About this project
CHF 139,695
106
Why it's worth owning this product?
In recent crowdfunding campaigns, we have been confronted with products defining themselves as luxury or affordable luxury. Besides wrongly interpreted, it seems the word luxury is being abused not only by some well-established luxury brands trying to justify bizarre pricing, but also by a questionable "affordable-luxury-movement" slowly eroding the true definition or value luxurious products used to represent. Nowadays for many this term stands for a status symbol or an isolated wealthy layer of our societies and all too often as a way to show off.
The fact that a luxurious product should deliver true value for the money paid seems to be a thing of the past for some of the companies out there.
This made us think and so we decided to turn away from luxury towards premium.
The German noun “Luxus” comes more close to the meaning of “luxurious”. Owning something luxurious is pretty close to our understanding of a product being premium.
And Premium in our eyes stands for true, hard work as well as love and passion being invested into the making of a product. A product which is not just an alteration of other companies technical expertise packed in some known design principles to pull off a quick campaign...
NO, we want a product in which we had to invest significant effort and which is worth to pay for. Something where you like the story and you feel it is worth owning for the long term.
Why we call this watch Multiply?
We all like choice and choice means variety and variety leads us to uniqueness which in turn leads us to a certain rarity. And this rarity of something you own paired with the true value and work being put into the product makes it premium. Got it?
Taking it to the NEXT LEVEL
But making just a hand full of products to create rarity comes with constraints of high prices and all too often less quality in precision. Nowadays this is called "Manufacture" making many people believe they buy a high performing product until one has to turn it in for a service. To get both, a certain rarity and quality in precision, we had to take SWISS watch making to the NEXT LEVEL and think about configuration… But not only changing a strap… No, we used the benefits of our own K1 movement design to allow you to customize also certain functions and dials as well as straps.
Setting your choice framework this time to 48 versions of the Multiply watch.
Why is this brand so different from many others?
Because we apply the complex idea of configuration, combine it with high-end movement technologies painstakingly developed by ourselves during the past 9 years and wrap all this into a timeless design not showing off and staying "subtle". If you need to show-off... this is perhaps not the product for you.
Yes it takes self-confidence to choose something truly unique and different from what luxury´s marketing professionals might want you to blindly believe. We believe we deliver true value and a story which is worth every cent and a product to last for centuries to come.
Born out of Kickstarter and proud of it?
Although having founded our company before Kickstarter even existed, we would say that our brand and the K1 movement saw the light of life ONLY because of this fascinating platform. Lack of access to financial resources drove us into Kickstarter 2 years ago in order to be heard and continue with K1. (Kickstarter-1 2015 and Kickstarter-2 2016)
And we were heard and our K1 movement found with the help of the second campaign´s backers the necessary strong industrial partner to continue its journey of becoming a true Swiss mechanical icon in the industrial movement space. And as we already have communicated this movement is open for every brand who is serious about offering a premium watch with a valuable core.
But in order to reinforce and finally prove that K1 is here to last we want to go through this amazing platform once again. We want to show that Horage is a brand being able to deliver what it promise. A first class premium product delivered in time at a dream price. Just because we want to face the real world of true consumers proving once more the maturity of our product, the K1 movement and our business.
Crowdfunding has become a primary source for new watch products
We would not wonder if established players sooner or later start to understand the benefits of asking a customer before producing things.
But we also think due to the flood of watch projects we need to raise the bar to the next level, helping backers to better understand what premium is and what to expect from a top-notch watch company.
Every product is defined through its story but also through its content! And in case you have been reading until here, let's have a closer look on the tech... the hardware which makes Multiply truly premium.
Overall design approach at Horage
We make round watches... but pretty much all of our products show a certain "subtle edginess". We consider this to be a modern-classic design approach, or in other words "timeless".
We are not vintage... we are timeless future !
Vintage is "hip" at the moment and sure it is fun to look into the past achievements of others. As we can see there a loads of companies doing the vintage thing. But since we don't want to be "hip" for just a moment and since we did not choose to snap up an ailing old brand which could lend us any meaningful story, we decided to come up with our own story and way of styling products. Perhaps in 50 years from now some people think about us as vintage ;-) who knows...
