It began with a watch
that stopped.

The watch that stopped.

Monarte began with a disappointment. Before the company existed, our founder, Domen Veleusic, bought his first real watch. It had a French name, a sapphire crystal and a skeleton dial. It was supposed to cost €3,000. He found it on a flash sale for €199, and it felt like the deal of a lifetime.

He wore it every day. Two months later, it stopped.

A local watchmaker opened the back, took one look inside and laughed, gently. Then he said: “Sorry, I don’t fix cheap Chinese movements.”

Nothing on the box had said so. Not the stamped rotor, not the decoration glued on, not the word Swiss that meant nothing at all. The two of them talked for forty-five minutes. He walked out knowing he had no idea what real watchmaking was, and wanting to find out.

Looking past the spec sheet.

What followed went all the way down: forums, factory tours, movement specifications, tolerances, finishing techniques, chronometer charts.

It showed how easily a good spec sheet can fool someone. A sapphire crystal says nothing about how a watch is finished. A skeleton dial can still sit on a cheap movement with the decoration glued on top. And most new watches were either another diver or another dress watch, chasing numbers on paper.

Monarte was founded in 2019 to make the watch that search could not find: the elegance of a dress watch, with the confidence of a diver you can wear every single day.

We did not design it alone.

The Squid was never designed behind closed doors. From the first sketch, every step was taken to the people who would one day wear it: collectors in watch forums and groups, people who knew watches inside out and were not shy about saying what they thought.

The idea itself came from asking them. They did not want another automatic with a sapphire crystal and nothing else to say. That conversation is where the dressy diver was born.

They voted on the dial colours. They chose the wooden box every Squid still arrives in. When a reviewer called the first prototype’s dial too clinical and too flat, we did not argue. We started again, with three new patterns and four ways of finishing them, until the dial had the depth of the guilloché it wears today.

Their feedback reshaped almost everything you can touch. The hands were redesigned to catch the light. The lume went from paint to solid blocks. The caseback was reworked for comfort, the lugs and end links so the bracelet sits closer to the wrist, and the clasp now hides a diver’s extension under an engraved M. The dial alone went through twenty-four small changes.

So when we say Monarte was built together with its community, we mean it literally. Their ideas are on every watch we make.

Nothing about it was easy.

The first prototypes were not good enough. The lume was uneven from one hand to the next. The crown thread was too soft. In cold tests, the seconds hand brushed the dial. A gold rotor came back with a scratch nobody could explain.

The factories said all of it was within tolerance. It was not within ours. We rejected dozens of cases, had the hands refinished and had every test run again. We paid for each of those mistakes, and we would do it again.

Then the first finished run was ready: thirty watches, and the people who had ordered them waiting. During the final inspection we found a flaw on the edge of a rotor, so small it could barely be seen. Within tolerance, again. We did not ship. It cost three weeks and it cost money, but we would rather be late than send someone a watch we would not wear ourselves.

Made in the Jura.

Every Monarte is assembled, regulated, tested and inspected by hand in the Jura, home to some of the most respected watchmaking in the world. The design work, and the care of every owner, are based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

A house measured in decades.

Monarte is built to outlast any single collection. Every watch is made expecting to be worn for years, serviced when it needs it and one day handed down.

That is why a new piece only arrives when it is ready, not when a calendar says so. And it is why our promises to you, below, are written for the long term.