I’ve always had an affinity for Diesel watches so I could not believe my good luck that I was able to put a face to some of my favorite designs when I recently came across Jason Ice. Jason nests at Fossil and designs for the Diesel license. He was kind enough to talk to me about his work:
Wrist: Part of Diesel’s appeal is that their designs are fresh in an industry where most brands are watered down licenses that play it safe. Most of the more interesting work done in the fashion watch field was back in the early period with Lip, Pierre Cardin and others. What is your take on it?
Jason: For the history of fashion wristwatches… I don’t know how I feel about this. It’s a back and forth between high end watches and fashion watches. The trick with fashion watches is making a cool product that everyone can afford, all the while having an appeal that makes someone walk by and be like… I gotta get that watch, it’s so cool. I think that is something that luxury wristwatches does, it’s just on a luxury level… does that make sense? Some of my favorite “luxury fashion” watches are from Corum and U Boat.
For Diesel… I am sure to any fan of wristwatches, you can see the influence of watch design from the past. In Diesel, we try to do what LIP did back in their heyday. Be unique. Be different. Let the design speak for itself. People gravitate to what we do in Diesel because most of what we do in a Diesel watch, is something very unexpected!
Wrist: How did you get into watches?
Jason: I got into designing watches by being at the right place at the right time. I was doing a production job at Fossil, assisting the graphics group. I was sitting in the break room one day sketching some of my graffiti style characters and a guy from the product design group saw my sketches.
He asked me if I could draw watches. I told him, I didn’t know but I’d give it a try. So, I did a test project, he dug it… and I have been doing watches for the past 9 years now… haha… Never thought I’d be designing wristwatches. (more…)
Nicolas Lehotzky may not be part of the wristwatch industry and he may be a recent graduate but he has already personified his vision for the industry in an amalgam of interesting prototypes. I recently talked to him about them:
Wrist: I really liked your work and I’m sure you’ve had a similar reaction from others. How did you come around to developing the concepts? Do you have an affinity for watches?
Nicolas: As I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, I was constantly exposed to images of watches, either through advertisements, magazines and newspapers.
As I became older, I looked at these images with as much admiration, but I also started to notice a few things. Wrist watches, unlike cars, do not fall under massive regulations such as is the case with the auto-industry.
A watchmaker, or watch designer, has no boundaries except technical feasibility, yet nearly all watches are conceptually identical.
The great majority of watches use very similar forms of movements, feature a case, a graphic display, a clear window, and a bracelet. Today, the word ‘Watch’ brings to our minds this exact series of items, even though the main functional feature, telling time, can be shown in an infinity of ways.
I am naturally attracted to objects with a high degree of refinement and detail, and watches are a great area for me to work in. I created the radical watch project to communicate my vision. For this project, I chose brands that have nothing to do with watches in a way to drive my inspiration in a radically different way, to create strong, recognizable concepts. The CAT watch is not a Chinese made watch with a small CAT logo. The CAT watch ‘is’ what the caterpillar brand, it goes to its essence and is recognizable as belonging to that brand even without a logo.
Wrist: What was your inspiration for the Brembo watch?
Nicolas: The Brembo watch was inspired by the automotive disc brakes of the same brand. While the disc and the brake caliper are interpreted artistically, the final remains pretty literal. There are lots of high-end watches that are inspired by automobile brands. Breitling has a watch that is co-branded with Bentley for example, and you can also buy VW, Mercedes, Audi watches, among others.
The Brembo watch
These watches look like regular watches, but bear the car maker’s name. The ‘inspiration’ is thus limited to the presence of colors and materials. With the Brembo watch, I wanted to create something that would be recognizable as belonging to the automotive world even without any logo. Most people who I have showed the watch to have recognized that it is inspired by disc brakes, even though it has no logo.
Wrist: Part of the reason why the wristwatch category remains conservative when it comes to its design language is because consumers are much more conservative about watches than they are about other fashion category. Would you agree or have you had any experience that would suggest otherwise?
Nicolas: You are right, consumers of high-end watches are for the most part conservative and it would be difficult to sell them a watch that does not fit that conservative norm. However, I am looking at the long term: I do not feel that a young man today would want to buy the type of watches that their parents buy today. Technology and manufacturing have come a long way, and watches no longer have to look the way they do for reasons of feasibility.
While the conservative brands generally seem to remain that way, a slew of new brands has appeared over the last few years that definitely embraces modernity: Richard Mille, URWERK, MB&F, DeGrisogono Meccanico DG etc.. are very successful examples of this change. I anticipate this trend to increase in importance as today’s youth reaches a higher level of wealth.
Wrist: Since you have such a strong vision for watches, have you flirted
with the idea of working in the industry?
Nicolas: I have been fascinated with watches since I was a child, and I am thus especially excited about products with a high-level of detail and quality. Watches are a perfect fit, and I am looking to work in this industry.
