclasts redefining modern watchmaking.

​The series, which is produced by Singapore production company Refinery Media and supported by Singapore Airlines, is ​hosted and executive produced by Mr Koh.

Season 1 opens the atelier doors at Swiss stalwarts F.P.Journe, Chopard and De Bethune; traces the revival of Danish brand Urban Jurgensen; follows Kosovo-born watchmaker Rexhep Rexhepi’s journey from refugee to revered master; examines Swiss brand Greubel Forsey’s relentless pursuit of precision; and peers into French luxury house Louis Vuitton’s future under Mr Jean Arnault alongside movement maestros Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini, before landing in the kinetic universe of Switzerland’s MB&F.​

The approach is personal and human – less about products, more about people. It shows how legacies are built, how families sustain them, and how passion and perseverance turn into watchmaking craft.

It comes at a time when interest in watches is growing and timepieces are seen not just as tools, but also as works of art, investments and heirlooms.

Mr Koh – who is married to artisanal ice cream maker Beatrice Ding, a former fitness entrepreneur – says the series is more than a love letter to watches.

“This isn’t just a documentary about horology,” he says. “It’s also about the lives, laughter and struggles of people I deeply care about.”

Give us the 15-second pitch for Man Of The Hour. Why should someone who can’t tell F.P. Journe from French toast tune in?

It would go like this: Man Of The Hour is a television odyssey into the heart of horology, a mythical realm presided over by geniuses, poets and madmen capable of expressing the very limits of human ingenuity through the micro-mechanical universe of watchmaking.

While the world of watch collecting might sound like a secret cabal where its devotees speak in a bizarre patois of archaic French engineering terms mixed with coded reference numbers, it is – to me – a hidden universe where one of the most vibrant art forms thrives.

I call it art because in a world where digital time is pervasive, a mechanical watch has no pragmatic reason to exist beyond transmitting emotion to its wearer. 

In a time when the electric vehicle is rapidly making the combustion-engine automobile extinct, the watch is the only remaining luxury object that fulfils our innate fascination with mechanical systems.

To me, the watch, with its oscillator vibrating multiple times a second, is the mechanical system that most closely approximates the human body and the beating heart.

How about this? A watch someone ordered from F.P. Journe in 1993 for approximately US$30,000 just sold for US$8.36 million (S$10.8 million). That’s how desirable Francois-Paul Journe’s watches are today.

Even though he makes around 900 mechanical watches a year, every one of these timepieces could command a secondary market premium ranging in value from the equivalent of a small car to a house.

In the last couple of years, watches have exploded in popularity. People have gone crazy in particular for a small subset known as “independent watchmaking”, which is the focus of Season 1 of the show.

While the residual values of watches made by these watchmakers can be extraordinary, Man Of The Hour is about the incredible human stories underlying each of their heroic journeys.

Having built Revolution and The Rake, what compelled you to step in front of the camera this time? Was it vanity, adventure or boredom?

As someone brought up on print, I missed the long-format structured storytelling of great print articles. The rise of social media has been immensely powerful for transmitting a message instantly to millions, but the veracity of the message is unchecked, and social media can be a maelstrom of chaos and misinformation.

I felt there must be a way to unite great, well-researched, editorially responsible storytelling with the medium of today, and I landed on television in both its linear and streaming formats.

I was also inspired by the late American chef and author Anthony Bourdain. I loved how food was the vehicle into his world, but in the end, it was always about human beings. I wanted a similar show for watches.

You’ve said many of the watchmakers featured are “dear friends whose families I’ve had the privilege to know”.  How do you interview friends without turning the show into a puff piece?

Man Of The Hour is the least objective thing I’ve ever done. It’s my love story or ode to watchmaking. It might come off like I’m waxing lyrical at times, but every one of these guys had to struggle like crazy to become a success.

Rexhep Rexhepi arrived in Geneva as an Albanian refugee fleeing Kosovo, not speaking a word of French or English. MB&F’s Max Busser almost went bankrupt three times with his brand.

Robert Greubel of Greubel Forsey was so disheartened when a client mistreated his watch that he vanished from the public for 20 years. Chopard’s Karl-Friedrich Scheufele had to labour ceaselessly for 30 years before his creations were recognised.

Their heart is incredible and that is the story I hope people take away from Man Of The Hour.

The series celebrates watchmakers as rock stars and poets. What’s the most unglamorous, grease-under-the-fingernails moment you witnessed while filming?

