Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo is thrilled to welcome you to The Hong Kong Sessions, Fall 2025, and IWC: Back to the 80s online auctions, running from 12:00 PM HKT, Wednesday, 17 September, to 2:00 PM HKT, Wednesday, 24 September. The sales feature nearly 150 different high-end luxury wristwatches, covering everything from A. Lange & Söhne and F.P. Journe to Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, including the Kudoke Mysticum highlighted below.
– By Logan Baker
Independent watchmaking has a way of revealing the human story behind the craft.
It strips away the marketing and the noise, leaving you with one person’s vision of what a watch can be. In the case of Stefan Kudoke, that vision has carried him from graffiti-covered walls in Frankfurt to the benches of Glashütte Original, from a service desk in New York handling Breguet and Blancpain to his own small atelier in Saxony.
Stefan’s first artistic outlet was about as far from traditional watchmaking as one can imagine. As a teenager in the early 1990s, he was out late at night with spray cans, leaving his tag on walls and trains. By 17, he was making money airbrushing custom designs on cars and motorcycles. Cycling was another passion, but not one that promised much of a future. His mother pointed him toward a quieter trade – watchmaking – joking that at least it would keep him indoors, warm, and clean.
Kudoke apprenticed in Glashütte and then landed at Glashütte Original, where he worked in the complications and prototypes workshop. Later, he joined Swatch Group’s U.S. service department in New York, working on Breguet, Blancpain, and Omega. By his early 20s, he had already completed his Master Craftsman certificate, one of the youngest to do so. But if you’ve ever spoken with him, you know Stefan isn’t the type to be satisfied with an assembly-line approach to watchmaking. He wanted to go deeper into the finishing, the engraving, the real handcraft. So he taught himself the old-fashioned way – books, trial, error, and repetition.
By 2008, he had founded the Kudoke brand, not out of an inherited legacy but from an obsession with learning and doing. In the early years, he specialized in elaborate skeletonized and engraved one-offs. As his skills deepened, so did his ambitions. In 2019, he introduced the Handwerk line, powered by the brand’s first in-house movement, the Kaliber 1. It was a more restrained, traditional collection, but still unmistakably Kudoke. The Handwerk 1 went on to win the Petite Aiguille at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2019, and Kudoke repeated the feat in 2024.
Two GPHG wins in five years cemented his reputation as one of the most interesting independents working today.
What sets Kudoke apart isn’t just design or price point, but approach. Each Kudoke watchmaker is responsible for an entire watch from start to finish – assembly, casing, finishing, and quality checks. That philosophy carries through to the Mysticum, the model appearing in the Phillips Hong Kong Sessions, Fall 2024, Online Auction. Its dial is dominated by hand-engraved floral reliefs that frame four apertures. Time is not shown by the usual pair of hands. Instead, a revolving disc beneath the dial reveals the hour through one of the cutouts, while a sinuous blued-steel hand sweeps the minutes across twelve applied blued markers. The case is solid stainless steel, operated by a classic onion crown. Inside beats a hand-wound Unitas 6498 calibre, transformed by Kudoke’s hand-engraving into something far removed from its utilitarian origins. Turn the watch over and you’ll see the full extent of Kudoke’s craft – floral engravings and surface treatments that give life to every bridge and plate.
The example offered here is unworn, complete with its accessories and accuracy certificate. Over the past 15-plus years, Stefan and his wife Ev have resisted outside investors, preferring to grow organically. After his first GPHG win, waitlists stretched to two years, forcing the team to move from their basement workshop to a proper facility and hire additional staff.
But the heart of Kudoke remains the same: handwork, imagination, and a refusal to compromise.
Stefan once said, “My dream is to lead a fulfilled life as an independent watchmaker, where I have the chance to constantly develop myself and learn something new every day.”
That ethos is still visible in every Kudoke watch, from the more restrained Handwerk 1 to the playful Mysticum.
You can view the complete Phillips Hong Kong Sessions, Fall 2025, Online Auction catalogue here.