Rexhep Rexhepi

Rexhep Rexhepi's answer is: Build complicated timepieces.

"When you're 25, you want to show people what you can do - so I started with complications," says the Kosovo-born watchmaker, now 31 and based in Switzerland. In quick succession, the young man hailed as the next big thing in luxury mechanical watches produced five ultra complications in the six years since he started his AkriviA brand in 2012. All, including a rare combination of a tourbillon and mono-pusher chronograph and a tourbillon with a chiming digital jump hour, are focussed on the tourbillon.

The talented young watchmaker, obsessed with the precision of timepieces since he was a boy, regards Abraham-Louis Breguet's seminal invention, the gravity-defying tourbillon, as one of the core elements of horology.