The Awake Team
Behind every dial, there is a person who refused to compromise.
AWAKE is a small team. Small enough that every decision goes through someone genuinely obsessed with getting it right. But behind every watch there are also the hands of artisans in Vietnam, Japan, France, Italy, Switzerland, India, the UK, and beyond. Their stories are inseparable from ours.
Founder
Lilian
A lifelong collector and watch enthusiast, Lilian built AWAKE not to add to the noise of an already crowded industry, but to ask a different question: what if a watch could make someone stop, look, and feel something real?
Everything at AWAKE passes through his instinct — the choice of a technique, the curve of a case, the colour of a pigment. He defines the creative direction of AWAKE entirely — with the conviction of someone who builds new paths rather than following existing ones.
There is a lacquer painting in Lilian's home that has survived every move he has made in the last seventeen years. Bought during a trip to Asia, it followed him through cities and life changes — and eventually became the founding gesture of the Sơn Mài collection.
"Knowledge and beauty should be endless. This is why our watches are made to be treasured and passed down across generations. So that the arts and crafts inside them are never lost."
Director of Operations
Thibaut
Twenty years in the watch industry, across major groups and independent brands. Thibaut understands the industry from the inside — its rhythms, its constraints, its hidden levers — and he knows how to navigate them with both rigour and agility.
Lilian is the dreamer, he is the doer. He turns encounters into partnerships, builds the roadmap like a chief of orchestra, sets up clever collaborations, and channels his passion for literature and cinema into projects that surprise everyone.
"For a project to be beautiful, it must be seamless. Behind every great idea, there's structure — and people who care enough to build it well."
Head of Innovation & Manufacturing
Benjamin
Benjamin is a micromechanics engineer. The man who figures out how to make ideas happen.
He oversees every prototype, every tolerance, every finishing specification from first sketch to final assembly. He spent a full year developing the luminous signature. He is why AWAKE's technical ambitions match its creative ones.
"I don't just build watches — I build the conditions for emotion to happen, through detail, structure, and intention."
Our Artisans.
A watch is not made in one place. Or by one pair of hands.
Cultures and skills from all over the world converge to create something that none of them could achieve alone. Centuries of knowledge, in the space of a dial you can hold in the palm of your hand.
Without these passionate and talented craftspeople, not a single AWAKE watch would exist. This is why we pay tribute to their art — so it never dies.
All watches:
