Before Mark Cho, a co-founder of the men’s wear retailer the Armoury, agreed to speak to a reporter about a new watch that he recently created with the independent watchmakers Naoya Hida in Tokyo and Joshua Nathan Shapiro in Torrance, Calif., Mr. Cho, a Manhattan resident, asked himself a question: “Were we meant to tell the world about this or not?”
His ambivalence — expressed on a three-way video interview with Mr. Hida and Mr. Shapiro in late September — made sense. Even though the hand-wound mechanical watch is not expected to be finished until early next year, all 15 pieces in the 37-millimeter limited edition — 12 watches in steel, called the Type 1D-4 East-West ($28,500), and three in gold, called the 1D-5 East-West ($49,500) — already are sold.
Collaborations, once rare in the secretive high-end watch trade, are so common that partnerships between brands and designers can seem a little clichéd. Still, a three-way two-continent alliance stands out — especially one involving two of the watch world’s most sought-after independents and a tastemaker who in 2022 realized $1.63 million when Phillips auctioned his watch collection in a single-owner sale.
The new timepiece, based on the Type 1B model that Naoya Hida & Company introduced in 2019, is a dress watch that pays homage to classics like the Patek Philippe Ref. 96. It features a design by Mr. Cho and his design partner, Elliot Hammer, and a guilloché dial by Mr. Shapiro, whose company, J.N. Shapiro in Torrance, Calif., specializes in the centuries-old decorative engraving technique.
“We are very lucky because we have Mark as a conductor,” Mr. Hida said.
The idea for the collaboration was Mr. Cho’s. He had discovered Mr. Hida’s brand in 2019, when he bought one of the seven Type 1B watches produced that year. Another was sold to one of Mr. Cho’s clients in Hong Kong. (The Armoury has locations in New York and Hong Kong.)
“Before he approached me by email,” Mr. Hida said, “I already knew about him because he is my iconic person in men’s sophisticated lifestyle.”
The two men decided to work together and, in 2022, introduced the NH Type 2C-1 Lettercutter, a mash-up of two previous Naoya Hida models with a typeface, called Lettercutter, developed by the Armoury. By then, they already were in discussions with Mr. Shapiro.
“I bought one of Josh’s watches,” Mr. Cho said, puffing on a cigar, “and I remember when I was at his workshop, he mentioned to me, ‘I do dials for other people from time to time.’”
In early 2020 Mr. Cho and Mr. Hammer began mocking up images of their design in Photoshop. The biggest challenge, Mr. Cho said, was trying to add “something extra through the lens of the Armoury” to Mr. Hida’s delicately balanced design.
“It’s sort of like playing with a Jenga tower that’s on its last bricks,” Mr. Cho said. “You know if you touch it in the wrong way, the whole thing will actually fall apart. So through a lot of trial and error, we finally got to a point where we’re like, ‘OK, I think this is something that we could show Hida-san.”
Soon after, they asked Mr. Shapiro to create two guilloché subdials for the timepiece, one for the center and another for the small seconds at 9 o’clock.
On the trio’s first joint call in July 2020, Mr. Shapiro said, he sensed a kindred spirit in his Japanese counterpart. “I was really impressed with Hida-san because he referenced a very obscure book on Lépine” — the 18th century French watchmaker Jean-Antoine Lépine — “that I didn’t think anyone else in the world had heard of,” Mr. Shapiro said.
Mr. Hida typically uses German silver for his dials, but Mr. Shapiro suggested they work with TruSilver, a tarnish resistant alloy of sterling silver sold by the American metal refiner Hoover & Strong.
“On top of that, we heat the dial with an open flame and then put it into acid and then go back and forth between the flame and the acid,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It gets this beautiful matte white color, but the process is perilous. If we apply too much heat, the dial will warp and then it won’t fit.”
The watchmakers divided their tasks, which meant that when Mr. Shapiro finished creating his guilloché dial patterns, he had to ship them to Mr. Hida in Tokyo. “There were definitely some challenges,” Mr. Shapiro said. “I had never shipped whitened dials before, and the packaging damaged the whitening on the dials. It was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t see that one coming.’”
He even prepared special tools for Mr. Hida, just in case the chapter rings — the thin rings inside the watch dial — needed repairs after shipment.
For these reasons and more, the men decided to put strict limits on production. (Mr. Hida said his brand was expected to make 100 watches this year, while Mr. Shapiro said he would max out at fewer than 40.)
As they got closer to completing the pieces, Mr. Cho explained, he realized that not promoting the watch wouldn’t be fair to Mr. Hida or Mr. Shapiro.
“Why not make a little bit of noise and let the world know this thing exists?” he said. “Just because you can’t buy it doesn’t mean you can’t at least appreciate it a little bit.”
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