Profile
Lee Yuen-Rapati
The more we study the lives and careers of our esteemed community members, the better we can understand its strength and why and how watches generate such magnetic power. Even though many of us entered horology in pretty much the same way—by way of a parent, grandparent, uncle/aunt, spouse or best friend, who themselves wore watches or collected them—(which is true of many enthusiasts, collectors, content creators and brand owners,) some of us took a detour, and sometimes didn’t intend to arrive in watchmaking at all in the first place. It just all happened by happenstance, a little bit by magic, however the result is the same: for we are all united by the fact that once we’ve gotten in, we can’t get out. Because beyond their technical specifications, above their designs, and unrelated to their perceived value and prices, watches do indeed hold power over us for without them we would feel naked, incomplete, and, in many instances, we would not have access to that one tool we need to express who we are to the world, signal our place within it, and muster the courage to be the person we aim to become.
As it turns out to be, these little machines constitute the tangible representation of our intangible selves—a concept I learned from Lauriance Gerthoffer-Ham and which I will repurpose ad vitam æternam with her permission—hence their magnetism. This is a lot to take in, and perhaps this all feels a bit far-fetched in some ways. However, after having written dozens of profiles about collectors, content creators, influencers, and horological professionals (brand founders, marketers, designers,) I can say with a high degree of confidence that timekeeping devices do indeed hook us in strong and won’t let go. And again, since many of us have entered this domain of human creativity and engineering in the same way, today we ought to profile someone who didn’t step on the same path. And his unique journey into watchmaking is mirrored by the unique spot he occupies within it. Thus, we will be turning our attention to Lee Yuen-Rapati, Fears’ in-house designer, multi-horological project incubator (@lyr.watch), creator of @onehourwatch, and one of the most humble yet most talented people I’ve met in the industry.
Lee Yuen-Rapati; photo credit: Baruch Coutts
It Started with a Magazine Ad
What this profile will demonstrate is the fact that the emotions we feel when wearing our favorite watches stem from the singular artistic sensibilities of the person who designed them, engineered them, and put the final touches to make them perfect for their creator and for the few of us who strap them onto our wrists. In many cases, these steps are handled by a variety of people within the same brand, or working with third-party engineers and manufacturers. More rarely, many of these stages are for the most part managed by the same person, and for a person to become so agile in designing and spec’ing out watches, one must have a rather unique background. And that is what Lee Yuen-Rapati had and which prompted him to occupy his own very spot in our niche yet global watch industry. It all started back in Nova Scotia in his 20s, when Lee was studying multi-disciplinary design. One day, casually chatting with his mother, he was encouraged to check out a watch brand from an advert she had recently seen in a magazine. That brand was Urwerk—the madly conceptual avant-garde Swiss watchmaker.
As a designer-in-training, Lee was immediately taken aback by the mixture of Uhrwerk’s science-fiction-like aesthetics and profound physical three-dimensionality which were at the forefront of all of their collections, which Lee was quick to study on their website. At the time, Lee wasn’t a de facto watch collector, however he dabbled, like many of us did, with inexpensive digital watches. Within his field of study, Lee was more interested in industrial design and physical objects rather than visual or graphic design, which is why Uhrwerk so quickly tickled his interest. From that point onward he started looking up other brands, different genres of watches, reading up blog posts and in-depth articles about horology. As his interest for horology was slowly growing, Lee completed his undergraduate degree in multi-disciplinary design with thus a focus on industrial design, by which time he was full-throttle on watches. He already started meandering around the idea of creating an horological project at some point in the future.
And this is something he kept thinking about when he moved to the United Kingdom to pursue a Masters Degree in typeface design at the University of Reading (a city west of London,) a topic he was interested in parallel with horology. He actually found himself at a crossroad a year earlier as he couldn’t decide whether to study typeface design or join a watchmaking school to become a watchmaker. He ended up choosing the former and went through a one-year program at the conclusion of which he had to deliver a practical project and an academic one. The former consisted of designing a typeface family informed by mid-20th century watch typography and the latter came in the form of a dissertation which Lee focused on horological typography more broadly which will have, as we’re about to see, a profound impact on his career-to-come. By opting for this Masters Degree, Lee had formulated the perfect recipe to combine his two greatest passions—industrial design and horology—which led him to attend watch shows in the UK to get a chance to meet some of his watchmaking heroes. Folks such as Richard and Maria Habring, Rexhep Rexhepi, and brands such as MB&F, Nomos, and Urwerk.
The Catapult: @onehourwatch
Going back a little bit in time—2014 to be exact—a moment at which Lee was already strongly interested in watches, he found himself with fewer opportunities to draw as he was getting nearer the end of his undergraduate program. (As he explained, the more one progresses in his design studies, the less one actually draws.) Since he had a great deal of enthusiasm for horology but didn’t know as much about the domain as he does now, he thought he could in a way create his own horological educational program by drawing timekeeping devices. At first, he didn’t have any real goals or plans with this new endeavour, but quickly he created a structure for himself, primarily centered around the self-imposed goal that he had to draw one watch per day under one hour, and to publish his creation online. One hour is very specific, but he knew that 60 minutes (maximum) was enough time for someone with his artistic capabilities to fairly accurately draw a whole watch, so that his new self-imposed artistic endeavour wouldn’t eat too much of his time each day and that it would thus be “easy” to maintain so that he could do it long term.
