Co-founder and watchmaker at Pragma, bringing Rolex, F.P. Journe and Laurent Ferrier training to a radically transparent independent brand.
Pragma was born from a simple question: what if watchmaking could be both exceptional and responsible?
Christopher Wegener is a Swiss watchmaker and the co-founder of Pragma, the Geneva-based independent brand built around radical component-level transparency. He trained at Rolex's watchmaking school from the age of fifteen, completing his apprenticeship at nineteen, before spending years working under François-Paul Journe and Laurent Ferrier. Pragma is not his first attempt at an independent brand: he previously co-founded Akrivia alongside Rexhep Rexhepi, an early project that shaped his later thinking about what a founder-led watch company could look like.
Wegener met designer Kai Hsuan Liu through a mutual friend, and the pair began developing Pragma around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, using the slower period to define the brand's values before moving into design and movement development. Where Wegener brought two decades of hands-on watchmaking experience, Liu, a Taiwan-born industrial designer trained in Lausanne with a background at Hermès, brought a design sensibility from outside the watch industry entirely, a combination Wegener has credited with allowing Pragma to attempt things traditional watchmaking would not.
The partnership's debut watch, the P1 – Perseverance, reflects both halves of that thinking: a case built from individually finished and serviceable parts, informed as much by Alpine architecture as by watchmaking precedent, paired with a transparency model that publishes the manufacturer, supplier, material and recycled content of every component. Buyers of the limited rose gold Perseverance also receive a 1% equity stake in Pragma itself, a structure Wegener has described as a deliberate alternative to crowdfunding, built to create long-term relationships with collectors rather than one-off sales.