Three team members, two continents and one passion: watches. This is Quiet Club, the new house on the watchmaking block, which recently released its first timepiece, called Fading Hours.

“The movement has been fully designed and made from scratch by our head watchmaker, Norifumi Seki,” said Hokuto Ueda, the brand’s chief executive.

Mr. Seki, 26, is something of a boldface name in Asian watchmaking since his pocket watch, with a spherical moon phase plated in yellow gold and blued titanium, won the 2020 edition of the F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition. The Tokyo resident was the first watchmaker from Asia to take the prestigious prize, established in 2015.

Mr. Seki’s partners in the business are Mr. Ueda, 40, who lives in Seattle and previously worked in automotive engineering, and Johnny Ting, 41, of San Francisco, whose background is in product and user experience design. Mr. Ueda and Mr. Ting initially met in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they worked for five years at Drivemode, an auto technology startup acquired by Honda in 2019.

So why did they go from cars to watches?

Mr. Ueda had challenged Mr. Ting, a longtime watch enthusiast, to use his background in user experience to design a timepiece. (They said the watch’s name was inspired by the fader control on Mr. Ueda’s audio mixer — music production is his hobby — as the watch was designed, in essence, to fade from notice when the wearer was concentrating on something else, and then fade back in when needed.)

After reading about Mr. Seki’s prize, they thought “it would be great if someone like this could be part of our project,” Mr. Ueda said, “so we could do something from the ground up.”