One evening in 2018, over dinner, Mig Reyes placed a printed letter in front of his parents. It was an acceptance from Birmingham City University, to study watchmaking in the United Kingdom. They had no idea he had applied.
It was the quietest, boldest decision of a life spent around small mechanical things. Today, Mig is the founder and master watchmaker of Watch Solutions PH, an independent luxury watch service centre in San Juan, and his bench sees Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, Richard Mille, Patek Philippe, Rolex and other luxury watches. Yet ask him what a watchmaker does, and he will not begin with the movement. He will begin with the person wearing the watch.
The boy and the Seiko
At 14, Mig received a Seiko 5 in a military style from his father, the first in the family to own an automatic. What enchanted him was how it worked. Shake it, and it comes alive. To a boy, it felt like technology.
One watch became many. He was collecting a Seiko almost every week, each with a target in mind: a particular model to find, to hold, to finally own. Japan-market versions could not be bought locally, and during a stretch of frequent trips to Japan, he could bring them home. He sold through the Philippine Watch Club and OLX, because, as he puts it, you have to sell to buy more.
Collecting, he discovered, is a community. The people who share the passion become friends, and in a tight circle, if you know the right people, you are known from the provinces to Manila. Watches, he learned early, are rarely only about watches. They are about the people who find them, trade them and pass them along.
In 2016, he consolidated that Seiko collection to buy a vintage Rolex GMT-Master he had wanted from the very beginning. It was not a new model but something closer to an heirloom, and he owned one at an age when few of his peers did. Of everything he services, vintage still excites him most.
Choosing the bench
On the way to college, a quiet thought arrived: I want to study watchmaking. His father’s counsel was pragmatic. Finish a bachelor’s degree first, so there is always something to fall back on. Mig enrolled in Legal Management at Ateneo, and within that year, with his sister’s help, and without telling his parents, he applied to study in the UK.
The acceptance arrived just before the semester began. He had a fallback plan: if his parents said no, he would enroll in the next term. In the end, his father said yes in two words: sige na. The letter was already on the table, and he did not want to be blamed for holding his son back.
Mig left Ateneo after a year for the UK, and graduated in Horology with first-class honours. He was alone, he missed his family and friends, and he flew home every year. But he never once thought it was the wrong decision. He was learning what he wanted to learn.
What the bench teaches
Watchmaking taught him humility. School opened at 8 a.m., but a watchmaker’s true adversary is time itself: hours are scarce, execution is demanding, and the work is never perfect.
It also taught him the difference between loving watches and serving them. Collecting is a hobby. Creating is something heavier: design, planning and the business sense to hold it all together.
A watch is worn by someone
That difference shapes the workshop he runs. Watch Solutions is not simply a service centre. It is a meeting point, where watches, watchmakers and the conversations between them become relationships. At its core is Mig, who values relationships above all else, with friendships forged in the early days of collecting now continuing across the workbench.
His view of watchmaking centres on the wearer rather than the wristwatch. A watch is worn through years, given, inherited, remembered. What reaches the bench is rarely just a mechanism; it is part of someone’s life. So he aims to be a watchmaker who values reputation and respect, who explains honestly what a watch actually needs, and who treats each piece as a story worth keeping. It is the idea behind the shop’s own line: We preserve your story, not just your timepiece.
At 14, Mig learned that a watch comes alive the moment it touches the human hand. Everything since has been dedicated to whose hand it rests in.
Spotlight is BusinessWorld’s sponsored section that allows advertisers to amplify their brand and connect with BusinessWorld’s audience by publishing their stories on the BusinessWorld Web site. For more information, send an email to online@bworldonline.com.
Join us on Viber at https://bit.ly/3hv6bLA to get more updates and subscribe to BusinessWorld’s titles and get exclusive content through www.bworld-x.com.