Interview How Awake Watches Went From Recycling Ocean Plastic To Celebrating Traditional Vietnamese Lacquer

For most of the watchmaking world, continuity is one of the greatest strengths a brand has. Technical achievements become Maison DNA, archival design details are revived, and anniversaries are celebrated as endurance becomes an indelible marker of quality.

For Lilian Thibault, the founder of Awake watches, continuity has never been a concern, and the journey his brand has been on over the last eight years is all the proof you need. It began as a watch brand that was solely focused on the message of environmental concern, selling €200 watches with cases moulded from recycled ocean fishing nets and straps made of castor beans. Now, Awake creates watches with labour-intensive hand-lacquered and hand-guilloché dials with Swiss automatic movements, and they’re selling for something closer to €3,000.

Thibault didn’t found Awake with a background in watchmaking. He spent the early years of his career working in tech media and digital marketing, before selling his company around 2009 and finding himself in something he described as a midlife crisis. He’d also been a passionate watch collector for years, and while his wife was pregnant with twins, he decided his next venture would be building a brand with a purpose, focused on ensuring his children would inherit a better world. 

At first, that purpose was ecological. Awake launched around 2018 off the back of a successful Kickstarter, with a founding idea that was to prove watchmaking could be a vehicle for environmental change. Three months into the brand's life, Thibault received a message (which he initially assumed was a joke) from the organising committee of the 2019 G7 summit in Biarritz. France wanted a symbolic gift for the visiting heads of state, one that echoed the summit's focus on ocean pollution.

Awake had just six months to develop a watch case from recycled fishing nets and delivered 100 of them, imagining they'd be handed out quietly as gifts to visiting dignitaries. Emmanuel Macron had other plans, and during the opening session on climate and the oceans, he held the watch up to the cameras and assembled leaders and declared the recycled material watch as "an illustration of what we want to do”. For a nine-month-old brand, it was, in Thibault's words, "the best spotlight ever,” and every news channel covering the summit wanted one question asked: what was the watch Macron was holding?

You could build an entire company on a moment like that, and for a while, Thibault did. However, for years he had loved more traditional mechanical watches, and he could feel a gap opening between the horology he admired and the thing he was actually making. At €200, he tells me, "there's no miracle", and you’re closer to a fashion brand than a watchmaker due to the sheer volume of watches you need to sell to make a viable business. This required volume sat awkwardly against his message about consuming less, which combined with the fact that he found the environmental message to be "way too political," and that in an already saturated world of messaging, "we don't need a watch brand to talk about that."

Instead of returning to the world of marketing, he decided to pivot the brand away from its sustainable message and towards watches that create wonder, showcasing "the best of what humans are capable of," rather than the worst. The reframing did hold one through-line, which was that of preservation, shifting from the preservation of the oceans to the preservation of human craft. "We moved the message," he explains to me, "but we didn't change the mission, or the vision." Awake had always been about bringing awareness to topics of importance, so he changed the topic. The current tagline, "artisanship awakened," is that pivot compressed into two words.

The craft he chose to focus on first was Sơn Mài, the ancestral Vietnamese art of lacquer, and the way he found it says a lot about how the new Awake works. Thibault partnered with the master lacquerers of Hanoia, the Hanoi atelier whose expertise creates objects for some of the most famous luxury brands on the planet. The artisans were used to working on vases and other homewares, but they were totally unfamiliar with the unforgiving miniature canvas of a watch dial, requiring, by his account, two full years to adapt their technique to something so small. 

Despite the length of time this retraining took, Thibault was surprised by the enthusiasm with which they approached the new challenge, contrasting the somewhat rigid Swiss suppliers he was used to working with. This enthusiasm also nicely captures one of the philosophies of the brand, which isn’t simply to preserve traditional craft, but to bring them into the modern moment. "Nobody paints like the old masters now," he points out to emphasise how artistic expression has changed over the centuries. Awake takes techniques that are centuries old and brings them into a contemporary format, with examples like his T-Rex or Kill Bill-inspired dials. The artisans, he insists, are happier for it, because it proves their craft doesn’t belong in a museum – it’s alive and well.

Nowhere is that philosophy clearer than in the collaboration that arrived in 2026, when Awake turned its attention to engraving. For the Sơn Mài – Guilloché Main collection, Thibault paired his Vietnamese lacquer with hand-guilloché from the Renzetti family in Italy, which is one of the last European workshops still practising guilloché main, an art it traces back to the workshops of Peter Carl Fabergé and has passed down since the late 19th century. The Renzetti artisans cut roughly a hundred grooves into each dial by hand on antique straight-line and rose engines, before the dial travels to Hanoi to be lacquered. It is, the brand claims, the first time these two crafts have met on a single watch dial, and it’s a pure expression of what Thibaul is interested in doing. He would never, he tells me, have made a plain guilloché dial, as that would just be doing what so many watchmakers have already done before. The value he sees is in the collision of two traditions that had never met before.

What he wants next is both modest and quietly ambitious. He’s adamant about staying in his current price segment – one of the issues with the broader Swiss industry, he argues, is the compulsion to increase prices – but he wants to deepen what sits inside that price. That means seeking out new crafts in new regions like India and China, so the brand isn't wedded to Vietnamese lacquer alone. It also means eventual complications in Awake watches, which he sees the capacity of as being what separates an independent watchmaker from a microbrand. Production is also something he wants to slowly increase, but the obvious constraint is in the challenge of training new craftspeople, which he admits is "a glass ceiling" on how many watches he can create. 

It is equal parts unlikely and wonderful that Awake has arrived at this point, having started with fishing nets and the attention of the global political media, only to arrive at the celebration of a craft that exists on the other side of the world. It spent its first act asking us to consider what we were destroying, and is spending its second asking us to wake up to what we're at risk of forgetting. Fishing nets might have been the original motivation, but clearly, preservation was always the point.

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