How It Started
A Watch That Did Not
Exist Yet
H. Vos Hofmeister is a young company. It began with Jon Butler wanting watches nobody was making, and deciding to find out how to put them together himself.
01
Since My Twenties
Marking Things With Watches
I have been a watch enthusiast for over twenty years. I write custom software for a living, and somewhere along the way I started marking milestones — in my career, in my life — with watches.
My first real one was a Seiko Flightmaster SNA413 — the blue dial chronograph, with the slide rule on the bezel. I still have it.
Over two decades I bought, sold and traded a lot of watches, some of them well into five figures. I sat on waiting lists. I learned what I liked by owning it and, often enough, by letting it go again.
02
Ten Years In
Then I Got Scammed
A decade or so into all that, I bought a fake. Not knowingly — which is the whole problem with it.
That changed things. Getting caught sent me back to first principles: what actually makes a watch good, what is inside it, why one bracelet feels different from another. I wanted to know enough that it could not happen again.
So I started studying properly — movements, finishing, case geometry, the details you only notice once someone has taken your money for a convincing copy.
03
Learning In Public
The Knowledge Was On Phones
I followed the majors and the micros on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and I followed the independent reviewers harder — the people arguing about lug-to-lug, about finishing, about which movement is worth paying for. I learned an enormous amount from people who were not selling me anything.
Then one night I watched a man build a replica Submariner on camera and fit a Seiko dial to it. Someone else's case, someone else's bracelet, someone else's bezel — a different name on the dial. He had a large following and he was selling them.
I could not stop thinking about it.
04
December 2025
Not Mods. Not Homages.
I did not want to build mods, and I did not want to build homages. I wanted to take the designs I already admired, change the things I would have changed, and end up with watches that were right by my own standards.
So I did what I do for a living. I gave everything I had learned to a set of custom AI agents and asked them the questions I could not answer myself: where do these parts actually come from, how do they go together, and what tools does it take to do it properly. The agents found the vendors, worked out the assembly sequence, and told me what I was missing.
Two months later, in December 2025, I built my first watch.
“I have two small children. The house is quiet by eight, and I write code all day, so more code at night was a fast route to burning out. Building watches turned out to be the thing. It felt like adult Legos.”
05
The Name
Butler Was Too On The Nose
I called the first one Butler Watch Co., after myself. It wanted more distance than that. My mother's maiden name is Vosler, and I had a VH monogram drawn for a client who went another direction — which made it fair game.
- H.
- short for homage — to my parents, Cheryl and Don
- Vos
- the Swiss form of Vosler
- Hofmeister
- German for master of the house — what they called the butler
Old-school on the outside, with a meaning that only matters to me on the inside.
06
And One More Name
Aimée
My wife's name is Amelia, and she goes by Ame for short. Aimée is the French for beloved, and it is where her name comes from.
It is the watch we are cutting our own case and bracelet molds for — the first one drawn from scratch rather than built on an existing case. It seemed like the right one to name after her.
See the Aimée
07
Six Months Later
Forty Watches
The second build was the Triumvir Viator II. I made two: one for me, one for my golf league partner. Then some for friends. Then two for my business partner. Then twenty for the golf trip I run every June.
People kept asking when I was going to make it a business. The demand was obviously there. But assembling forty watches by hand had started to feel like work — I still loved designing them, and I had stopped enjoying building them at three in the morning.
So I asked the vendor I had been sourcing parts from whether there was a solution. He said he could put a team together to assemble my designs.
Where That Leaves Us
Nothing Is Built Before It Is Ordered
We hold no stock. The whole company is bootstrapped, which means every watch exists because somebody bought it. These are my designs — you are buying a considered thing, not commissioning one.
01
Made to order
Nothing is built until somebody buys it. Your watch goes into production the day you order it.
02
It is assembled
About thirty days, by the team that builds to our specification.
03
I check it myself
Every watch ships to me first. I do the final inspection, then it goes to you.
There are no waiting lists here, and nothing is ever sold out.
What Is Next
Cut From Scratch
Everything we make is designed here — the dial, the hands, the bezel, the proportions, the strap. The next step goes a layer deeper: our own case and bracelet molds, so the geometry is drawn rather than selected. The CAD work is under way for the Aimée. It will be the first of many.
Membership is not about scarcity — I have just told you there is no queue. I spent twenty years as the customer. I would rather know the people wearing these.
— Jon Butler