Time Tv has a video interview with Nicholas Hayek aka Mr. Swatch which includes a candid excerpt about the circumstances under which he saved the Swiss watchmaking industry from caving in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Wize & Ope is a new kid on the block – A fashion wristwatch brand that bases its entire concept on customization. You can take a W&O watch and change the design by sliding out design slides and straps and remix it anyway you like.
I recently got a chance to take to the creative and one of the partners behind the brand, Victor Louzon:
Wrist: How did you guys stumble into this?
Victor: It all started when we created the character Wize who is a kid traveling around the world and discovering trends, cultures, and environments. Wize is very open to discovering new thing. This is where we took the word “ope”, from “open”. As wize travels and discovers the world, he transforms and adapt, and becomes Ope.
He finds out, that the world is great also because of its all the differences and cultures that exist. This is why the world is great, and that he wants to embrace it.
Once I created that character and his philosophy, I found the watch concept, that was following the same track, which was to be able to transform, and change depending on fashion, trends, environments.
How the W&O watch works
Wrist: How did you guys get into watches? Do you a background in the industry?
Victor: When I was a kid, my father was a watchmaker, and I grew up playing in cases full of watches, it was my playground. I repaired, destroyed, transformed, and wore them. I believed it stayed in me, and made me want to create a brand one day.
Our background in the industry is mainly around Odm, which we were the first to launch in Europe, and set a strategy in the fashion business. We have been distributors in the fashion industry of many other brands, such as the mythic brand from San Francisco – Emily The Strange.
Wrist: Your father was a watchmaker?
Victor: Yes, my father who passed away about 20 years ago, was a watchmaker. He started to distribute watches made in France and Switzerland. He created a brand in 1973 called Yonger & Bresson that he sold in late 1989 to a Swiss group.
The brand was very famous back in the day and still exists. It’s currently owned by Ambre Group in France.
I heard about watches my all youth. But actually, I was more a big fan of Casio, Calculator watches and Robot transformer watches released in the eighties.
Wrist: You have said that you came up with the characters first before the watch. Are you suggesting that you never really planned on the watches first?
Victor: Yes, I was travelling in Japan with my wife in December 2006, and I was overwhelmed by the cultural difference I saw there. One night on the top roof bar of the Park Hyatt Hotel where I was staying, I drew Wize under the cup paper. And it all came from that.
Victor’s partner in Wize & Ope – Benjamin
The watches came about after a month as I was looking for a way to transform my old gshock watch. We created the concept, and it all made perfect sense, like it was all mattered to happen. And we took it from there.
Wrist: What are you the future plans for the brand?
Victor: The brand is not only a watch brand, but a lifestyle brand. This is where we want to go. In the future, we will add accessories such as sunglasses, trading cards, comic books, and many other accessories. One of our dream is to come out with a cartoon on Wize & Ope.
Four years ago, a frustrated creative took a chance and released two limited edition watches. Today, Matthew Waldman is the man behind Nooka, a fashion forward brand that has enjoyed a lot of love from the media and celebrities alike. He’s even featured in a new book called Design Enterpreneur by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico.
Recently, I got the chance to catch up with him:
Wrist: When I first interviewed you back in 2004, you had just parted ways with Seiko and were about to launch a limited edition Nooka despite some skepticism from some of the people around you. Looking back, How do you feel about your journey so far?
Matthew: The journey has been utterly amazing! I had no expectations when I produced the first 2,000 pieces and even thought that I might end up with a bedroom full of future gifts to give out the rest of my life! From that I now have a thriving business with offices in new york and tokyo, get fan mail, and have my designs on people I admire.
The Ikepod watch founder, Oliver Ike reveals the thought process behind his brand in an article he wrote for the David Report:
“..10 years ago I created a watch-brand called Ikepod. By picking one of the most en vogue ikepod designer at that time, Marc Newson, I differentiated the looks of the product from what was available in timepieces on the markets…” (link - scroll down to see article)
When 31 year old Felix Baumgartner met Jeweler Harry Winston’s Maximilian Brusser at the launch of his designer URWERK 103 in 2003, he was already on top of the world. His orbital cross movement was already getting a lot of attention. But little did he know that his watch was just a prelude. Fate was plotting and unbeknowst to him, he would soon embark on his most inspiring and challenging assignment yet – The limited edition OPUS V, a watch with the world’s first “satellite hour” display.
Much Recently, fate once again intervened and we got a chance to sit down with Mr. Felix and have a little chat:
Wrist: Congratulations on the OPUS V. How are you handling the reaction to the watch?
Baumgartner: The reaction has been intense, nobody seems to remain indifferent to the Opus 5 and the vast majority of reactions has been extremely positive.
