e’ve said it many times: the decision to become a watchmaker grows from a seed planted in childhood, often triggered by a particular event or encounter. In Shona Taine’s case, that event involved not a watch but a clock. And not just any clock…

She was born in 1998 in La Chaux-de-Gilley, a village just a short drive from Morteau. Watchmaking wasn’t the obvious career choice - her mother runs a shop and her father “does all kinds of jobs. He’s an artist, originally from northern France. He travels, writes books. Nothing that might have interested me in watchmaking.”

Shona Taine (Photo: Guillaume Perret)

A trip to Prague at the age of ten would prove decisive. While visiting the Old Town with her parents, she came face-to-face with the city’s world-renowned astronomical clock. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The immensity, the colours, the procession of automata, the planets. I can’t explain why, but the sight of it stayed with me. It’s actually the only thing I remember of the entire trip.”

The Prague astronomical clock was built in 1410 by master clockmaker Hanus Carolinum and refined in the sixteenth century by Jan Táborský. Legend has it that Hanus was blinded to prevent him from making a similar clock elsewhere. (Photo Steve Collis from Melbourne)

Watchmaking, literature and philosophy combined

An avid reader, she expected she would study literature at university but was equally convinced of “the importance of working with your hands. I went to a Catholic private school. I knew I wanted to learn a manual skill but I had to fight for it. In France, there’s a tendency to look down on vocational studies.”

Undeterred, she enrolled for watchmaking at Lycée Edgard Faure in Morteau, and at the same time pursued online degree courses, graduating in modern literature from the Sorbonne, and philosophy, from Nanterre University.

Shona Taine, aged 19, at the ceremony for the 2017 Prix Avenir Métiers d’Art awards. She is holding her end-of-studies watch which she named “La Route du Thé”. (Photo: Augustin Détienne)

Initially, “watchmaking school wasn’t what I’d expected. In the first year we practised machining and learned about quartz movements.” It wasn’t until the second year that students were introduced to the mechanical watch. “That’s when I knew I’d made the right choice. This was what I wanted to do.” That same year, 2015, she was one of the Meilleurs Apprentis de France, a title awarded to outstanding students under the age of twenty-one. After a further four years of study, she was awarded her Diplôme de Métier d’Art (DMA). She also took first place in a precision regulation competition organised by the lycée and Besançon Observatory. “Looking back, I can see how much I benefited from these awards,” she says.

She graduated from Morteau in 2019 and found part-time work with an independent watchmaker in Les Brenets, just across the border in Switzerland. She spent the next six months servicing and repairing customers’ watches but was eager to go it alone, and so she quit her job and started a business. Shona Taine was now the boss of her own company, Khemea. She was 22 years old.

Exchanges

She had in mind to design and build a chiming watch, an area of horology that has always fascinated her (at least since that trip to Prague).

First, though, she needed to learn more. “I met many, many watchmakers and, in exchange for their advice, did small servicing and repair jobs through my company.” Her research put her in touch with Olivier Mory (another of our featured watchmakers) whose experience in industrial production complemented the skills she had learned in school. “Having this experience of both sides of watchmaking gives a broader view.” He suggested that she move to La Chaux-de-Fonds, where she could share his workshop and machines, find answers to her questions, help out occasionally and save up by doing after-sales service for others.

DMA restoration project – Le Phare calibre – Counter – Minute repeater.

She learned a lot from these exchanges, helping with the construction and prototyping for the movements and watches Olivier Mory develops. She describes her generation of independent watchmakers as “close-knit. The things I didn’t learn in school, I’ve learned from them.” She’s both surprised and delighted by “how well things are going for me!”

Restoring sound

Music is another of Shona Taine’s passions. “The combination of music and mechanisms, the ability to produce melodious sounds out of gears, springs, hammers and gongs is extraordinary.” At Morteau, students must complete two assignments, a construction project and a restoration project, in order to graduate. “I managed to source a minute-repeater movement through a teacher, who’d bought it second-hand. It was a Le Phare calibre that still had all the drilled components but was missing a lot of others. Working from archive documents and old photographs, I set about drawing and building all these missing parts. It took me two years, during which I also had to work on my end-of-studies watch. If I hadn’t managed it, which would have meant not graduating, well so be it. The most important thing was to have my chiming watch.” She finished both. Brilliantly.

Now, with this new experience under her belt and having saved up the necessary funds, Shona Taine was ready to move to the next level and finally make her own watch: the first under the Khemea name.

With the benefit of the knowledge she had acquired in the three years since leaving school, she was able to look at her plans and realise there were “things that wouldn’t work” – and go back to the drawing board.

Arkhea

She decided to rebuild the entire movement, using a tourbillon by Olivier Mory as a base. She introduced several of her own modifications, adding moon phases, a date, and, on the back, an indicator for the 100-hour power reserve. She also gave it a name: Arkhea, from the Ancient Greek for “origin”.

The Arkhea watch. 40 mm steel case. Movement K.10. Moon phases, date, power reserve, tourbillon. Balance frequency 21,600 vph/3Hz. Manual winding. Power reserve 100 hours.

Tourbillon, hours, minutes and date are arranged with infinite subtlety, poetry and the lightest touch. For the date, a white dot appears through 31 openings made in the aventurine dial. Against the same aventurine background, a beautiful, minimalist Moon marks each of its phases. These gently overlapping spheres are invigorated by the double arrow shape of the tourbillon bridge and, above it, the needle point of the hour and minute hands. Between the two sits a mysterious, finely engraved flower-like form: the “alchemical” logo of her brand, Khemea. This Ancient Greek word means “the art of fusing metals”. It’s also the origin of the word “alchemy”.

The art of self-knowledge

At just 25, Shona Taine shows remarkable maturity and astonishing consistency in her work, down to the smallest details. “I’ve learned a lot in three years,” she admits. “About watchmaking, but also about myself. Maybe I’ve lost some of my innocence but I’m in good company. I have all the support I need and creatively, I’m having the time of my life.”

She talks again about the solidarity that exists between young independents. “We even share clients between ourselves. We don’t trample over each other. We talk a lot.”

Asked how she feels about being one of the few women in what is still a male-dominated profession, she smiles. “It’s not something I think about. I’m used to the environment. At school, we were three girls in a class of fifteen. At home I was the only daughter…” She admits she has to stand her ground in the face of certain reactions. “Some clients have been pretty obnoxious, as though they underestimated my abilities. But to be honest, it’s not my problem. As for my watch, I’d say it’s more personal than feminine.”

Elegant and refined, 40mm in diameter, the Arkhea is as much for men as for women. Shona Taine plans to make a dozen, with the possibility of giving each one a more masculine or feminine aspect. In her view, complication watches for women are still largely unexplored territory. And whatever happens, chiming mechanisms will remain central to her work. “I’m starting to make a name for myself,” she says, shyly. “Most of the watches people bring to me for repair are chiming watches.”

As for her own chiming watch, there’s not long to wait…

“I still have so much to learn. You learn through practice, repeating the same gesture over and over, and if you succeed in mastering even the smallest thing, it’s already huge progress. The beauty of watchmaking is that you can express yourself in so many ways, whether artistic, artisanal, mechanical… The possibilities are endless.”