A screwdriver got here first
The name is older than the business. As a kid, "Abyon" was the first word out of my mouth — family legend has it that, near as anyone could tell, it meant screwdriver. Nobody thought it meant anything. Least of all a career.
Years of watchmaking later, the joke stopped being a joke. A screwdriver is still the single most-used tool on the bench — seating a case back, freeing a stuck movement ring, nudging a regulator arm by a hair's width. Abyon Watch Co. is named for the tool that's in my hand all day, not the other way around.
The years weren't short. I started repairing watches at thirteen, and by twenty-three I was running a small watch company of my own. In between, I worked on the fine jewelry side of the trade for major diamond retailers, picking up gemology certifications along the way.
The formal training came from Gem City College's School of Watchmaking — one of the most competitive, and one of the last true two-year traditional watchmaking programs left in the country. Much of its curriculum still traces back to the old Bulova and Elgin watchmaking schools of the Midwest farm country, where the trade was originally taught to farmers as seasonal work to see them through the winter.
Part of that education happened under an Amish master watchmaker, and I'm a member of AWCI, the trade's national certifying body. There's an easy joke in the Amish part — no electricity means no quartz and no batteries, so mechanical is the only option, which makes their communities some of the last places in the country where old-world watchmaking never stopped being a living trade rather than a museum piece.
But the joke undersells it. Sitting across the bench from someone with a direct, unbroken line back to nineteenth-century watchmaking changes how you see the craft — you're not reading about how it used to be done, you're watching it done. That's exactly what pushes me toward the newest movements coming out today: you can't push a trade forward with any real confidence until you've felt, firsthand, where it started.
It's also why "we can't get that part anymore" isn't an answer here. A stem, a pusher, a case lug for a watch nobody supports — if it can't be sourced, it gets machined instead. Mechanical or quartz, vintage or modern, the job gets finished.
We don't decorate a watch to look precise. We regulate it until it is.