Konstantin Chaykin is a Moscow-born watchmaker (b. 1976) who established his eponymous brand in 2003 and was admitted to the AHCI (Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants) in 2010, the first Russian member. His early career focused on serious complication work: tourbillons, calendars, and a religious complication (the Decalogue, displaying Hebrew calendar dates and Jewish religious cycles). The Joker was a sharp pivot: launched at Baselworld 2017, the watch took the conventional time + moonphase complication and rearranged it into a cartoon face.
The dial is the entire watch: two large discs for hours (left eye) and minutes (right eye), each marked with the visible digit, rotating once per 12 hours and once per 60 minutes respectively. Both discs are visible behind a dial aperture and display "looking at you" through the watch crystal. The smiling mouth is a moonphase aperture: the moon disc rotates behind a curved cut-out, and the visible portion of the moon serves as the "smile" (or "frown" depending on phase). The whole construction makes time-reading straightforward: read the digits in the eye apertures.
The launch reference was a 42mm stainless steel case with Konstantin Chaykin's base movement Cal. K07-0 (an ETA 2824-2 automatic with a custom Chaykin display module on top). Subsequent variants have included the Joker Bronze (with naturally aged bronze case), Joker Russian (red-and-blue dial honouring the Russian flag), Joker Halloween (orange-and-black themed), Joker DC (with reference to the comic-book Joker character, in green and purple), and the Joker Selfie (a photographic-printed portrait dial, limited editions for collectors who upload their photo). The Wristmons family expanded into the Mouse, the Snowman, the Easter Egg, and many other face-dial variants.
The Joker is now Chaykin's most-recognised watch and one of the most-recognised modern independent watch dials period. Retail spans approximately USD 8,000-15,000 for steel variants, with bronze, gold, and limited-edition variants reaching USD 25,000-40,000+. Production is small (Chaykin estimates fewer than 1,000 watches per year across the entire workshop), and Joker waitlists at boutiques and authorised dealers run multi-month. The watch sits in an unusual market position: not technically ambitious in pure haute-horlogerie terms, but visually so unique that it has built a substantial collector following in markets (US, UK, Asia, Russia) where face-dial novelty is independently valued. Several other modern watchmakers have attempted face-dial variants since 2017, but the Joker remains the reference.