Wrist: Now, when you proposed the satellite watch to Maximilian Brusser for the OPUS V, you had more than one proposal, didn’t you? Are you planning on working on them?
Baumgartner: No, We are not planning on using the abandoned project. We only had one alternative to the present OPUS 5.
UR-103.03 – A prelude to the OPUS V? The orbital cross movement has little hanging satellites that not only tells the time, but, thanks to a much larger open window, also shows the approach of the future and the passage of time long gone.
Wrist: You seem to seek inspiration from everywhere when it comes to designing your watches. For example, one of your pieces takes some of its visual cues from a famous airplane, the JUNKER 52 or another is inspired by the movement of the sun. Is this a hint that you’re interested in design in general and that you might be interested in working with something other than watches or am I reading too much into it and the world is really your muse?
Baumgartner: URWERK’s designer Martin Frei and myself work together on the concept. We share a similar fascination for modern art, space development and architecture. Our goal is to create and invent new concepts for watches and not copy what has been done before.
As far as working with someting else than watchmaking, I am a watchmaker first but we do however have projects to create watch related objects.
Designer Martin Frei and Watchmaker Felix Baumgartner
Wrist: You come from a long line of watchmakers. What was it like growing up? Was there added pressure to follow the same line or were you always fascinated with watchmaking?
Baumgartner: I’ve always been impressed by watches and clocks, ever since I was a little boy because that’s the environment I grew up in.
To grow up in a watchmaker family was for me the opportunity to learn very closely about history and the meaning of watchmaking.
Wrist: What about your experience working for such prestigious names as Vacheron Constantin, Svend Andersen and Patek Philippe? Was setting up Urwerk a reaction to your work experience at places like Patek Philippe and Svend Andersen? Did you seek more freedom and originality in your work?
Baumgartner: Working for these prestigious brands gave me the opportunity to learn about the traditional way of watchmaking. URWERK gives me the possibility to transform what I have learnt there, adding my own style and sensitivity.
URWERK 102
Wrist: So are you going to be concentrating on Urwerk now? Or are there going to be more collaborations?
Baumgartner: No collaborations are planned for the moment because the development of URWERK takes up all of our time now. Future collaborations are however possible.
Wrist: Where do you see yourself in the watch industry? Do you think that your generation of new creative independent watchmakers are going to have an impact?
Baumgartner: In our opinion, the creative independant watchmakers have the great opportunity to create and infuse new ideas and ways to see watchmaking. The current state of the Industry is very interesting, because some companies hold on to old values as Tourbillon, minute repeater, and others try to find new ways to create haute horlogerie watches – The future will show us.
URWERK 101
*The title, The man behind the OPUS V, is slightly inaccurate. Mr. Felix Baumgartner’s other half is designer Martin Frei. We regret not meeting him.
Not a day goes by without another watch advertisement hammering in the notion that it tell us more than just time Yet, despite that, it has remained fairly conservative, maintaining its age old status quo as a symbol of prestige and personality.
Enter London based Designer Crispin Jones, who set out to investigate the cultural messages that the watch espouses – If the watch really is the purveyor of personality, could it be more than just a status symbol? Could it instead express some of the negative aspects of a wearer’s personality? Could it even change it?
With some help from fellow designers, He developed seven working concept watches – three of which focused on subverting the personality i.e. Summissus (Video) – A watch that fosters humility in the wearer by constantly reminding him or her of their demise, Adsiduus (Video) – uses the psychological practice of auto-suggestion to affect a change in the wearer’s personality i.e. “You’re an amazing person!”, and Fallax (Video) – a watch that projects the wearer’s honesty instead of their wealth and style.
While the remaining four focused on how to tell time differently: Docilis (Video) – It would train the wearer to live without a watch by internalizing it using a small electric shock at regular intervals, Avidus ( Video) – that would make time personal, by making it pass more quickly or slowly depending on the wearer’s mood, Prudens (Video) – enabled the wearer to check the time without looking at their watch, and Inveteratus (Video) – A watch that referred to a more culturally appropriate timescale than the movement of the sun to tell time – the television schedule.
Fellow Watchaholic, Wrist Watch Review, had an interesting interview with Mike Kobold, founder of the Kobold Chronograph and Watch company:
“What do you do when you’re 19, in a strange city, and hate school? While many of us would take to pizza, beer, and video games, Mike Kobold, founder of the Kobold Chronograph and Watch Company, decided to build and sell watches from his dorm room.
“I went to Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, to get my graduate degree in Economics,” said Mike. “A friend of the family’s, a Nobel-prize winner, actually, told me it would be a great place to go. I hated it, so I started a watch company at age 19 with $5000, my lifetime savings, out of my dorm room.”