Experts in the craft however will agree... we are hard to compare to anybody else in this industry and when it comes to timelessness as well as design sophistication we do not need to hide from the "Haute Horlogerie" crowd...;-)
41x11.1mm of machine and architectural feel
When we were diving into making silicon components for our escapement unit, we saw ourselves in front of a beautiful sparkling microscope built on a 13 ton concrete basement at the Nanotechnology center in Duisburg.
These geometric cylindrical shapes blended with architectural supporting structures somehow inspired us for the design of the side flanks of this case.
The crown is crisp and its contours are well defined with the mosaics of our logo raised through the stamping process. It feels very mechanical.
The crystal is of course sapphire anti-reflective coated and slightly domed. Just slightly... because we wanted to keep this watch still flat and comfortable to wear.
Caseback... we decided to go for some circular "beam-like" structure to draw the eye towards Multiply´s heart, the K1 movement. It not only draws the eye, it makes you sweep your fingers over these usually hidden structures, as if you would be a teenager finding yourself in a heavy petting situation;-).
Since we are at the steel part of this watch, we just continue with the bracelet which has ... an incredibly solid look, yet light and smooth to wear. It is a masterpiece of a one link design. It tapers from the first link towards the buckle which means most of the links are different and more sophisticated to make. A good bracelet design has the right play not too feel wobbly, but enough play to not squeeze any hair.
The bracelet ends in a nicely finished top cap covering parts of the clasp which sadly due to budget reasons could not be our own functional U-buckle design. But you can be sure we choose one of the best open source clasp designs in the market, tested millions of times.
On the leather and cordura straps we are using our own design. It is super light builds thin and merges the function of the locking mechanism with the spring itself which is made of special spring steel.
And below is your choice of how you wanna strap this amazing case around your wrist...
Leather and cordura strap share some seriously sophisticated design and hard-to-make characteristics. A closed-edgy-case-lug-strap interface which transitions into a roundish-strongly-three-dimensionally shaped strap. Wow what a word combo... but as a non native I did not know how to express it in a better way;-)
We made the metal feel much lighter through an open first link design and the straps feel much more strong through the closed lug section and a strong piping surface. Voila design at its best!
And now lets move inside of the watch entering from the front door... the watch face.
Having designed and produced many thousands of different dials for OEM customers is giving us access to the top manufacturers in this field. The dial side is our true passion and this is where our watch industry´s career has started more than 20 years ago.
Executing a clean dial design in a perfect way, which does not make you feel tired after 10 years is equally challenging as making a crowded dial with a thousand different layers... perhaps the later one is sometimes more easy as minor flaws can easily be hidden.
We decided to go for four dials. Blue, Black, White (silver), Rhodium, executed in 3 fundamental different dial finish technologies.
Perfect blue spray paint and a perfect black rhodium sunray finish. Looks simple, but perfectly done is kind of the business card of a dial factory... and they are perfectly done.
For black and white we wanted to add some structure and we decided to go for a super fine relief silk printed pattern. Only very experienced people can do this in a factory because otherwise you have tons of loss and the structure does not grow while lifting the silk screen. Wish we could show you this...
All of the dials share something we are especially proud of... the indexes... which are heavily loaded with luminous and have prismatic diamond cut flanks. Just perfect.
And these diamond cut structures with three faces can be found in the hands again. Voila!
And guess what the Swiss supplier we asked for an offer refused to do it, because it is so hard to do... so we had to go to our Korean friends which are experts in diamond cut hand manufacturing. We wish we will be able to show you this once, but those people keep their secrets still very tight;-)
To round up this section the specs of the watch:
- Name: Multiply K1
- Versions: 48 (see configurator)
- Case: 41mm x 11.3mm / 316L stainless steel / 3 piece Sandwich construction
- Crystal: Saphire front and rear / anti-reflective
- Dial 1: Black Checker + silk relief print
- Dial 2: White Checker + silk relief print
- Dial 3: Just blue paint semi mate
- Dial 4: Rhodium sunray finish
- Index: prismatic diamond cut + A-grade super Luminova white
- Minute & hour hand: 3 face diamond cut with super Luminova
- Second hand: Horage signature with luminous hash / varnished
- Sub-hands: Small second & power reserve indicator diamond cut
- Bracelet: Stainless 316L tapered mono link design, satin finish
- Bracelet buckle: One sided folding buckle with satin finished cover, polished angles
- Strap Leather: calf leather black with piping
- Strap Cordura: dual color tear-resistant with piping
- Strap Buckle: Horage signature folding buckle, one piece spring
- Box: Leather case brown outside blue inside - can fit two watches and a strap tool
Standard Retail price levels of the 4 different versions:
- Two Hands / Small Second: 2100,- CHF / USD
- Three Hands / Power Reserve Indicator: 2500,- CHF / USD
- Three hands / Big Date: 2700,- CHF / USD
- Small Second / Power Reserve Indicator / Big Date: 3300,- CHF / USD
USD and CHF are pretty much equal as we all know...
