Challenges

At the moment we are facing 2 main challenges: Firstly, the time setting. To be able to make a watch without buttons, I had initial ideas of a radio controlled watch. I thought that would be possible and not too expensive, because there are so many cheap radio controlled watches and alarm clocks out there.. and made the first concept without dealing with technical issues too much (i’m not a professional industrial designer!! 😉 . Well.. technically this would be possible, but there are other issues with radio controlled watches. The time signal provided from terrestrial antennas does not offer global network coverage, but mainly central europe, some parts of asia, like japan, and northern america. There are also other issues, but this alone is a killer argument against it. Receiving GPS time signal seems to be uncommon with wrist watches, and is also much more expensive. Concerning this problem, we are thinking of using a hidden crown on the back, which will hopefully be possible (dealing with that right now).

The second challenge is the strap. If the strap is made of soft rubber, it won’t be ensured that it will stick to the bendable metal part without slipping out. If the strap is made of hard plastic, it won’t be possible to adjust the size in any way, and producing many sizes is difficult with a limited quantity of watches. But we are doing all we can to avoid a common strap, because we think that this bracelet-style strap is one of the key features, making the watch unique. We’re racking our brains to find out how this could be achieved and really be done by the factory who is producing the watches. My latest idea would be a removable clock body (through the back of the hard plastic part). We would have a cuff with different colours and 2-3 different sizes, and a universal clock body with different colours. This way you could put a red clock body into a blue cuff for example. One question remains: is it economical to produce that many different plastic cuffs ??

By the way, I found this cuff on my girlfriend’s wrist. It fits perfectly, and i could very well imagine wearing such a watch..