How Kollokium is making a point of difference in a crowded market
Russell SheldrakeThere are a lot of young, exciting watch brands out there – and we have talked about pretty much all of them at one point or another, whether we’re asking the people behind them about the challenges they face, highlighting the ones that should be on your radar, or getting a bunch of them together in a panel to talk about it. Indeed, there is so much one can talk about in this space, and it feels like more brands are popping up all the time, so it can be hard to truly stand out. But I believe that Kollokium has managed to do so in the last two years more than many of its competitors.
The founders
You have to start with these small brands with the people behind them. They are the driving force and make such a big impact when the team is small in size and the company is young in age, so to understand them is to understand the company so much better than just handling the product. Kollokium has an interesting trio at the helm: founded by Manuel Emch, Amr Sindi, and Barth Nussbaumer, they are not your typical watch brand founders. For starters, none of them are watchmakers, but all have a wealth of experience in the industry. I had the chance to speak with Sindi, who gave us some insight into how the trio work so well together on a conceptual level.
“I’d say it was a mutual passion for the things we all share (contemporary design, architecture, music, cinema, etc.), but perhaps more importantly, a shared frustration with the watch industry. We felt that there was a real lack of innovation in design, especially in watches within our price segment. Most of what we see is very conservative or just a rehash of something that was already done decades ago,” he says.
Emch has a bit of a knack for turning companies around, having worked for Jaquet Droz, Louis Erard, Raketa, and Romain Jerome. Emch is a systems and strategy-based man, but he understands product and consumer trends, being one of the driving forces behind the Louis Erard x Alain Silberstein collab, and when they joined forces with independent legend Vianney Halter. While collaborations might be seen as a slightly overused tactic at this point, the combination of brand equity and know-how, when done correctly, could help transform a company. It turns out it was Emch who brought this trio together, as Sindi tells us.
“Manuel Emch was the bridge between the three of us, as I’ve known him for nearly 20 years as a collector. I bought a Jaquet Droz in 2008 when I was relatively young, and shortly after met Manuel, who was the CEO at the time. He became my first true friend in the industry, and I’ve always admired his creativity and audacity, as well as his no-bullshit approach to business,” Sindi relates.
“On the other side of the equation is Barth Nussbaumer, who Manuel has known since his teen years and with whom they’ve worked together across many brands and projects over the years. Barth also, at some point, got a little fed up designing for others, and when COVID-19 [hit], we all felt that it was time to do something on our own. Both Barth and I approached Manuel to create our own brand or project, so Manuel had the bright idea to introduce us to each other and see if we could all do something together.”
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Sindi might be better known to you as The Horophile, an Instagram-famous collector of independent watches able to take extremely crisp, sharp photos of his impressive collection. His collection has always stood out for its eclectic colours and deep cuts in terms of the names he was putting on his wrist. He also started to venture into official collaborations with smaller brands, even joining forces with Emch for a limited run of Raketa pieces.
Finally, Nussbaumer is a prolific watch designer who has worked with some of the most impressive names across the industry, such as TAG Heuer, Petermann Bedat and Alto. It’s always important to have a creative mind like this on the team, and what I have always liked about Nussbaumer’s work is how eclectic it is. Some have levelled criticism at designers like Gérald Genta for all of their best-known works looking rather similar, but Nussbaumer knows how to work within a brief and bring his style of creativity to the table without dominating it.
The brand (sort of)
I’ve been making a grave, but purposeful, error so far throughout this article by labelling Kollokium a brand, which by their own admission, they are not, but rather a projects-based platform. By freeing themselves of this moniker, it conceptually allows the Kollokium collective to do more and work with a broader scope. By avoiding that traditional label, it also means they subvert standard expectations as well. There is no need for them to pump out a new watch, or dial colour, or case shape every year. In fact, the three founders started the platform in 2020, and it took them three years for their first watch, the Projekt 01, to materialise.
When I asked Sindi about the biggest challenges the team have had to overcome in launching the brand, he mentioned this long time it takes to develop a new watch. “As a collector, I was always skeptical when brands say it takes 3-5 years or more to develop a product. Of course, in some cases it’s exaggerated, but in my experience with Kollokium it’s definitely true. We started the project in 2020, and didn’t have anything to show until the very end of 2023. It takes a lot of patience to do what we’re doing, especially when you consider that a lot of the elements in our watches have never been done before or at least not in this way, so the learning curve can be a bit daunting, and getting the overall quality and execution to the level we’d like is always a challenge. And with every new Projekt we do, we end up creating new problems to which we need to find solutions.”
By calling themselves a projects-based platform, it also means that Kollokium could take pretty much any direction they choose in the future with its products. Whether they look to collaborate with a brand, a publication, a famous person, or a cultural institution, they do so with a blank canvas and they do not burden themselves with having to adhere to brand guidelines or a historical back catalogue. This is the type of creative freedom many brand or business owners dream of.
