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Everybody that knows me will tell you: I haven’t got the faintest idea of time. I’m pretty much always late, although, since I turned 25, there was some improvement. Apparently, you really do grow up a bit with time (pun fully intended).
Timing is everything
However, I´m a big fan of watches. Mine stopped working about a year and a half ago and I haven´t gotten around to getting it fixed, but I still wear it religiously – simply because I feel naked without. It’s a pretty basic, round clock with three hands, even one for the seconds you’re wasting watching cat videos on the internet. But it doesn’t really show you how much time there´s left in a day.
Enter Corvin and Chris, the men behind slow watches. These long-time friends were best man at each others wedding, had successful jobs after studying business together, but when they were recapping their lives they felt like being stuck in a hamster wheel: “We weren’t doing what we wanted to do. Then we had the overall realisation that we wanted our own company.” This was the start of slow.
“There’s no better product to represent the concept of time than a watch. But none of the brands are based on a story.” Their watch only has one arm, and shows twenty-four hours on the clock. They made a distinction between quarters, not minutes or seconds. “It shows the time naturally,” the men say.
Being an extremely chaotic and neurotic person (not the best combo, I can assure you) I’m often stressed. Just showing the hours left until you finish your day offers me a bit of peace and quiet. “It doesn’t divide the day in two,” Chris mentions. And he’s right, by showing twenty-four hours you get a more personal focus: “It might not be the best watch for cooking an egg, but it’s a reminder that helps you ‘refocus’. The other hands on a watch are not important; you don’t even read them. What’s important is not writing that last e-mail at ten PM, it’s being with your friends,” Corvin adds.
Up close and personal
It’s a message a lot of people relate to, from suppliers to customers. “Being a new, small company, we have the luxury of having a lot of personal contact with our customers,” Corvin says. He tells me people have been sending in their stories, relating to the product. “There was a couple that e-mailed us, saying the man never really wore watches because his wife didn’t like them, but she liked ours so she told her husband he could buy it. It turned out she was sick later on, but when she got better they bought the watch. For them it’s a reminder that they fought that disease and won.” Another man pays 50 euros every month because he was married four times and has to pay so much alimony to his ex-wives that he can’t buy the watch in one go. When telling the stories the men light up, they really have a passion for what they do.
The clocks are Swiss made and available with a leather or steel band. The colours vary and you can mix and match, since they included a tool that lets you change the straps yourself. There´s no logo on the clock, “It’s not like the brand has to tell you ‘I’m this, so I’m good’, it’s more that the product is good.”
By doing what they love and following their instinct, these men have succeeded in creating a product that does not only tell you time, but what’s important in life.
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