The most authentic (including “dirt under the fingernails”) individual we featured is Denis Flageollet, the co-founder and technical guru of De Bethune.

He forages for ore in Saint Croix in the US Virgin Islands, which he uses to forge his own metals in the foundry behind his house. It is powered by a wood fire fuelled by trees he chops down himself.

Despite living like a hermit, he creates timepieces that speak with a remarkably avant-garde seductive power. It was interesting to go from his foundry to American DJ and rapper Swizz Beats’ ultra-modern house designed by American architect Wallace Cunningham in California, and listen to Flageollet compare the watches with the house aesthetically. 

That was one of the coolest things about the show. We interviewed artistes like Swizz, painters like Wes Lang and NBA stars like Kyle Kuzma, who themselves create so much emotion in others, and saw how watches emotionally fulfil them.

You turned US$20,000 into US$1.3 million during the dot-com boom and lost half of it in a day. Does that experience make you better or worse at understanding collectors who spend astronomical amounts on watches they’ll never wear?

People have made similar fortunes simply by buying the right watches. Journe’s and Rexhepi’s watches can have near US$1 million premiums on the secondary market. So, they need to be careful in terms of who they allocate their watches to, because there are plenty of people who might succumb to the temptation of flipping them for these immense profits.

Despite knowing this, both of them remain remarkably humble and live normal lives. This is one of the things I like best about the Swiss watch industry – this Calvinist idea of keeping your feet on the ground, even when you are very successful.

With my watches, even if they have appreciated in value, I try not to look at them in these terms, but as expressions of the incredible personal creativity of these watchmakers who happen to be my friends.

Rexhep Rexhepi’s path from refugee to watchmaker extraordinaire is powerful. What did your conversation with him teach you about time, luck and merit?

It took him three years to sell his first watch after starting his brand. Think about the mental strength this takes, to be rejected day after day and wake up every morning, look yourself in the mirror and say: “Today will be the day I succeed.”

He talks about this time as teaching him the most valuable lessons in life, not to take anything for granted. That is probably why he is such a down-to-earth, kind and generous person, even though he is this immense horological rock star.

The series covers independent watchmakers who prioritise craft over profit. Greubel Forsey says it “doesn’t make money” despite astronomical prices. Do you admire that purity or think it is commercially naive?

Neither Robert Greubel or Stephen Forsey are businessmen. They approached watchmaking from this incredible place of sheer creativity, making a huge contribution in terms of improving the performance of the mechanical watch and also establishing the highest level of finishing the industry has ever known. This makes their watches incredibly hard to create.

When they started their company, they had 100 watchmakers making 100 watches. That means each guy basically spent one year making one watch. So, yes, they were not making any money despite the high price of their timepieces.

If you try to make artists into businessmen, you crush their souls. I like that today, they are purely involved in creation. It is Robert’s stepson and the brand’s chief executive, Michel Nydegger, who is in charge of finding the balance between commercial well-being and artistic authenticity.

Your father suggested you go to business school Insead to “afford any watch you want”. Instead, you created a magazine empire. Did proving him wrong feel as good as finally being able to buy all the watches you want?

I am unfortunately not able to buy all the watches I want. But I have also learnt to want less in life. I think much of this has to do with being truly happily married to the person I consider the greatest woman on earth.

When I want a watch, it is usually a symbol of a friendship with a watchmaker. I am hoping to get a Journe Resonance with a special black mother-of-pearl dial like the one on my Chronometre Optimum.  

Also, I am waiting patiently for my Rexhepi watch. In his episode, I have to go three rounds in the boxing ring with him to be considered for a place on his allocation list. Spoiler alert: He beat me mercilessly.

The series is called Man Of The Hour. In interviews, you have said you spent years as someone who felt he didn’t belong anywhere. When did you stop feeling like an outsider looking in, or do you still feel that way?

I stopped feeling like a weirdo, geek and outsider when I found watches. Watches have given me everything – my livelihood, my community, my passion, my sense of self-worth and my friendships.

I once asked Louis Vuitton’s Jean Arnault: “How do you deal with it when you go to weddings and everyone wants to talk to you?”

He replied: “I just have to find that one guy in the room that loves watches and then I know I will enjoy that conversation.”

That is exactly how I feel. And the show Man Of The Hour is for all the watch geeks out there so they know they are not alone, or for the person who knows nothing about watches and wants to discover this extraordinary realm where science meets art meets magic known as mechanical watchmaking.