Celeste Watch Company is a 100% woman-owned and operated watch company in the United States whose team consider themselves watch dial artists, specialising in innovative and bespoke timepieces with handcrafted dials made from natural shell and enamel. The house keeps an inventory of more than 100 designs available for purchase and also creates custom designs by request, working directly with individual customers on their commissions. Its boutique sits in the downtown historic district of Springfield, Oregon, and has become a destination for visitors.
The company grew out of founder Celeste Wong's own slow and sometimes painful apprenticeship. Starting in 2013 she began taking apart old watches, making her own dials and putting them back together; when her first completed inlay dial stopped ticking during a rainstorm because the wood had swelled and blocked the hour hand, she set about learning to stabilise the wood, match the thickness of wood and shell, cut a precision inlay, design a case, reliably build watches and craft leather bands — discovering, by her own account, at least fifty ways how not to make a watch dial. She applied to be a vendor at the Eugene Saturday Market and sold two of her first four watches on the opening weekend. Her first design, Nostalgia, was clean and simple without numerals, and its abalone shape drew such varied readings from customers — cats, octopus, quails, dolphins, a dancing hippo — that the impromptu Rorschach test became a way to connect with wearers and pushed her to expand the shell colours and wood choices; Radiance, a starburst of dial dots that lets light radiate from behind the mother of pearl, followed for those who wanted markers. Wanting to be a watchmaker since childhood, Celeste first became a biomedical engineer and ran her own engineering education company for 18 years, authoring over 20 books and booklets on engineering careers; she received the National Academy of Engineering's Norm Augustine Award in 2005, was listed among '50 Engineers You Should Meet' and named one of the Nifty-Fifty by the USA Science and Engineering Festival. She remains a self-taught watch designer, dial artist and watchmaker who applies an engineer's mind to every process from design and material choice through cutting, inlay, building and testing.
