The Founder
Francisco "Nico" Moreno grew up in Manila with a deep interest in classic cinema — its elegance, its restraint, the particular way its protagonists carried themselves. Frank Sinatra was a constant. Jazz was a discipline he had always wanted to pursue.
In 2013, he graduated with a degree in Physics, with a specialisation in Materials Science, and entered his first corporate job in manufacturing. Breakfast was dinner; dinner was breakfast. Somewhere in that inversion, the desire to learn jazz came back — yet work made it impossible. However, the impulse to pursue something considered, something that carried meaning beyond a function, remained.
It was during this period — his first years in corporate life — that he had a conversation with his father about getting a watch. Not just any watch, but the right one. Something modest but knowing. Something that, if you understood it, said everything without announcing itself. That conversation opened a door. He began collecting vintage pieces, and as he did, maintenance became a real challenge. He brought his watches to technicians and watched them work. Somewhere in that observation, an idea formed.
The transition from science to watchmaking was less dramatic than it sounds — a mechanical watch is, in many ways, a materials science problem solved beautifully. Spring equations, magnetism, energy transfer, friction — these are all science. The discipline never left. It simply found a more personal, more human application.
He gave himself seven months to research the idea. By the end of those seven months, the decision had already made itself. In 2014, he founded Ibarra in Manila — named after the idealistic hero of José Rizal's novels. The name carries a question he wanted on every dial: Rizal died at 35, and in those 35 years accomplished what most people could not do in several lifetimes. What are we doing with the time we have?
The brief was clear from the beginning: make watches that are timeless without being frozen in the past. Elegant without announcing themselves. Filipino in soul, universal in appeal. Watches that a person could pass on.
Through Ibarra, Nico has carried that conviction into rooms he had not anticipated — institutional moments that, for someone who had once dreamed of representing the Philippines in sport, carried a weight that went beyond business.
When the pandemic halted operations almost overnight, he made the decision most difficult for a founder — whether to surrender or find another way forward. He chose to continue. He called it the second age of Ibarra — built slowly around the Trofeo and the return of the Mariano Automatic, one deliberate step at a time.
In 2022, Nico relocated to Tokyo for further studies. The years that followed deepened both his craft and his understanding of what Ibarra could become. From that period came Deco Ibarra — a collector line born from a design partnership with his independent Tokyo atelier, Moreno Watch Studio. Its first piece, the Gran Luz, was selected as a participant in the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève 2025 — horology's most recognised design award.
The work continues. In Manila and in Tokyo, quietly and without announcement.