His commitment towards this project was serious as he decided he would go through with it no matter how busy he was or how tired or sick he would feel. So he started by designing one watch. Then he thought he had to follow it up with a second one, and to follow that second one with a third one and so on and so forth. Each time, he drew an original creation, as he found it was the best way for him to properly and effectively study watchmaking rather than redrawing existing watches, studying their functions, their proportions, and how the hands and dials and cases should interact with one another. One drawing after another he ended up doing @onehourwatch every day for eight straight years, drawing 2,869 watches consecutively which coincided with his 30th birthday, which he decided was the ripe time to slow down a little. That and the fact, as we will see later, that Lee had professionally entered the watch industry and had to gently put the brakes on. At the time of our interview (May 2026!) Lee had drawn 2,940 bespoke watches in under one hour.
The Hobby That Became a Profession
Let’s now move forward in time to 2017. Through his @onewatchwatch Instagram account, Lee had created a solid and global reputation for his keen eye to design an impressive number of watches of various styles and pedigrees, and his now self-taught expertise in bespoke horological design projects made it easier for him to approach the heroes he looked up to at watch fairs and events to establish his first professional connections in the industry. (In other words, with thousands of unique designs under his belt, Lee could show that he could design complete watches.) During an event, he approached the Habrings looking for information to complete his Masters’ dissertation, and he was then approached by them to design new numerals, and potentially a new typeface for dial text, for a new model they were working on called the Perpetual Doppel—a perpetual calendar with a split-seconds chronograph complication. With his self-built experience, Lee felt confident he could do the work and his contributions to Habring² constituted his very first real industry project. Not a shabby start one could add.
Photo courtesy of Habring²
Upon finishing his Masters Degree in 2018, Lee started working independently on a contract basis, at first doing commission-based illustrations for collectors and brands such as Roger Smith, MB&F, and MING., and then pivoting over the years to doing 90% design work and 10% illustrations. He worked on projects for multiple brands, J.N. Schapiro for example, for whom he designed bespoke numerals for a one-off piece, which the brand then adopted as their default typeface for numerals for many of its collections. One of his other first clients was British brand Struhthers for which he worked on Project 248, and at last, Fears. Lee met Nicholas Bowman-Scargill in 2018 and began working for him in 2019 by redesigning the brand’s logo and then on one-off projects, for instance redesigning the numerals of the Brunswick 38 Polar White, then creating a new bespoke typeface which is now known as the Edwin typeface we’ve encountered on many models, for example on the Brunswick 40 Filton and Redcliff 39.5 “ES”.
Photo courtesy of J.N. Shapiro
Working Full-Time for Fears
As we now know, Lee is a multi-disciplinary creative who is as comfortable drawing his own concepts for watches as he is to design bespoke numerals and create new typeface families for high-end brands looking for unique work. Working for Fears allowed him to evolve within defined design codes the British brand established many decades before that Lee joined, which he very much enjoys. Historically, Fears has produced many sports and utility watches (Lee’s outstanding way of speaking about tool watches) even though Nicolas first put the emphasis on elegant and dress pieces upon bringing the brand back to life in 2016. However, Fears’ management team knew that activity watches constitute a large segment of the watch market, and since the brand had a legitimacy in outputting fine examples of these, it started bringing back a certain utilitarian ethos to its catalog, albeit always in its own elegant and unique way. (Hence, for example, the aforementioned Redcliff 39.5 “ES” which stands for “Endurance Specification,” a nomenclature used by Fears in a previous collection.) Thus Lee found himself working on many projects for the brand.
The first complete project Lee worked on for the British house was the Redcliff 39.5 as he started working full-time as Fears’ in 2022. Before the Redcliff 39.5, and as we saw above, Lee worked on one-off projects and slowly worked his way up through the industrial design ladder of a watch brand, first designing numerals then complete typefaces, and moved onto dials, cases, and soon enough managing the entire design and most of the technical side of the collections working directly with Fears’ engineers and suppliers. Upon our discussion I started to formulate in my mind the certitude that Lee is the principal person responsible for Fears’ now extensive catalog of extraordinary professional-grade tool watches, however he humbly told me it is not so. Lee is part of the senior product team along with Nicholas and Daniel Varney, Head of Commercial. Together with Nicholas, Lee helps develop the new product lines and oversees their designs and technical requirements.
Photo courtesy of Fears
Photo courtesy of Fears
More specifically, Lee (and thus Fears) work inside out on new models, first selecting the movement that will power the watch, around which he designs the dial, hands, case and even fastening systems. He works in 2D and moves to 3D to ensure that all critical elements making up the watch have the right tolerances, at which point his creations are passed onto the Operations Department and then onto the manufacturers. Since he works within Fears’ established design codes, he is required to add certain elements to the watches in order to meet the brand’s horological directions and meet customers’ desires. For instance, we discussed date apertures—whether or not they should exist, and if they should, where they should be placed on a dial. Lee is neither for or against date complications, however should he design a watch with one, he prefers for it to be placed at the three so that the numerals are easier to read. Even though numerals are actually taller than they are wide, a three o’clock placement permits ease in the reading as they have more room to breathe.
