Hitori Habuka 39 Snow White

"Who even is Gnomon Watches? Honestly, this is not as straightforward a question as it seems, especially to many new folks here who just came across us. We’d be only identified as for them in searching for the best “value for money” Swiss-made watches, or even those well bang-for-bucks watch straps for your Black Bays and Seikos. Y’all might be just half right. As I mentioned clearly in the title, we’re certainly not your next-door watch shop, selling off the shelves stocks like your parents at grocery runs. But if you insist, we will change your watch battery if you ever pop by our store and have a quick chat with our watchmaker.

So how did we get started? Our beloved founder Mr. Anders Tan started Gnomon Watches in 2002, but the story goes way before that. As a watch enthusiast himself at a young (He still is today), he was deep into those that were military rooted, to be specific. From the likes of “Dirty Dozen” to those Teutonic like Sinn and such, he preferred those qualities, form-follows-function wristwatches since the beginning. He might be the first few in Singapore who actually cares so much about wartime watches, intrigued by how they were built to last in the field and being good at that throughout decades. So much so that he simply wants to share this passion and actual military watches with the rest of us.

So he began to collect them directly from those once suppliers, along with the retailers who stocked them at the time, and brought some into Singapore and started selling them himself. He started his biz online on forums, where he often spent time on his personal hobby. All that has happened was in pre-Gnomon days, but you could clearly see where I’m heading. Not long, his ambition grew, wanting to share more of his passion for these military pieces with the world. He then started his official store, both online and physical, in 2002. He then named it after one of the early forms of time-reading – a sundial that shows the time by the position of its shadow – “Gnomon” Watches. What a journey for this man, but this is only the beginning..."