Buci’s Nouvelle collection, a hand-wound chapter that turns the written word into a watch, opened on Kickstarter on 25 September 2026. We held the pieces at the Watchmakers United boutique in Geneva a few weeks before the campaign.
The buzz around Geneva Watch Days gives even smaller watchmaking names the opportunity to occupy spaces throughout the city. This September the new collection from the Parisian brand Buci was on display at the Watchmakers United boutique in the Old Town near the lake. We had known the brand from a distance since Garde-temps, the first collection released in 2022, and from the collaboration with seconde/seconde and Revolution Watch Arabia that followed. Therefore we were curious to meet founder Nousseïma Baraket and see the novelty before release.
Nousseïma comes from Franche-Comté, the French Jura region on the Swiss border where watchmaking has been a local trade for centuries. She spent more than ten years as an entrepreneur in design, events, and communication before presenting Buci to the world in 2022. The brand operates from Paris, from an office on rue de Sèvres, and its name derives from rue de Buci, the street a few blocks away in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. With its cultural heritage and diversity, this part of the city has become integral to Buci’s identity, just as the written word itself has, both in its meaning and in its calligraphic form.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Nousseïma calls Saint-Germain-des-Prés the quarter with a rich résumé her creative wellspring. For nine centuries the Rive Gauche (Left Bank of the Seine) around the old abbey has gathered minds that faced opposition elsewhere and given them a place to flourish.
Already the 12th century scholar Peter Abelard, whose teaching was condemned multiple times, settled to lecture on the Rive Gauche. His fame drew students across the river, which began the quarter’s long habit of gathering around banned minds. By 1686, Le Procope (now the oldest operating café in the city) ensured the caffeine needed by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire and Diderot among the habitués. In the 1880s, the terraces of Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots hosted the poets of the Belle Époque. After the Second World War the same tables passed to Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, while Gallimard, Seuil, and Grasset made the quarter the working centre of French publishing.
Beyond the masters of script, icons of other artistic genres settled in the area too. In 1966, Yves Saint Laurent opened Rive Gauche, his ready-to-wear boutique, and put the Left Bank’s name on the label itself. The headquarters of the House remains in the neighbouring Quartier Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin still today. Great exhibitions showcase his works, his fantastic sketches, and even his muses (such as Betty Catroux) on a regular basis.
Buci pays homage to the intellect of scholars, writers, journalists, designers, and artists who worked and lived in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for centuries.
Chapter 2: Nouvelle
Buci’s second timepiece, Nouvelle, is 2mm smaller than the initial Garde-temps introduced in 2022. The 36mm unisex watch features a dial with a similar texture as the previous collection, looking and feeling like a soft, uneven paper surface that has absorbed moisture, much like blotting paper.
Blotting paper is said to have been discovered by accident at an English paper mill in the late 18th century, when a sheet fell into a vat of size, came out incorrectly, and was kept aside until someone noticed how readily it absorbed ink. Before then, wet writing was dried with sand or with pounce, a fine powder dusted over the line. The blotter spread through the 19th century alongside the dip pen, peaked with the fountain pen in the early twentieth, and went into retreat once László Bíró patented the ballpoint in 1938, which made blotting unnecessary.
The paper-pulp-mimicking dial of the Nouvelle evokes the cultural memory of writing even more vividly than its predecessor thanks to its numerals. These were drawn by Victor Bert, a Paris-based calligrapher engaged specifically for this collection. Each hour is drawn to its own proportions, and the twelve fall into a half-moon crescent across the dial, becoming part of the watch’s character. “I wanted them to feel genuinely handwritten, as writing is at the heart of this second chapter, rather than using a conventional watch typeface”, noted Nousseïma. No two hours are quite alike.
The hands extend the conceit. When the hour and minute hands meet, their overlaid profiles describe the tip of a fountain pen, an image that assembles and dissolves within minutes. The small seconds at 9 o’clock completes the dial.
The soft-grain dial sits inside the brushed ring of the inner bezel and the polished case around it, so that the least reflective surface on the watch is framed by its two most reflective. The case has been redrawn around the new dial. The oval concave bezel, already present on the Garde-temps watches, is more defined here, its ellipse drawn deep enough that the lugs flow out of it rather than interrupt it. The mid-case is fluted, regular ridging that recalls the stacked page edges of a closed book. At 36 mm across and 9.88 mm thick, it sits comfortably on the wrist, particularly on smaller wrists.
The movement is a Sellita SW219-1 hand-wound calibre running at 4 Hz and holding 38 hours of reserve.
The collection arrives in two moods. Essentiel has the colour of aged paper, warm and slightly faded. Contemplation is the nocturnal version, a deep blue Buci associates with the small hours of the night. Each watch comes in a book-shaped box holding a notebook, whispering that a watch starts a story its owner is meant to finish.
Kickstarter Campaign
The Buci Nouvelle campaign opened on Kickstarter on 25 September 2026 and runs until 15 November. The launch edition is limited to 300 individually numbered pieces, at a retail price of €1,550 including VAT. Although Nousseïma worked with several partners during the 2022 Garde-temps campaign, the deliveries went smoothly and all backers received their watches on time. With Nouvelle, she chose to work with a single partner, the Swiss manufacturer Roventa-Henex, for the entire production, estimating an end-of-June 2027 delivery.
For those who prefer to see the timepiece in person, you can visit her retail partners in France, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland, or meet Nousseïma at her fair appearances in Toronto (Toronto Timepiece Show, 26-27 September), Paris (We Love Watches, 9-10 October), New York (Windup Watch Fair, 16-18 October), and Singapore (Spring Sprung Sprang, 14-15 November).
Photo credits: Loupiosity.com
All registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.
All rights reserved.