In the spring of this year, French watchmaker Awake revealed a 50-piece limited edition watch named Dare & Dream with a dial designed by Parisian illustrator Nicolas Barrome Forgues.
It was the second time Awake had worked with Mr Barrmome Forgues, who is famous for using animated monsters, robots, hairy animals, giant octopuses, strange fish and extra-terrestrials in his work in a mix of characters with icons and symbols to portray more subversive messages.
The watch immediately sold out, building on previous Awake watches where demand far exceeded supply including for its Meteorite dial Time Traveller, Mission To Earth and Summetria.
That is the way Awake wants its watches to be received. Each launch should be a special event that excites existing clients and draws more into its creative world.
Collaborations are an important part of that strategy, because they have crossover appeal. Dare & Dream, for example, helped Awake watches to get notice by fans of Nioclas Barrome Forgues art around the world.
“Nicolas’ artistic approach is based on uncontrollable and mischievous aliens, which he imagines and stages according to his inspirations. His art excludes itself from our societies, cultures and codes, freeing itself from space and time, making it totally universal. That’s why this limited series has found fans all over the world, from the Americas to Asia and the Middle East,” explains Lilian Thibault, Awake’s founder and CEO.
Remarkably, Awake’s success has been built in only five years, and confidence is growing that it can take even more risks with design and advanced watchmaking. “2024 is a very important year for Awake. It marks a major evolution for the brand, which must more than ever embody our creativity, our high standards and our passion for fine watchmaking,” Mr Thibault says.
“A new collection, revised from A to Z, will materialise by the end of this year that demonstrates a complete renewal,” he teases.
The new collection will be launched worldwide at WatchPro Salon in London on November 1 to 2.
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Dare & Dream is a bridge from its first five years into that future.
As Mr Thibault describes, the business needed a watch that would broaden Awake’s appeal, and set it on a path to an even more daring future.
“This was the brief we put to Nicolas, a friend of the brand with whom we had already collaborated on a first project in 2020. The result is Dare & Dream, a very limited series whose artist’s style traces the brand’s past, but also its future through the innovative and creative use of luminescence,” he explains.
Dare & Dream is unlikely to be the last watch that Awake makes with Mr Barrome Forgues, although the brand is not making any firm commitment to a date or concept for any future collaboration, particularly since the mission is always to shock and surprise.
The business also wants to broaden its horizons by working with other artists who share its vision. “There are many artists we’d be delighted to work with but, more than a name, it’s the alchemy between style, philosophical and creative thinking, and the personal feeling with the artist that will determine who we work with on future collaborations,” Mr Thibault describes.
He is being coy, because Awake is already in development with another artist, but is refusing to name its collaborator at this stage.
These partnerships are all the rage right now. At Geneva Watch Days in August, where Awake was exhibiting, we saw the launch of the Passi0n Fruit watches by H. Moser and Studio Underd0g, which gave the British microbrand the sort of publicity with watch aficionados that money cannot buy.
Might Awake go the same way and work with a fellow watchmaker?
Not necessarily, Mr Thibault replies. “We regularly think about it but, just like with artists, the point is not to surf on a name or a wave of hype. A collaboration must make sense, and it’s not easy to get it right by mixing the DNA of two brands from the same industry. We don’t go looking for this kind of collaboration; we think it will come about on its own when the time is right,” he adds.
Select customers and journalists were given a glimpse of what Awake has planned as it moves into 2025, but Mr Thibault swore them all to secrecy on its design. What he will share, ahead of an expected unveiling at WatchPro Salon on November 1 and 2, is that it will demonstrate a higher level of watchmaking while retaining Awake’s artistic roots and ambition to keep surprising.
“What I can say is that, for this new collection, our ambition was to make our own watchmaking revolution: a project between art and craftsmanship based on an ancestral technique never before used in watchmaking with incomparable beauty and finesse of colour and enhanced by a totally innovative luminous signature,” he hints.
Upping the horological ante, the next collection will be powered by a Swiss-made movement from La Joux-Perret and, unlike previous limited edition launches, is likely to be delivered as a core collection that can evolve over time.
“The limited edition strategy — and the inevitable selling out that follows — is no longer our priority. It generates a feeling of FOMO and frustration, marketing levers with which I’m not really comfortable,” Mr Sacre admits.
“We exist to please all those who love what we do, and that’s the most beautiful story we can create,” he continues. “In the future, our collections will be limited only by our production capacity, which is now artisanal, but not by quantities. Any customer who wants a watch will get it, even if they have to wait a little.”
Awake’s watches have typically sold for around €1,000, even models with meteorite dials were priced at under €1,400. But those were using Japanese movements. Will the switch to Swiss movements change that?
“Our prices could be higher but, since our creation, we have always aimed to optimize the value/pleasure ratio of our watches, and this will be even more evident in our next collections,” Mr Thibault says.
Improvements won’t just be under the bonnet with La Joux Perret movements, there will also innovations such as NFT transmitters embedded in the crystals of watches that store technical or owners’ information and more work on finishing. For example, Awake is moving from machine-made dials to metier d’art by hand for future editions.
Shorthand for this evolution might be that Awake is shifting from a microbrand to become an independent (a highly charged semantic debate in the watch world). Mr Thibault is relaxed about how the brand is defined, preferring to focus on how it is perceived by customers.
“A certain number of young independent brands bring creativity and craziness that cannot be found, or is no longer found, in the big groups. Awake belongs to this category, and it’s a great pleasure to move forward alongside other young independents who, each in their own way, are winning over more and more enthusiasts, beginners and advanced alike,” he explains.
“I want Awake to be recognized worldwide for being more creative, more innovative and more inspiring than any other watch brand. That’s my goal and why I get up early every morning,” he concludes.