Watch Angels is a community-led cooperative that aims to support fledgling independent watchmakers with crowdfunding, pre-orders and retail sales.
Effectively, it looks to grease the wheels for horological entrepreneurs coming to market through the support of a watch collecting club whose members then benefit with early bird pricing and access to limited editions.
Frederique Constant is lending its backing to the Angels by co-creating a special edition of its Worldtimer Manufacture.
The watch uses the same in-house FC-718 world time movement as the core collection, but Watch Angel and FC decided to trim the size of its slimline case from 42mm to a more fashionable 40mm.
Worldtimers typically come in larger sizes because of the space required to display 24 world cities.
Frederique Constant’s solution overcomes this challenge with bright white capitalized lettering for the cities against a dark blue rings at the perimeter of a segmented sunray dial.
There is a 24-hour ring between the 12-hour markers and the cities that is divided into two half hemispheres: a polished sun for daytime and a polished-sandblasted crescent moon for night-time.
Watch Angels provides a sort of focus group that feeds into design, often in radical ways.
“Since our founding, we innovate by collaborating with best-in-class partners. They are able to take us out of our comfort zone which is necessary for experimentation and innovation. The collaboration with Watch Angels situates itself within this framework, and additionally brings us the feedback of a collector community further reinforcing our way of innovating which includes closely listening to the market,” explains Niels Eggerding, CEO of Frederique Constant.
The steel watch, a limited edition of 718 numbered pieces, has an exhibition case back exposing the finely-finished FC-718 automatic movement.
Watch Angels has an exclusive window, starting today, for sales of the CHF 4,490 watch at watchangels.ch.
