Owners of Ikepod, the innovative Swiss watch brand making flying saucer-style watches since the 1990s, have bought Klokers, an equally avant-garde brand that went bust in 2019.
Ikepod was founded in 1994 by Marc Newson and entrepreneur Oliver Ike, who made the pod-shaped watches that would not have looked out of place in The Jetsons.
Journalists loved the eye-catching pieces, but the company struggled to hit its stride commercially and went bancrupt twice in 2006 and 2012.
It was bought back to life by new investors led by Christian-Louis Col in 2018, who used crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to raise money and sell the first new collections.
Now Mr Col has been inspired to bring another bankrupt brand back to life by acquiring the rights to Klokers, he told WatchPro in Geneva last week.
Klokers is another brand that benefited from early success on Kickstarter.
In 2015, a crowdfunding campaign for the Swiss-French company raised €606,000 for its Klok 1 travel time watch.
Three years later, the business was back on the platform looking for advanced orders and investment for its Klok-08, described as a 60s-inspired customisable watch. This time the founders raised over €463,000 ($515,900).
These remain two of the most successful crowdfunding projects of all time for a watch company, but that has not been enough to save the company, which stopped trading in the summer of 2019.
Klokers watches are every bit as distinct as Ikepods.
The KLOK-01 won a German Design Award in the Excellent Product Design/Luxury category in 2018.
It had a dial composed of three disks, one for hours, minutes and seconds, rotating counter-clockwise, the second feature the brand thinks made it stand out from others in the category.