Last but not least we move into the heart of Multiply which is the K1 movement
Lots has been said about the K1 movement and for the ones who are deeply interested in the development of this story we recommend to read the last two campaigns in Kickstarter and the various blog entries in Whatchuseek and Worn&Wound. It's a cool story which sometimes sounds thriller like and we are proud of it.
Many companies claim to have an own movement, but at the end of the day these are mostly clones or slight variations of older designs. This is not our understanding of true premium value engineering. We were striving for independence and modern technical design. Now with K1 we can add ourselves to the short list of the two true quality movement companies in the Swiss market. These two are the ones which can be considered to offer an authentic industrial level movement for entry level premium watches (premium bread & butter products as we call them or in this context entry level luxury watches might fit;-). You can think by yourself who they are. One of them does not sell any movements to others and both players are for sure companies to admire.
K1 is set to COSC levels although we did not do the official thing due to saving your cost. K1 holds the precision within the given tolerances of +-5 seconds per day... most of them even more narrow. If you have any doubts ask some of the backers from the last campaign.
And to be honest, yes we also had minor problems with the last campaign watches which gave us valuable insights for further improvement (mainly some loosening screws...), but this is why we reach out to the consumer to be able to find the problems we cannot find in the labs... We are sure this time we can further decrease After-service need to minimum levels and you will be happy for a long time with your watch.
And if all this would not be enough we designed, reengineered and produced with the help of a leading research institute in Germany our own Swiss lever escapement made of silicon.
This is where true watchmaking and engineering is about to begin, being able to master the design, engineering and manufacturing of a Swiss lever escapement and even outperform existing standards by 30%. And because of this great design, our movement can reach 65 hours of power reserve at 3.5 hertz and such small dimensions.
Last but not least... K1 specs in overview:
- Caliber Name: CMK1
- Power Reserve: 65 hours
- Finish outer ring: Collimacon circular
- Finish bridge faces: Vertical brush (Satinage) with laser H
- Finish bridge edges: Diamond cut (Anglage)
- Finish rotor: Vertical brush (Satinage) with Laser Logo
- Spec 1: Two hands, small second at 9
- Spec 2: Three hands, big date
- Spec 3: Three hands, power reserve indicator at 6
- Spec 4: Small second, Power Reserve Indicator, Big Date
- Beat: 25.200 / 3.5Hz
- Volume: 25,6mm x 4.95mm
- Escapement: Horage in-house, Swiss lever escapement in silicon
- Rotor: Solid Tungsten
- Total Parts: 130-164
- Sub-assemblies: 54 units
- Precision: +/- 5 sec
What else?
We will deliver your watch in this beautiful leather watch case which can be your companion for travelling with more than one watch in future. Perhaps some companies would do a Kickstarter only on that thing ;-)
It's not a Swiss knife... it's THE Swiss watch-tool amongst the watch tools out there. For sure you will not find this anywhere else, as our friend Daniel B. specifically designed it for his own business. We are honored that he gave us the green light to present this to the market as the first movers.
it is made of aluminum with hard rubber grip and has 6 exchangeable bits stored in the grip compartment. Ready to become a hobbyist watch maker?
Risks and challenges
Two campaigns later, 9 years of track record with making movement parts, and a stock of 2500 units to assemble the K1 movement should assure everybody that we will be able to execute accordingly.
Thanks to the last two Kickstarter campaigns K1 came to reality and the feedback from our backers helped to further improve our product and operations.
Of course we are not immune against war and other misery happening on our beloved planet, but overall we think backers do not need to worry about their product being shipped in time and in quality.
People are welcome to pay us a visit and have a look in person in case there are doubts.
HORAGE SA
Fuchsenried 10
2504 Biel
Switzerland
0041 79 8207402 (Andi Felsl)
www.horage.com
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Funding period
- (46 days)