Back in 2022, I was working on a project that never came to fruition - it was a lighthouse-inspired watch that I just couldn't visualise. At this point, Marloe was still my designing committee; well, at least, for this particular project, ideas were being pitched at me - for example, to replicate the lantern of a lighthouse as the crown for the watch. I tried it, but it was gimmicky, and not at all how I wanted the watch to be. So I spoke with Oliver who delivered a line that really resonated with me: "Stop trying to design watches through the eyes of others, design a watch that you would wear."

A blank slate. A fresh page. The world and all its possibilities. To wake up and ask myself "What will I create today?" And make it a reality. We dream, we wake, we make. What an incredible privilege to have. 48 hours later, the concept for the Daytimer was born. 

The Daytimer, or ‘Gordon’s Watch’ as it was called in our production documentation, began with thoughts about what I craved in a watch that I would wear every day. A selfish approach undoubtedly, but one that focused my mind on what it was that made me fall in love with wristwatches in the first place. What is it that makes a watch engaging? What makes a watch wearable? Comfortable? Discreet? Clean? Busy? All questions that were fed into the dreamworld for answers, and the response was immediate.

10 years ago, I looked through a misted porthole at the watch designs that set my heart aflame, dreaming about the day that I could design my own. From the outset, the message that resonated with me was simplicity and clarity.

Since then, over the many projects we’ve undertaken, I’ve tried to follow the same ethos - let the details speak for themselves, and follow our hearts, rather than give in to the pressure of conforming. Sometimes it has succeeded. Other times not. This time the intolerance of imperfection has driven the Daytimer to a place we’ve not been before: catharsis.

Infinity at our disposal

Sometimes you crave the dreamworld but sleep eludes you. Other times the dreamworld appears through the mists of slumber to reveal, in glorious technicolour, the answers you seek. I think the dreamworld was waiting for me this time. The Daytimer design process, from first thought to resolved concept, took a single weekend. The instruments were tuned in earnest, but deep down the music was already playing.

A watch that hides as much as it shouts. A curving, reflective case design that wraps around your wrist, becoming part of you. An expansive edge-to-edge dial affording a clarity of vision that astonishes the eye. It’s a fascinating tension, created through knowledge gathered from nearly a decade of dreaming; the Daytimer wears small, but reads big. It’s discreet yet present, there when you need it and imperceptible when you don’t.

Form and Function

Which case style or features constitute a watch that you don’t just tolerate because you love the dial, but make you want to wear it every day? Things that make you reach past all the other options available to you in the morning, and choose this one because it makes you feel great? Going through my research processes over the years for each project, it always begins at the point where wristwatches transitioned from the pocket. Those beautiful, smooth, rounded pebbles housing manual winding movements were made that way for a reason. They felt pleasing in the hand.

The trench watches prevalent in wartime - pocket watches with soldered wire lugs - took that tactile form to the wrist. Over a century of watch design, cases have appeared in every fathomable form, but I keep gravitating to the beginning of it all. There are huge benefits to the trench style of case: having the lugs drop down dramatically means that we benefit from a reduced lug-to-lug dimension, making the watch sit perfectly in the middle of the wrist without overhang. It also affords greater choice in terms of suitable straps, from leather to Nato to rubber or flat-ended metal bracelets.

The pocket-watch style case also lends itself to edge-to-edge dial apertures, making the Daytimer’s 37.70mm dial diameter read a lot larger and closer to your touch than if it were tucked deep inside a bezel. The balance of wearability and discretion, but also a perceptively bigger dial, can thus be struck.

Micro Machine of Magnificence

Daring to dream that one day we could use a Swiss movement in one of our designs, 2017 saw that dream come true with our Haskell range. So proud were we that the words “Swiss Made” appeared on the dial, that the news of the supplier of those movements closing their doors to third parties came as a devastating blow, albeit temporarily.

Another group of dreamers had been working diligently away in their own workshops, crafting their own mechanical wonders, and it was with these beautiful micro machines that the Haskell lived on.

We’ve used several of Sellita’s movements in our watches since then and it was with no small excitement that, when dreaming about which engine I’d love to have in our Daytimer, the Sellita name was first to materialise. But not just any old movement.

The Sellita SW261-1 M is a more niche calibre than you might think, and it’s down to one very simple reason: pinion distance. You see, for the standard SW216-1 movement the pinion is quite close to the middle of the dial, making it comparatively hard to have a prominent, spacious subdial - it would intersect the hand stack rising from the centre, and small diameter subdials would be all that’s achievable.

Having a greater distance from the middle affords a bigger subdial diameter, giving us the space to place the date window at 6 o’clock, retaining the symmetry, creating beautiful balance and cleaning the entire dial of distracting oddities. A truly magnificent micro machine.

Peaceful Symmetry

A hopeless search begins with confusion and ends in dismay. We don’t dream to be frustrated. We dream to be inspired, surprised or delighted. A watch dial must light the way with glowing clarity. It’s the centrepiece, the big show.

We’ve long championed symmetry as a means of building balance and cohesion into our dials; asymmetrical disruptors, cluttered indecision or over-stimulated micro details all combine to make reading the time a chore. And that is abjectly not what a watch is for.

Convenient. That’s a good word to use. Compendious, a better one. Concise, even better. But the word we use to describe the Daytimer dial is not a c-word but a p-word: peaceful. The dial is arranged in such a way as to make looking down in search of the current time a peaceful process, made possible with symmetry of design and with integration of complications through eccentricity.

The minute track, anchored to the bold outline, flaring like the sun, and the hour blocks, straddling two textures, are held in perfect concentricity. The subdial, anchored to the lower hemisphere and a date window within, following suit. The north and south hemispheres are balanced with the larger ‘12’ numeral and the final use of our full logo on a watch dial. It’s a layered approach affording unparalleled speed of time referencing, while keeping simplicity at the heart. I dreamed of peaceful symmetry and found it here.

Keep the Heid. Long Time Deid.

We talk about our impact on the world as we follow our trajectories from entry to exit. What will be left behind? Did I make people happy? Was I happy? Did I succeed in my goals? What will I be remembered by?

Big, emotional stuff. From a design perspective, and from a business perspective too in a way, the hope is that the things we create while we’re alive and thriving will continue beyond our waking life and, if we’re lucky, will inspire many more generations to come. It’s rare for it to happen, given how many dreamers are working towards this very end, but it’s still a good place to start, and remain true to.

Watches are a wonderful medium for creating a legacy simply because they can and do last forever. Designing with this in mind, I try to stay away from trends or blips in the zeitgeist and design with placement in the unfathomably wide landscape of ‘good design’. Timeless is a word often used to describe a design or object that transcends movements or fashions, and exists in its own place of the ‘everything’.