How it all started

I never planned to become a watch photographer. I didn't grow up around watches. I didn't study photography. I didn't have a career plan at all.

What I did have was an obsession with attention. I spent years on social media, building my own accounts, studying what made people stop scrolling. Not theory, not textbooks. Just posting, watching, learning. I figured out what made content go viral. Not once, not by accident, but repeatedly. I understood the mechanics of attention before I ever picked up a real camera.

Then a friend of mine asked me for a favor.

Felipe Pikullik is an independent watchmaker based in Berlin. We knew each other personally. One day he asked me if I could help him out with his social media. He's a watchmaker, not a content creator. His work was extraordinary, but almost nobody knew about it. He had barely any online presence. No strategy, no consistent content, no visual identity. Just a workshop full of incredible timepieces and almost no way to show them to the world.

I said yes. Not because I knew anything about watches. I didn't. I had never looked at a movement, never heard of complications, never thought about dial finishing or case polishing. I said yes because I looked at his situation and thought: what if I could take everything I know about generating attention and apply it to something that actually deserves it?

Because Felipe's work deserved it. I realized that the first time I watched him work. A man sitting at a bench, assembling hundreds of parts by hand, adjusting a mechanism so precise that it measures time to within seconds per day. Weeks and months of work going into a single watch. And meanwhile, brands with a fraction of his craftsmanship were getting all the attention because they had better content.

That felt wrong to me. And that feeling became the engine.

I started creating content for him. At first, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how to photograph a watch. I didn't know what details mattered. I didn't know what a collector looks for when they're browsing Instagram at midnight, deciding whether something is worth their attention. So I did what I've always done: I learned by doing. No mentor, no course, nobody holding my hand. Just trial and error, night after night.

But I didn't just learn how to photograph watches. I went deeper. I started studying how watches actually work. I needed to understand what I was looking at before I could show it to someone else. I spent hours watching Felipe at the lathe, shaping parts from raw metal into components measured in fractions of a millimeter. I learned what a properly executed bevel looks like, the kind that takes an hour of hand work on a single bridge edge just to create that thin, light-catching line. I learned the difference between a brushed surface and a polished one, how many passes it takes to bring steel to a true mirror finish, and why a watchmaker would spend days polishing a part that sits hidden beneath the dial where no customer will ever see it. I learned what a wolf tooth gear does, where the balance wheel sits and why its placement tells you something about the architecture of the movement, what makes a retrograde date different from a regular date display.

Nobody asked me to learn any of this. There was no deadline, no exam, no requirement. I did it because I realized that understanding the craft was the only way to capture it honestly. A photographer who doesn't know what they're looking at will take a photo of a shiny object. Someone who understands what went into that object will show you why it matters.

It took time. Years, not months. Over four, almost five years of doing this, making mistakes, improving, studying, shooting, reshooting. Building my knowledge from zero, completely on my own. There were no shortcuts. There was no team. Just me, a camera I was still learning to use, and a watchmaker who trusted me enough to let me figure it out.

And slowly, something started happening. The content got better. Not just technically, but in what it communicated. People started responding. Not with empty likes, but with real questions. "What movement is this?" "How does the retrograde work?" "Is this piece still available?" The content wasn't just showing a watch. It was translating the watchmaker's work into something people could feel through a screen. And when people feel something, they buy.

I learned something in those years that I couldn't have learned any other way. The hardest part of selling a great watch isn't making it. Most independent watchmakers are already extraordinary at what they do. The hardest part is making people see what makes it great. Bridging the gap between the bench and the buyer. Between the craft and the scroll.

That's what Woatchman is. It came from watching a brilliant watchmaker struggle to get the attention his work deserved, and deciding to do something about it. Not with marketing tricks. Not with gimmicks. With content that understands the craft, because I took the time to learn it from scratch.

I didn't come from the watch industry. I came from the content side. And that combination, understanding both how a watch works and how attention works, is what makes this different.

I built this with nothing. No background, no connections, no formal training. Just the belief that if the work is good enough, it deserves to be seen. And the stubbornness to keep going until I could make that happen.

That's how it started. And I'm just getting going.

I put together a free guide that helped me create a full week of content in just two hours. If that sounds useful to you, it's yours. Grab it below.