Whatever kind of watch Lee works on for Fears, they ought to fulfill a specific function based on their nature, and for each collection he works on, the prime focus changes from one model to another, thus rendering his job all the more interesting and positively challenging on a daily basis. For example, activity watches’ raison d’être is their legibility, and sometimes this translates to having legible date numerals (as mentioned above) in addition to easy-to-read hands and hour/minute markers, because a date complication is an integral part of the watch’s functionality. And some other times legibility is achieved through ensuring perfect dial symmetry as seen on the Brunswick Filton 40 pilot watches, for which Lee placed the date aperture at the six o’clock to respect the traditional design codes of such types of timekeeping devices, having to compromise on the placement of the date aperture in order to ensure that the dial will be visually balanced. Thus, Lee puts to good use the great many hours he spent designing bespoke watches for @onehourwatch, through which he studied in great depth all aspects of horological design.
The Evolution of His Career
However, as much as Lee thrives working within Fears’ century-old established design codes, he equally enjoys working with none whatsoever. Surprisingly perhaps, whilst being Fears’ full-time in-house designer, Lee continues to work freelance for other brands, running his own agency for clients who have different aspirations, requirements, and goals, allowing him to work in different ways with different brands. In other words, Lee learned to be visually versatile and professionally agile, for example working in 2017 with Mathieu Cleguer—remember, at the time he started getting his first jobs—who gave him his debut design project in horology working on The Inspiration one. Mathieu approached Lee with a detailed brief: he had designed a new escapement he wanted to put in the watch, which should have an off-set balance wheel visible on the dial, a small offset hour and minute dial, a visible barrel, central seconds, a power reserve, and he had to make sure that the styling would be architectural. He tackled the task, first sketching out the watch as he knew very well how to, which Mathieu transposed into CAD technical drawings. The pair continued to collaborate over the years in the near decade-long development of the Inspiration One.
This is the kind of horological project Lee strives to work on as it connects him back to the Uhrwerk his mother told him about many years before that, in other words conceptual and architectural watches which have great dimensionality and perfectly illustrate the detail-intensive aspect of the design work he now does. And besides the work he’s currently doing for Fears and Cleguer, and which he has done for Habring² and J.N. Schapiro, Lee is always running and working on various horological projects, many of which I do not know the existence of, unfortunately. Since 2017 then, he has been one busy person: he began his professional career in horology by way of a once-in-a-lifetime-type-of-project, which he put at his own reach through his religious dedication to @onehourwatch, which brought him to explore new freelance opportunities which led to the serendipitous meeting of Nicholas Bowman-Scargill, now working for one of Britain’s oldest independent watchmakers. And within each opportunity, he has slowly expanded his field of expertise from designing one single piece of watch’s element to now managing complete projects.
Photo courtesy of Kallinich Clayes
Through all of his experiences, he was able to reframe an essay he wrote when he first dabbled into horology—in which he claimed that watchmaking is the only industry which allows designers to work without having to compromise. Oh wrong was he, as he knows, as in fact, this industry is all about having to compromise, all the time—with his clients, customers, engineers, manufacturers, and even with himself. And as it does for every single one of us, horology is endowed with this curse-and-blessing type of power which dictates that it changes us profoundly—how we see ourselves and the watches we are so obsessed with, and what they can do for and say about us. As Lauriance Gertoffer-Ham put it: watches are the tangible representation of our intangible selves, and furthermore, of the idea of time and how we spend it, lockets through which we hold onto memories of past events, of people, and of the emotions we feel when wearing them. Thus, Lee is someone who is bestowed with a tremendous amount of responsibilities to design wristworn machines that have the capacity to move us at a first glance, as did the Uhrwerk for him many years ago.
Conclusion: The Beauty of the Invisible
From a question about how Lee figures out how to factor in the immaterial costs of designing watches (the time and energy it requires) into their price, spawned the explanation of what makes him so good at what he does today: as he put it, design only matters to people who want it to matter, and a watch’s X factor—what will generate the right emotions in people that will prompt them to buy it—is invisible if it is well formulated. For he obsesses over the smallest of details which, if analyzed individually, won’t necessarily make sense to the casual observer, but taken together as a whole by a keen enthusiast, will endow a watch with a singular character, a complete soul, which is created from the sum of its tiniest visual and technical parts. Which is why Lee obsesses over such things as the weight and height of a numeral, whether to print or 3D-cast hour markers, or how the particular shape of a crown will positively impact its operation. As a consequence, even if Fears doesn’t deal in the avant-garde, Lee’s painstaking attention to the most minute of details contribute to making the brand’s collections stand out so much for they ooze a high-degree of refinement which cannot easily be explained and is mostly impossible to see.
Lee further indicated that the best compliment he can receive, upon showing someone his latest work, is either to be cursed at or for that person to purchase the watch he has designed. I believe I have cursed at him once at least, and he replied with a humble “thank you.”
Thanks for reading.