“I probably would have hated any school,” he adds, not wanting to disparage his adopted city. “I didn’t want to go to school.” (continued)
By now most of us have probably been promised about the wonders of e-paper – flexible thin futuristic displays that could easily double as interactive wallpaper, and while the watch paper isn’t it, it still comes pretty close.
A fully functional clock, The Watch Paper is printed on ordinary paper and uses a heat sensitive coating to tell time. Each digit blurs from one into the other using the heat from the LED in the back which makes the coating transparent, or atleast we figured thats how it works.
Either way, its fiendishly clever and we decided to have a word with Hannes Koch, the creator and congratulate him about it:
Wrist: If there is a word i could use to describe both your paper-clock and the digital tape, it’s “Ingeniuity”. Both play on our perceptions of LED displays, and both seem so obvious, yet no one’s ever thought of it.
Koch: When developing our own “loTech” epaper, we went back to the almost “retro Style” LED Segment displays, because they are so easy to control and very familiar to everyone. Yet they are the perfect “vehicle” to demonstrate the area between digital and analogue which we are interested in. Dealing with the setup of the segment displays for a week day and night and in parallel marvelling at the qualities of tape in general, the signage tape came to mind. It seemed so utterly obvious that I was sure that someone’s done
it before, but I couldn’t find it. To this day no one has complained…
Wrist: How has the RCA helped you develop as a designer?
Koch: I came to the RCA as a product designer from a technical background (BSC Product Design, Brunel University. The unique quality of the RCA was that it challenged me to complement my technical knowledge with a more conceptual approach to design. As an environment it was (and is) extremely stimulating, because chances are that someone did “it” before. So most of the ideas (in the design area) are massively challenged and therefore
developed. It is not always a pleasant process, but it surely encouraged me to try and establish my own area within design.
Wrist: How has the reaction been so far? Would we see a commercial version soon?
Koch: The reaction has been absolutely overwhelming so far. The wallpaper clock today won an IF-Design Concepts award here in Germany and got me into the NESTA creative pioneer programme, which gives me the chance to seriously work on a business plan for that project and then apply for up to £35.000 funding to get it serialized. So yes, there is a very good chance that this will turn into a commercial version next year! Also I have been invited to show in an exhibition about german design during the Designmai 2005 in Berlin and in Tokyo’s Designersblock in October 2005. Apart from that we are looking for seed-funding right now to develop the next step prototype in the next two months. For us the wonderful thing is to be busy straight after graduating with a project which is completely our own…
Ever since man put a price on time, Timepieces have been judged for their horological or decorative values, but rarely for their aural experience, that is, until the much recent rise of the quartz movement. Ask any watch aficionado today about their mechanical collection, and they won’t fail to mention the sound and feeling they get when they wind up their mechanical watch.
With this in mind, I recently had a conversation with Douglas Repetto, the creator of the Sine Clock, a sound sculpture that keeps time with sound by encoding it in a set of sine waves:
Wrist: Your clock reminds me of how important sound is to the mechanical watch experience.
Douglas: I can understand that. There’s still something marvelous about the complexity of a mechanical watch mechanism. It seems so unlikely to work!
Wrist: Would you describe in detail how your clock works for our readers?
Douglas: It’s fairly simple. There are three sounds, low, medium, and high. Each one is pulsing at a certain speed.
The low pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one minute, the medium pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one hour, and the high pulsing goes from slow to fast to slow over the course of one day, so if you sit and listen to the low sound for a minute, you’ll hear its pulse slowly speed up for thirty seconds, then slow down for another thirty seconds. Then it starts again.
Because the speed of each pulse is constantly changing, each moment in the day has a distinct set of pulse speeds.
Technically it works perfectly…but in human terms, it’s difficult to actually tell the time. It’s easy to hear the passing of a minute. But for an hour or a day it’s not really possible to tell precisely what time it is.
But that’s okay, I was thinking more of the way we tell what time of day it is by the position of the sun in the sky or the passing of a train or some other environmental clue. After listening for awhile you get a feeling for the sound at different times of day, but you’re never going to really be able to say “It’s 3:37pm!”
Wrist: How intrusive is it compared to the tick of a watch?
Douglas: It turns out to be a pretty soothing sound. There’s one in a group show in a gallery right now here in New York, and the gallery people were a bit worried at first that the sound would be overwhelming or distracting, but really it’s a very quiet, calm sound.
There’s a short snippet of sound on the website. After a while I find that the sound sort of melts into the background, just the way a clock’s ticking does.
Wrist: How did you first come up with the concept?
Douglas: Almost all of my artwork involves physical or biological cycles, systems, or phenomena of one sort or another. I find natural systems endlessly compelling, and in my works I often try to find ways of making those systems more easily perceivable.
I also tend to work with sound, so I was thinking about our perception of time and started imagining different ways of marking the passage of time with sound. Sine Clock was the result.
City Magazine’s somewhat dated 
