Naoya Hida

Naoya Hida founded the eponymous brand in Tokyo in 2018, leveraging twenty years of experience in the Swiss luxury watch industry through his previous role at the FH Bureau (Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry's Japanese office) where he had worked extensively with the most refined Swiss makers. The premise of the brand was specific: build modern Japanese independent dress watches with hand-engraved silver dials, hand-finished movements based on existing Swiss bases, and a production volume small enough to maintain workshop-grade artisanal quality.

The first reference, the Type 1A, launched in 2019: a 37mm steel-cased dress watch with a hand-engraved solid silver dial (the dial is engraved with concentric circles by hand, then patinated and lacquered for protection), blued-steel pomme-style hands, and a heavily-modified Valjoux 7750-base movement rebuilt with a Japanese hand-finishing standard that includes hand-bevelled bridges, polished countersinks, and a hand-engraved balance bridge. Subsequent references (Type 2A, 3A, 4A, 5A) varied the case, dial layout, and complications while maintaining the same hand-finished silver-dial identity.

Naoya Hida's annual production is one of the smallest in modern serious watchmaking: fewer than 50 watches per year, allocated through application and waiting list. Pricing starts around USD 28,000 for the entry references and rises into the USD 50,000+ range for the more complex variants. The brand has built a reputation among collectors of independent watchmaking as one of the most refined small-batch Japanese makers, sitting alongside Hajime Asaoka and the Kikuchi Nakagawa workshop in the modern Japanese independent tier. Distribution is direct from the Tokyo workshop with limited international representation.