How Patrik Sjögren turned a bladesmith’s material into a watch dial — and built a workshop discipline around it
Pattern-welded steel — what GoS actually makes, forge-welded layers of different alloys — goes back to Celtic and Viking-era smiths working in northern Europe by roughly 300 to 500 AD, and arguably earlier. Today knife makers build careers on it, as it’s most often used for high-end knives, swords, and jewelry. The surface patterns that make a billet beautiful are precisely what make it nearly impossible to finish flat enough for a dial. In 2007, a Swedish watchmaker named Patrik Sjögren and a master bladesmith named Johan Gustafsson decided to use it for watch dials anyway, and called the resulting brand GoS. Almost twenty years later, GoS Watches is one of the few workshops in the world still doing it consistently.
GoS — short for Gustafsson och Sjögren — makes 20 to 30 watches a year, to order, with a six-to-eight-month wait between commission and delivery. Sjögren has run the brand alone since 2021, when Gustafsson stepped back, and master bladesmith Conny Persson joined to take over the forging. The work is centered in Linköping, with an engraver working remotely from the west coast. About half the watches go direct, often in bespoke configurations; the rest move through retailers, reaching buyers in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
What sets GoS apart isn’t the production volume. It’s the material — and the reason most other brands haven’t followed.
What the Material Actually Asks
Three watches from the GoS Fullerö collection, photographed alongside a hand-forged damascus blade. The same metalwork tradition that shapes the sword produces the dials.
The pattern only reveals itself when the surface is etched, and no two billets are ever identical — every fold, twist, and stack of the layers before they fuse produces a different result. That suits a knife blade and complicates serial dial production considerably.
A dial blank has to be flat, thin, and clean enough to accept indices, hands, and a printed minute track without distortion, then etched precisely so the layered pattern emerges without compromising the surface. The finishing is a discipline of its own, and it doesn’t transfer cleanly from the cutlery side of the trade.
“I’ve often had to educate buyers on how damascus steel is forged and finished, so they understand the expertise required to do what we do at GoS with that material. I’m also trained as a service watchmaker, which means I always keep serviceability in mind when I design a watch. Every GoS piece should be serviceable by any trained watchmaker experienced in high-end work, without any custom tooling.”
— Patrik Sjögren, Founder, GoS Watches
A handful of other brands have tried damascus dials in the years since GoS introduced them. Few have stayed with the material long enough to build the workshop knowledge to do it consistently. The bladesmith partnership is part of the reason GoS has: dial steel is not knife steel, and the calibration between forging and finishing only holds because the same workshops have been refining it together for years — first with Gustafsson, then with Persson, who specializes in mosaic damascus and has been forging pattern-welded steel since the early 1990s.
Sweden, on the Dial
Detail of a GoS Skadi movement. The layered damascus pattern is brought up by acid etching after forging; the applied gold element draws on Norse iconography.
GoS draws its design vocabulary from Swedish landscape and history without leaning hard on the iconography. Some pieces make the reference plain — the Väring, the brand’s Viking-era model, recently sold out. Others, like the Winter Nights line, let the damascus pattern itself do the visual work that engravings or appliqués handle elsewhere.
Several GoS models carry no visible logo, or one so faint it requires a close look. Sjögren’s stated goal is for the case profile and dial geometry to carry the recognition that a logo would otherwise handle — a position that only holds if the design language is coherent enough to stand alone.
A second-generation Väring is now in preparation, this time in a bronze case that Sjögren plans to pre-patinate before delivery. The surface will keep developing on the wrist rather than starting from raw metal.
A Movement That Probably Shouldn’t Have Worked
The Sarek Frost caseback. The movement is visible through the sapphire window, with the limitation engraved around the perimeter: one out of one hundred.
Five years into the brand, Sjögren commissioned something unusually ambitious for a workshop GoS’s size: a manufacture movement built in collaboration with German watchmaker Martin Braun, with damascus steel components integrated into the caliber itself. The first generation of Winter Nights was the result.
“Possibly a bit naive,” is how Sjögren describes the decision now. Getting it done relied on his background as an engineer before he became a watchmaker — a problem-solving instinct that, he says, lets him accomplish more in his workshop than the available tooling would suggest is possible. Winter Nights established that GoS could carry a manufacture caliber alongside the dial work, not only commission Swiss base movements and decorate them.
A second manufacture movement is now in development, designed by Sjögren and built in partnership with a Swiss watchmaker he declines to name yet. He is targeting an announcement in spring 2027.
A Service Watchmaker’s Discipline
Patrik Sjögren at the workbench in Linköping. The service-watchmaker training he completed in 2007 still informs every GoS design.
One aspect of Sjögren’s background shapes more of the watches than is immediately obvious: he is a trained service watchmaker. He completed his studies at the Swedish watchmaking school and earned the Breitling scholarship at graduation, which sent him to Breitling for training in the summer of 2007 — the same year GoS was founded. He still owns the Cosmonaute he was handed at graduation, built around the movement he was trained on that summer.
The service discipline carries through to how GoS watches are designed. Every piece is meant to be serviceable by any trained watchmaker experienced in high-end work, without proprietary tooling. That standard sounds unremarkable until you compare it against the broader independent landscape, where proprietary modules and one-off assemblies have produced a generation of watches that effectively have to return to their maker — or stop running.
GoS has grown without outside investors, which Sjögren credits with giving the design language room to evolve at its own pace — from the moodboards he assembled about twelve years ago into what is now a cleaner, more refined line that still tracks back to the original references.
What Hasn’t Changed
Patrik Sjögren, founder and sole watchmaker at GoS. Trained as a service watchmaker, he designs every piece with serviceability in mind.
At 20 to 30 watches a year, GoS cannot stock dealers in volume; at the level of finishing involved in a damascus dial, batching aggressively would compromise what the material is for. Each piece is essentially a one-off in pattern, even when the case and movement are shared across the collection.
The new Väring will join that rhythm. The second manufacture caliber, when it arrives, will join it too. None of it gets announced before it exists. That has been how the workshop in Linköping has operated since 2007.
GoS Watches is based in Linköping, Sweden. The collection is shown at goswatches.com, and orders are arranged directly through the workshop or through authorized retailers.
All images courtesy of GoS Watches.
