Michael Wunderman has spent much of his life around watches. But with the debut of House of Wunder, the industry veteran is less interested in recreating the business he grew up in than building one for how luxury operates now.

The Mallorca-based luxury house is making its U.S. debut with Swiss-made watches and Spanish-made fine jewelry, connected by a single design language. Its first timepiece, the Amplifier, pairs an architectural square case and natural stone dials with Wunderman’s proprietary Wunderflow bracelet construction, which migrates into the accompanying jewelry offering as a connective tissue between categories.

To dual launch is intentional. After more than 15 years away from the watch industry, Wunderman found himself wearing watches alongside an increasingly expressive collection of men’s jewelry and felt the two rarely were in dialogue.

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“I thought there’s nobody that’s doing a watch and a jewelry brand with harmony,” he told WWD. “There’s watch companies that make jewelry or jewelry companies that make watches.”

It represents a markedly different proposition from the enormous watch businesses in which Wunderman grew up.

His father, the late Severin Wunderman, built Gucci Timepieces alongside Aldo Gucci, and Michael has no memory of life before watches. As a child, he played with Star Wars figures on his father’s office floor before graduating to packing boxes and counting inventory; by 15, he was spending summers working at the company’s Swiss factory.

Wunderman became marketing director of Gucci Timepieces at 19, with a front-row seat as Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole transformed the fashion house. The turnaround followed a far more precarious period for the Italian brand, when Wunderman recalls his father’s royalty payments as having “kept Gucci afloat” and remembers Severin trying to assemble financing to buy Gucci for around $400 million.

College wasn’t in the cards; Wunderman instead enrolled, as he puts it, in “the University of Severin Wunderman.” But as luxury moved away from licensing and toward greater control of its categories, the father and son’s Gucci chapter ended.

Severin subsequently acquired Swiss watchmaker Corum in 2000, opening a more experimental period, where his father had “free rein to design whatever he wanted to design,” Wunderman said.

That freedom yielded unconventional designs including the exaggerated Bubble and gave Michael a more intimate understanding of manufacturing. He eventually became president of Corum.

The family’s willingness to push watchmaking convention had emerged earlier. When Severin wanted diamond-set versions of Gucci’s steel G Watch, Michael recalled that suppliers weren’t equipped to set diamonds into steel. His father turned to Rolex and asked to use its diamond setters.

The response, as he remembers it: “Sure, go ahead. Nobody’s going to ever want to buy steel and diamond watches anyway.”

Today the combination is nearly quotidian across the luxury watch market.

Then, in 2008, the ground shifted. Michael returned to Los Angeles after eight years in Switzerland; Severin died that June, followed months later by the global financial crisis.

“My father passing away really took the wind out of my sails,” he said.

He stepped away from watches, making independent films and later designing homes. Even there, his legacy shaped how he worked, composing a floor plan as he would a watch dial, thinking about the relationship and proportion of all the elements in it.

As Wunderman began wearing more jewelry himself, he noticed how rarely it spoke to the watches he wore alongside it, a disconnect that led him to reconsider the wrist.

Wunderman formed House of Wunder in late 2020 and began developing its watches the following year. The ideas came quickly: he recalls sketching 10 watches in a week, eventually narrowing them into four families.

He imagines his watches and jewelry stacked together and worn rather than preserved — pieces that can move from a boardroom to a weekend away and acquire the evidence of both. It is his counterpoint to what he sees as an overly serious strain of traditional luxury watchmaking.

“There’s only serious elegance, and it’s played out,” he said. “It’s boring, and I want to do something that’s provocative and sexy and fun.”

The Amplifier starts at $7,700 in steel, rising to $13,400 for a diamond-set steel Midi; sterling silver jewelry begins at $430. The automatic Midi is powered by a Sellita SW360 movement with a 56-hour power reserve.

House of Wunder employs 12 people across Spain and Los Angeles and is wholly owned and self-financed by Wunderman, with no outside capital. The company will produce 450 Amplifiers in 2026, with 200 units of its next watch expected before yearend, alongside a few thousand pieces of jewelry.

The categories also operate at different speeds: watches require roughly 12 to 15 months to manufacture, Wunderman said, versus six to eight weeks for jewelry. “The watches are my prestige and are my history and my heritage, but the jewelry gives me the flexibility,” he said.

House of Wunder has soft-launched online with limited availability and plans selective retail expansion. Spain, Germany and the U.S. are priority markets, with Wunderman emphasizing direct-to-consumer sales while building wholesale. Rather than immediately spending heavily on traditional watch fairs, he envisions intimate dinners, consumer events and experiences rooted in electronic music.

It is, in some ways, an inversion of the business in which he was raised. Severin helped build Gucci Timepieces through extraordinary scale. Michael is beginning with hundreds of watches, controlled distribution and direct contact — trading scale for intimacy.

That connection extends to how the brand meets customers. “I want to talk to them. I want to look them in the eye. I want to explain to them what this is all about,” he said.

Four watch families are planned, each eventually paired with complementary jewelry. The forthcoming Resound is next, while a future Severin model will fuse two design signatures associated with his father. The “House” in House of Wunder was chosen with room to grow: Wunderman eventually sees accessories, homeware and other creative categories joining the ecosystem.

“I don’t want to build something that is just going to sell once and then never sell again,” Wunderman said. “I really just want to build something that has longevity.”

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