The first 365(ish) days

September 26, 2019 13 Comments

It’s high time I put fingers to keyboard and got writing again. Believe it or not but its been almost 15 months since we launched our website and started showing off our first creation. We’ve gone from an idea and a design on a computer, successful crowdfunding, full production and finally delivery. Its been a packed few months and it's only the beginning.

The last 15 months has seen us building relationships with reviewers, customers and enthusiasts across the UK, US, Germany, Austria, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal and Brazil. To two guys from lowly inner-city Wolverhampton, it’s amazing knowing that people from all over the world have seen, liked and bought one (or occasionally both versions) of our watches. What’s even more amazing is getting early design feedback from Las Vegas to Japan, with pledges to order for our next one just based on the illustrations we’ve released.

Which brings me neatly to the next of our designs, we’re calling it Giri Ventiquattro and it’ll be our first fully automatic mechanical watch. Giri Ventiquattro is an important milestone for us. It’s our first mechanical watch obviously, but with JOTM under our belt and selling, we felt a little more confident and decided to have custom tooling and moulds for the hands, case and caseback made to bring this watch to life. Having the tooling and moulds does mean we’ll have them available for our use for other designs we create though, so we’re seeing it as investing for the future. I’ll talk more about the Giri Ventiquattro and its design in a follow-up blog.

The last 15 months has seen us dip our toe into the retailers’ market with wildly varied results, make new friends amongst fellow watch brand owners, introduce us to new people, new markets, potential investors and completely shred our original business plan. Not sure who said it, but its so true that plans rarely survive reality.

Of course, we knew we were going to learn as we went but seeing some of possibilities of what we could do has been an eye opener. Kind of a ‘why didn’t we think of that before’ moment. But hindsight and all that.

It’s been an amazing journey so far, a few bumps along the way for sure, but as Wilbur says in Meet the Robinsons, “Keep moving forward”. BTW we are working on developing a jump hour movement with the discs concept, which if all goes to plan will find its way into our third or forth design…and yes rough sketches for that are already on the drawing board.

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Also in In the beginning, the start of MAALS