Three team members, two continents and one passion: watches. This is Quiet Club, the new house on the watchmaking block, which recently released its first timepiece, called Fading Hours.
“The movement has been fully designed and made from scratch by our head watchmaker, Norifumi Seki,” said Hokuto Ueda, the brand’s chief executive.
Mr. Seki, 26, is something of a boldface name in Asian watchmaking since his pocket watch, with a spherical moon phase plated in yellow gold and blued titanium, won the 2020 edition of the F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition. The Tokyo resident was the first watchmaker from Asia to take the prestigious prize, established in 2015.
Mr. Seki’s partners in the business are Mr. Ueda, 40, who lives in Seattle and previously worked in automotive engineering, and Johnny Ting, 41, of San Francisco, whose background is in product and user experience design. Mr. Ueda and Mr. Ting initially met in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they worked for five years at Drivemode, an auto technology startup acquired by Honda in 2019.
So why did they go from cars to watches?
Mr. Ueda had challenged Mr. Ting, a longtime watch enthusiast, to use his background in user experience to design a timepiece. (They said the watch’s name was inspired by the fader control on Mr. Ueda’s audio mixer — music production is his hobby — as the watch was designed, in essence, to fade from notice when the wearer was concentrating on something else, and then fade back in when needed.)
After reading about Mr. Seki’s prize, they thought “it would be great if someone like this could be part of our project,” Mr. Ueda said, “so we could do something from the ground up.”
Mr. Seki said he agreed to meet, but with the intention of politely declining any offer. He had been working as a watch repair specialist at Eguchi, a vintage clothing and watch shop in Tokyo. “I had other people contact me about making specific watches for them or joining different projects,” he said, “but I wasn’t mentally ready to start creating a new watch.”
They talked online several times in 2021 and 2022, while Japan’s pandemic policies barred international travel. In October 2022, once the restrictions were lifted, they met at a restaurant in Tokyo — and something in Mr. Seki had shifted. “He realized that I was serious about working together, so that started to change his mind,” Mr. Ueda said. “I guess my persistence started to change that a little bit.”
Quiet Club — a name that Mr. Ueda and Mr. Ting came up with, based on their opinion that all three men have quiet personalities — was officially established as a business that fall in both the United States and Japan. And in March 2023, the men leased about 88 square meters (947 square feet) near Asakusa, a district in the east side of Tokyo known for its Senso-ji Buddhist temple.
“We just wanted a really wonderful space for him,” Mr. Ting said, “and to create an environment that he would be really happy to be in. That was, at least for me, the most important thing.”
On a particularly hot day in July, I visited the headquarters, which had a stylish lounge area with leather chairs and a sofa for guests and employees in front, and the office and workshop at the rear.
I remembered that Mr. Seki was reserved and quiet when I interviewed him in early 2021. But now he seemed comfortable in his surroundings, showing me around the workshop and explaining the operations of the various machines, such as the CNC (computer numerical control) unit used to cut metal (and which looked like a vending machine).
He even demonstrated how he used a bucket of crushed garnet and water to sandblast the dial of the Fading Hours watch, giving it a matte texture. He said he had learned the technique from Masahiro Kikuno — an independent watchmaker who also teaches at the Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo — before completing the school’s four-year watchmaking program.
“I have a lot of freedom,” Mr. Seki said, “and it’s a lot of fun because I’m solving problems, but in my own way and with a lot of creativity.”
On one of the work tables, I caught a glimpse of the Fading Hours prototype, a 40-millimeter timepiece in Grade 5 titanium, a durable but lightweight alloy that doesn’t feel cold against the wearer’s skin.
It had a dial made of German silver, devoid of any label, and a broad bezel of pure silver that Mr. Seki whitened, using a flame (and, he said, occasionally burning his fingers). The hour and minute markers were engraved on the dial, then the impressions were filled with enamel and fired in the workshop’s furnace.
On the case back, the intricate movement was visible through the crystal. “We wanted the external part of it, which is the dial, to be pretty quiet and simple and, but the back side of it, which is your internal world, to be very passionate and strong,” Mr. Ueda said. “So that’s why the back is a party. We told Seki-san, ‘You can just go nuts, just pour your passion into it.’ And this is what he came up with.”
The concept for the watch’s mellow alarm came from Mr. Ting. “I thought about minute repeaters,” he said, referring to timepieces that chime the time on demand. “They always have that hammer and gong. It sounds really great. I thought, ‘What if I had an alarm that sounded better?’ That’s where the idea came from.”
The alarm is set with two hidden hands that are revealed by rotating the bezel. Once the time is selected, the gong sounds — the result of a small metal hammer hitting the back of the silver dial. And, of course, it sounds again at the selected time.
“We thought the sound of a gong is something that helps you get into that mind set” of relaxation, Mr. Ueda said, “and then also brings you out gently, instead of with a jarring sound.”
The idea that young wearers need a watch alarm really sets Quiet Club apart, Yuu Sekiguchi, editor in chief of Hodinkee Japan, wrote in an email: “Just as the minute repeater was created in the past to tell time in the dark, they have the idea of using an alarm to secure time for focusing on tasks. They exhibit originality not bound by the past, making the dial the gong for the alarm mechanism.”
The Fading Hours watch, at $85,000, is available for pre-order on the company’s website. Mr. Seki, who has completed one prototype, has been working on another, with the goal of making 10 watches in 2025, which was scheduled as the first production year. (The strap, however, has not been chosen yet: The men said they are bouncing between leather or nubuck, and between black or gray. )
For Mr. Seki, the new watch was a continuation of his winning pocket watch. “There’s a lot of things that I wish I could have done better in the pocket watch that I’m building into this watch,” he said. “I wanted to work on something where it’s obvious once you think or hear about it, but that no one had actually done yet.”
Day to day, Mr. Seki works alone (he has set up a cot in the office as he tends to work long after the last train has departed), although a young student helps out twice a week. And while Mr. Ting and Mr. Ueda come to Tokyo only every two months, the men meet online weekly.
Mr. Seki said he didn’t feel lonely in the workshop, but the team members were separated by an ocean — so how did it work?
“It somehow just does. I don’t know why,” Mr. Ting said. “And I think that the fact that our situation is different is making it very fun for us. It just works.”
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