In a little over a year, Kollokium has sold out two limited-edition versions of its first watch and had online orders for a third iteration, opened in early October, sell out in 73 seconds. It also is a finalist for a prestigious industry award. Yet the company has no headquarters, has not spent anything on advertising and its founders say it is not really a brand at all.
So what is the story with the watch world’s latest breakout hit?
“We’re just friends having fun, doing something that we would like for ourselves,” said Manuel Emch, one of Kollokium’s three co-founders. And as for the idea of it not being a brand, he explained that the effort actually “is a kind of gathering of specialists around the project, which comes from the Latin word colloquium.”
Kollokium was the brainchild of Mr. Emch, an industry veteran best known as the chief executive of the Swiss brand Louis Erard; Amr Sindi, an influencer and blogger; and the watch and jewelry designer Barth Nussbaumer. They came together during the pandemic, bonding over a desire to create something free from preconceptions.
“We first spent about six months talking about what we liked outside of watches,” Mr. Emch said. Among the topics: Brutalist architecture, the 1970s German electronic band Kraftwerk and the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick.
The three partners’ first creation was Projekt 01, later labeled Variant A. “We all wore the watch to Geneva Watch Days in 2023,” Mr. Emch said, “and we sold our first 99 pieces off the wrist.”
Rather than traditional hour markers, the dial of the 40-millimeter stainless steel timepiece had 468 vertical pins of varying heights and thickness, each tipped with a hand-applied dot of Super-LumiNova pigment for nighttime luminosity. From the wearer’s point of view, the effect was akin to a pixelated image, with clusters of taller, thicker pins emphasizing the 12 locations where the hour markers traditionally are placed.
The dial was encased in a one-piece sapphire crystal dome, which allowed a side view of the pins. And the watch was powered with an automatic mechanical movement from La Joux-Perret, a Swiss movement specialist owned by the Japanese company Citizen.
Creating something that deviates from industry-standard parts and processes presented its challenges. “We knocked on a few doors,” Mr. Emch said, describing the search for manufacturing partners, “and everybody said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. It will not work. It’s too complicated, too expensive.’”
In the end, he continued, “we took an industrial process and made it super artisanal. And these 468 pins are all set by hand, one by one, so you can imagine that it takes a lot of dedication and precision to be sure that everything is right.” (He declined to identify the brand’s production partners.)
The Projekt 01 Variant A sold for 2,333.33 Swiss francs ($2,755), an unusual sum that Mr. Emch said was chosen in an effort to intrigue buyers.
But it was the originality of the design that has drawn praise from buyers and experts alike.
“Normally, brands bring out something that’s built on the foundations others laid. This has none of that,” said Faheem Ahmed, a watch collector who bought one of the initial watches. “I’m still waiting for someone — any of the experts on Instagram, anyone at all — to pop up and tell me it’s like something they’ve seen elsewhere. But no one has. That’s amazing, especially today.”
Yasmine AlShathry is the founder of Clé, a watch retailer in Saudi Arabia specializing in smaller brands that was among the handful of retailers chosen to sell Kollokium’s new watch. “Kollokium offers a very interesting aesthetic,” she said. “It’s very easy to do something new with a lot of money and make something that’s very expensive. It’s very hard to offer something innovative at an entry-level price.”
The initial iteration of Projeckt 01 is a finalist for the Challenge prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the industry awards event held each year in November. The category rewards the most impressive watch with a retail price of less than 3,000 Swiss francs.
“There are serious watches like a Greubel Forsey or a Jacob & Co. where everything is 3-D, but this is two grand,” Mr. Ahmed said, referring to Projeckt 01’s price. “Only when you get it and put it on do you realize the value of that box crystal, the pins and the way they show the hour markers. The thoughtfulness in the execution is amazing.”
Mr. Emch admitted that the initial Projekt 01 price didn’t make a lot of financial sense. Even though it was increased to 2,666.66 Swiss francs when Variant B was introduced in May — and to 2,999.99 Swiss francs for its latest model, Variant D — the founders still aren’t prioritizing revenue.
“This is maybe where we were the fools at the beginning, because it wasn’t very profitable,” he said. “But the idea was to do something for us and our friends; we didn’t start with the idea of producing a commercial product.”
Mr. Emch said that the award nomination has catapulted Kollokium to new levels of public awareness, noting that, by late September, more than 7,000 people had expressed an interest in buying Variant D, a 299-piece collection that was introduced Oct. 1. Orders were taken online for the majority of the production run, with eight retailers around the world receiving 10 watches each.
Why had Kollokium skipped Variant C? Mr. Emch would say only that watches are named in the order they are conceived, but production doesn’t always follow that sequence.
There are plans for several more releases over the next two years, he added, including a Projekt 02, which he said will build on the three-dimensional concepts of the first timepiece.
“If you think of Project 01 as a kind of bird’s view on L.A. city lights,” he said, “then I would say 02 is more like hovering in the Grand Canyon.”
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