The watches
This is really what you came here for, and I’m sure you recognise the rather eye-catching Projekt-01 from your Instagram feeds. Its design, led by Nussbaumer, was incredibly disruptive when it first launched in 2023. The most distinctive feature of the watch is, by fa,r the cylindrical pins filled with Super-LumiNova that cover the dial. The first iteration produced, the Projekt 01 F&F&F, had 468 of these pegs made in six different sizes and arranged into this organic, topographical-like dial that has the hour markers jumping out of the dial towards you and the big, boxed crystal. This 3D approach to dial design is something I hadn’t really seen before, and like many other,s was caught off guard when it was first released. Giving off a strong orange glow, I think this is one of those watches that truly looks better in the dark when all of that lume comes to life.
When I asked Sindi about what inspired the team for this design, it suddenly made sense as to why I hadn’t seen anything like this before in the watch world: “If you look at our moodboards from when we started, there’s actually very little inspiration drawn from watchmaking. You’ll find elements of industrial design, brutalist architecture, pop-art as well as retro-futurism and even sci-fi cinema (think Blade Runner). We really wanted to create something that doesn’t look like any other watch past or present, yet is still very much wearable and low-key, at least from a distance.”
We now have five versions of this format, with differing lume colours and applications, with the latest sixth iteration adjusting the original design slightly by increasing the number of pins and changing the technology that went into creating them. The Projekt 01 Variant “F” utilised something called Lichtblock technology that infuses Super-LumiNova with a ceramic resin to form these solid, luminescent pillars, which use the equivalent of 500 dials’ worth of luminescent material, according to Kollokium.
Throughout all six of the platform’s creations so far they have stayed true to the ‘neubrutalist‘ case design. The case is die-cast with a rough finish, giving it an incredibly industrial feel. To me, this is a great move as it aims to take attention away from itself, and direct you back towards to the other-worldly dial. This consistency means the dimensions have stayed the same, measuring 40mm and 11.95mm, with a lot of that thickness coming from that tall box crystal, which allows you to get a great view of those pins from every angle.
This technique for producing the case was something Sindi was keen to point to as well. “None of us are watchmakers and we don’t pretend to be, so for us, Kollokium is really all about design and execution. Like the die-cast steel case, for example. It’s something very anti-watchmaking in a sense, because it’s a process that’s prone to imprecision and larger tolerances than one would normally allow. Or the dial with nearly 500 hand-painted and hand-applied elements. It’s unprecedented stuff, without looking like a UFO or being outlandish just to stand out.”
While the finish of the stainless steel case is industrial, there are still design elements built into it that show it was not forgotten about or an afterthought. The lugs are sculpted and seem to cut away from the case flank, matching the triangular crown that has been designed to match the project-based platform’s logo. That crown is really the only piece of branding that exists on the watch besides the seconds hand counterweight: a very minimalist and anti-brand approach to branding.
Inside is where it might get less interesting for some, but I think the choices here reflect those made on the case, as they show where the effort and concept of the watch truly lies. Instead of developing their own calibre to try and standout, they instead went for the more than reputable La Joux-Perret G101. This is an excellent movement: its sturdy construction and wide availability have made it a bit of a darling for indie brands that want to go outside of Sellita and Miyota. It’s automatic but small enough to fit in most case designs: it only measures 4.45mm thick, keeping this chunky design as thin as it can be without losing the functionality of an automatic movement.
Closing thoughts
Overall, this project, helmed by three friends, feels like an incredibly organic way to go about making a watch. There is no pretence that they are trying to be something they are not. They have openly admitted to not being watchmakers, but rather they have doubled down on what they know and what they are all good at, and they have delivered on this. There are already design-led firms in our industry, and they are always quick to generate a cult following, and here again we see that originality in design and attention to the right details can lead to a stellar product. While they only make very limited numbers of these watches, I like them being hard to come by; it makes that chance encounter all the more special.
When asked about what kind of reception they’ve had since launching, Sindi had this to say: “Honestly quite surprising, dare I say surreal. When we first launched, we weren’t even sure we would be able to sell the initial Friends & Family series of 99 pieces. We figured worst case, we would each have a few watches to give away as gifts for Christmas that year, and it would end as a short-lived side project. Then we saw the kind of people who fell head-over-heels for it. A lot of them were either known and respected industry personalities or seasoned collectors, and somehow the watch spoke to them because it was so different and refreshing. We’ve never been compared to anyone else. We expected it to be much more polarising, to the point that we were actually worried that it didn’t get on a lot of people’s bad side.”
I am very much here for this brand and what they have been able to produce in the last 18 months, and cannot wait to see what they bring out next. Let’s hope all of this attention and high expectations don’t get the better of them.