The cases of his first watches were made from Harley-Davidson’s kickstart pinions.

 

Rugged-looking yet no less functional metal is the basis of his design vocabulary helping Sarpaneva stand out among the crowd of indie watchmakers and the rest of the industry as well. Stepan Sarpaneva is one of the few brave Finns who dared to embark on the not so promising career of a watchmaker.

 

I figured out that watchmaking suited me better than anything I had done before. I started at the Tapiola school in Finland in 1989 and finished in 1992. At the time, there was no work for watchmakers in Finland. Luckily, I had applied to study in Wostep in Switzerland, in Neuchatel,” he was reminiscing years later in an interview for watchlounge.com.

 

However, Harley-Davidsons and their pinions would come much later. After completing the watchmaker course at Wostep, Sarpaneva decided to stay in Switzerland. He started in a post sales service department at Piaget, and in 1997 he completed another course at Wostep, this time on complicated watches and restoration techniques.

 

Sarpaneva Stepan
Sarpaneva Stepan
Sarpaneva Stepan
Sarpaneva Stepan

This specialty offered more opportunities to find a more interesting and better paying job. And that is precisely what happened. After graduating he was invited to Parmigiani Fleurier specializing in making complicated watches and restoring collection timepieces.

 

At Parmigiani Fleurier, Sarpaneva worked under Kari Voutilainen, another Switzerland-based watchmaker from Finland and the best teacher Stepan could hope to find in everything concerning traditional techniques and skills.

 

But Stepan sought to broaden his horizons and soon moved to Vianney Halter, an independent Swiss watchmaker who throughout his entire career has taken an alternative, nonstandard approach far away from the traditional style, which includes, among other things, the courage to conceive and carry out the most daring projects.

 

Sarpaneva, Workshop
Sarpaneva, Workshop
Sarpaneva 1999 TimeTramp
Sarpaneva 1999 TimeTramp

It was here that Sarpaneva’s first attempt at making his own watches came to be. To make it he used the aforementioned pinion from a Harley-Davidson bike. Or rather, six pinions, as his first watch, Time Tramp, was released as a limited edition of six pieces along with six ultrathin vintage caliber 9P movements manufactured by Sarpaneva’s former employers, Piaget.

 

An aspiring watchmaker with his own limited edition? Yes, and there is nothing surprising about it - such are the rules of the industry Sarpaneva was so eager to get into. Still, it took another couple of years before his desire to make watches under his own name came to fruition.  “Vianney was more a watchmaker than a businessman, but it was truly an eye-opening time,” Stepan says.

 

Sarpaneva 2003 Oiva
Sarpaneva 2003 Oiva
Sarpaneva 2003 Oiva II
Sarpaneva 2003 Oiva II

Having worked with Vianney for a year and a half, a very interesting and productive period when Trio and two models of Goldpfeil watches were released, Sarpaneva decided that he was ready to go independent. However, as he needed funds to back his project, he started working for Christophe Claret, a Swiss manufacturer of complicated movements.

 

They agreed that 80% of his time Stepan would assemble watches, mostly repeaters and tourbillons, for his employer, while spending the remaining 20% on his own projects. In particular, in 2000 Sarpaneva was able to make his first watch Salpa, a 25-piece limited edition. In 2003, Sarpaneva came back to Finland where he founded Sarpaneva Watches.

 

Having worked with Vianney for a year and a half, a very interesting and productive period when Trio and two models of Goldpfeil watches were released

He rented part of the old cable factory Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki to accommodate a workshop and an office, from where he’s been operating ever since. He kept on working part-time for Christophe Claret until 2007 and only afterwards could focus entirely on making his own watches.

 

The first watches the now officially established brand released were Loiste and Oiva presented to the world in 2003. Both models telegraph their maker’s desire to work with metal, with their designs evoking industrial aesthetics, an idea Sarpaneva first introduced back when working on the pocket watch Time Tramp.

 

Oiva looked nothing more than just a novelty piece, whereas Loiste shared the same DNA with Time Tramp and had a charisma needed for a Harley-Davidson rider’s watch, and it was this direction that would dominate Sarpaneva’s subsequent works.

 

From the get go it became apparent that the company’s business model required fine tuning. The mostly manual production of collection watches could only warrant small scale manufacturing, several dozens of watches annually at the most, thus making the business unsustainable due to strong dependency on unpredictable fluctuations in demand and sales.

 

Therefore, just a year later, in 2004, Stepan Sarpaneva registered a new watch brand, S.U.F. Helsinki (Sarpaneva Uhren Fabrik) to manufacture and sell more affordable, mass produced watches based on existing but slightly modified calibers.

 

Sarpaneva 2003 Loiste
Sarpaneva 2003 Loiste
Sarpaneva 2005 SUF Paroni
Sarpaneva 2005 SUF Paroni

In 2005, the first watches under the S.U.F. Helsinki brand were released. These were Ässä and Paroni, models made in the style of technical watches with an invariably vintage, often military feel to them, which became the distinctive feature of this micro brand’s collection. The company went on to release models such as S.U.F. Helsinki Komentaja with a dive watch style dial (since 2006).

 

S.U.F. Helsinki Flying Finn (since 2009), S.U.F. Helsinki Myrsky (since 2016), and the first and so far only dive watch S.U.F. Helsinki Vetehinen (since 2017; automatic caliber Eterna 3901A), S.U.F. Helsinki “180” (since 2019), chronograph S.U.F. Helsinki Paroni Chronograph on a vintage caliber Lemania 1872 (2019), and the instantly sold out decoration watch S.U.F. Helsinki Sarpaneva x Moomin (2020; a 75-piece limited edition).