From an Apartment to an Atelier

Mimora began in an apartment. The first workshop was an improvised setup inside an apartment in Timișoara, and for a long stretch it was the whole of the operation.

The equipment came before the brand. Our first purchases were made in 2024, before there was a name to put on anything. Brand work began in late April 2025, and the identity took its final shape over that summer. The first watch shipped on 18 June 2025, while the three models of the Debut Collection were still being drawn and redrawn.

That first watch had no model name yet. In our design files it was called simply "Core," because that is what it was: the core of a good automatic watch. Steel case, sapphire crystal, Sellita movement, time and date, leather strap. The pragmatic essentials, done properly, and then given the personality they deserved. That personality turned out to be Buena Vista. The collection's dress watch is not a design we arrived at; it is the design we started from.

Equipment first, then a name, then watches. That order matters. It meant the tools were chosen for the work we intended to do, not to match a brand already announced — and it meant the first watch was built to answer a question about quality, not to fill a slot in a lineup.

Working in an Apartment

An apartment sets its own limits. Bench space is finite. Machines share floor and power with the ordinary rooms around them. Tools are put away at the end of the day so the room can be a room again. Anything larger than the space has to wait its turn.

Those constraints were not an excuse to cut corners. They were a filter. A process earned its place only if it could be done well in the room we had, and everything else stayed on a list for later. What passed through that filter was the Debut Collection: Buena Vista, Springtide, and Voyager, three watches on three different calibers, designed, assembled, and finished within those four walls.

A Dedicated Workshop

In June 2026, a year to the month after the first watch shipped, we moved into a dedicated workshop in Timișoara, tailored to Mimora's needs. It is the first space built around the work rather than borrowed from a home. The brand stays in the city where it began. The address changed; the standard did not.

The difference is not only floor area. There is room in the atelier to add machines and to widen the bench without surrendering a room to do it. The list of processes that waited through the apartment years finally has somewhere to go.

Leaving the apartment was never about size for its own sake. It was about giving each step the room to be done properly and repeatedly, which is a different thing from doing it once.

Bringing the Work In-House

Some of that work is already ours: every dial is pad printed in-house. The new workshop lets us extend the same principle to larger machines. CNC machines for case making are being installed, so cases can be cut in-house, and hands production is being set up alongside them. Both are work in progress, and we would rather describe them accurately than early.

A case and a set of hands are among the most visible parts of a watch. Making them ourselves is a long-term commitment, and we are treating it as one. Bringing a step in-house puts the tolerances, the finish, and the timing of that step at our own bench. It is slower to arrive at and steadier once it does.

These are additions, not shortcuts. The aim has not changed since the apartment: the product comes first, and the company grows only as fast as the product allows. We would rather ship fewer watches made the way we intend than more made a way we do not.