P11
Watch design is always a balancing act between two forces:
Familiarity heuristics. i.e. people like what they are familiar with
Novel. Something that the audience is not bored with.
With watches, this is always tough, as there are quite some designs that people will never get bored with. That’s why so many microbrands make “homage” watches, which are basically replicas of legendary designs.
But for our Caliber 852, we made sure that everything is designed from the ground up. We just needed to play by certain rules so that we don’t end up with something that’s a bit too different from what our audience is used to.
With our integrated bracelet design, we designed curves from the ground up and this resulted in a case profile that we really liked. However, turns out our design would require very sophisticated craftsmanship (or very expensive equipment). Our factory came back with a suggestion: straightening all the curved surfaces.
While we were very proud of our original design, we had to find ways to make the product practical and not overly expensive. So we said yes to the straightening of the main larger surfaces, and hoped for the best.
Once we received the sample… our watch case design suddenly started resembling the legendary Tissot PRX watch case. Who would have thought… a unique case design, with a few surfaces straightened, would turn into another legendary design. That’s bad. So then we immediately looked into engineering solutions. Different CNC routes, different contrast finishing, rounding/beveling of different corners…
This P11 marked our attempt to have a smooth curved radius connecting the two larger flat surfaces of the case. With this prototype, we learned that even such curved surface sanding is a huge technical challenge. As a result, we will not be proceeding in this direction.
With this decision, the P11 becomes a truly unique prototype :)