Leading collectors, with their finely honed and erudite taste in watches, have become ever more demanding. As a result, distributors continually need something new to keep them happy.

Collectors – generally top level, tough-nut businessmen controlling large corporations – will fight hard for a one-of-a-kind handmade piece.

Today, only a handful of people in the world can be described as real watchmakers; the term lost its original meaning ages ago, when watchmakers became the assemblers of parts mass- produced by machines.

Today, even a watchmaker who can assemble a complicated watch in its entirety is a rarity, and the normal high street “watchmaker” can normally only cope with changing a strap or the most simple of issues.

Give a true watchmaker tools, simple machines and materials such as bars, rods and sheets of gold, brass and steel, and he will produce a complicated timepiece.

What you can expect is a watch that has almost been granted a soul from hundreds of hours contact with human hands and eyes

The only exceptions might be parts such as sapphire, glass, rubies, sealant gaskets and balance/winding springs that are worked in highly technical processes virtually impossible to replicate outside a factory.

Philippe Dufour, operating in the Switzerland’s Vallée du Joux has become a le-gend. In a region filled with large-scale watch manufactures, he was one of the first to create a market for singular, handmade timepieces.

His mainstay, called Simplicity, is a basic watch showing only hours, minutes and seconds, with the most conservative, subdued yet classic look imaginable.

Produced in numbers of about 25 a year, his waiting list has been filled for ages, and he will be producing only another 80 pieces before stopping production and creating a new model.

Don’t even ask about ordering; it was sold out years ago. The first batch of anything he makes – even before it is known what it will be – has already been reserved by collectors.

Mr Dufour is also one of the few people in the world today capable of creating handmade grande sonnerie wristwatches, able to chime small gongs automatically, in the fashion of a church clock tower.

These are not to be confused with minute repeaters, which need to be prompted to supply the chiming hours and minutes. It may seem

Certainly the newest rising star must be Kari Voutilainen, a Finn who began his own atelier a couple of years ago after working several years at Parmigiani Fleurier and teaching complicated watch making at the prestigious WOSTEP school in Neuchâtel.

Collectors love him for his highly personal visual style in combination with virtuoso watchmaking ability.

In addition to a small, changing series of 10 to 12 watches produced each year, he creates one-of-a-kind items for collectors with different types of visual or mechanical requests.

As a former teacher, he is deeply interested in extending watchmaking to new areas. At Baselworld this spring, he presented the first chronograph in the world to use the British invented Carbontime oscillator, with its balance wheel of weighted quartz and a carbon-based balance spring.

Such a combination of the technical and traditional is unique among independent ateliers and every industry giant has been by to have a look at how David dared taunt Goliath.

Besides these two gentlemen, the handmade watch scene in Switzerland is virtually non-existent, although I can divulge in advance that this will change in 2007.

A couple of small ateliers produce a handmade watch every now and then, which places them on the economic fringe. Others join the ranks of having become small firms with several watchmakers and a large amount of outsourced machined parts and external collaboration.

However, I can’t avoid crossing land and sea to the Isle of Man, to include Roger Smith, the sole apprentice to the now virtually retired Mr George Daniels, as he continues the tradition of the handmade English watch and chronometer.

English watchmaking was long considered far superior to the Swiss, and its golden tradition of accurate, handmade watches lives on in Mr Smith’s pieces, where even the case and the screws contained within the movement are made by hand.

However, don’t expect flashy rubber and steel, zirconium, titanium, magnesium, ceramics and glow in the dark encounters with these wristwatches.

What you can expect is to have a watch that has almost been granted a soul from hundreds of hours contact with human hands and eyes.