Danish watchmaker Arcanaut will present its 2023 novelties for the first time in public at November’s WatchPro Salon in London.
The indie is known in its native Copenhagen as a sort of skunk house for innovative design and engineering for its watches, particularly for dials, which combine Nordic aesthetics with innovative and daring materials.
It brings together the talents of founder and chief designer Anders Brandt, co-owner and head of materials research James Thompson (also known as @blackbadger on Instagram), and Rob Nudds, head of brand development.
The Arc II D’Arc Matter, made in Denmark and introduced in 2021 and currently sold out, is a perfect example.
Arcanaut developed the material for the dial, which it calls D’Arc Matter, by feeding Swedish slate stone through an industrial coffee grinder and then casting it under high pressure in a vacuum chamber.
The result is a stone surface for the Arc II dial with a dark matte finish that limits reflection.
At WatchPro Salon, the company will present its first timepiece with a dial made from fordite, a material that brings a second life to paint that has built up over time on car factory floors and equipment.
A waste material that was once chipped off and discarded, fordite has caught the eye of designers because of its multiple random layers of colours from the paint.
Anders Brandt is obsessed with the stuff, and Arcanaut has acquired samples of fordite that built up in Detroit’s Ford motoring factories in the 1970s through to the 1990s.
It has been sliced into vertical or horizonal cross sections that show the decades of colour on unique, one-of-one dials for what will be known as Arcanaut Arc II Fordite watches.
The 41mm steel watches, using Swiss Soprod A10 movements, will retail for $3,950+VAT.
Plans for additional launches later this year are still under wraps.
The company says there will be three new product drops.
The first, a follow-up to the brand’s popular D’Arc Matter series, will arrive in August, with a further update to the Composites collection following in late September.
Finally, and just before WatchPro Salon in November, it will unveil its Experimental Collection for 2023, which pushes the team to its aesthetic and horological limits, they promise.