Ernst Benz - A Room with a View for 16 Watchmakers
WORLDTEMPUS - 11 August 2010
Founded and directed by Efim Khankin, Universal Watch Repair in Birmingham, Michigan, is a true family affair. Efim's wife Luda heads up the financial department, while sons Boris and Leonid are each in charge of important aspects of the company: Boris primarily heads the technical service department, while Leonid has the Herculean task of being the driving force behind the Ernst Benz Swiss watch brand that the Khankins acquired in 2005. "Ernst Benz is not like a job for me," Leonid says with a great big smile. "It's like a dream come true."
From its beginnings with six customers in the 1970s, Universal Watch Repair now proudly counts more than 3,000 accounts for the restoration and repair of timekeeping treasures, not including the twenty-two manufacturers for which it is the official U.S. service center such as Graham, Arnold & Son, Perrelet and Maurice Lacroix. These statistics speak for themselves: the Khankin family clearly understands giving good service. Universal Watch Repair's workshop can truly repair any mechanical or quartz pocket or wristwatch, whether modern or vintage. If a part needs replacing, it will be found—or one of the sixteen experienced watchmakers at home in the sunny Birmingham workshop will make it.
In late 2009, Universal Watch Repair moved into luxurious purpose-built premises comprising 5,000 square feet in Birmingham, an affluent suburb just about as old Detroit itself. It now shares its space with the first North American Ernst Benz boutique and proudly displays every Ernst Benz model currently available—a watch and a brand that has become a phenomenon not only in Detroit, or even the U.S. Inauguration of the space took place on August 2 with approximately 150 guests including professional baseball player and Detroit Tiger Brennan Boesch, mayor of Birmingham Rackeline Hoff, and international watch journalist (and Worldtempus editor) Elizabeth Doerr, who signed copies of the recently released Twelve Faces of Time for guests.
Universal Watch Repair's sixteen watchmakers sit at standard watchmaking benches located right next to large glass windows providing natural light to the busy workshop. The watchmakers are of various nationalities, including American. Most of them have been trained either at well-known watchmaking schools or at Metro Detroit's own Warren Consolidated School's horology program, the only high-school watchmaking program in North America and one of only ten watchmaking schools in the U.S.
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