Originally the idea about engraving our watches stemmed from the notion that seafarers used to be tattooed to initiate them and to signify how far and where to they had travelled, e.g., a turtle would signify you had crossed the equator.
Morten and I started talking about the relevance for us as a watchmaker focused on the sea to make engraved/tattooed cases. Given that a watch is a personal piece of art we thought it would mix well with our sea universe.
The Perfect V and Henning Jørgensen
When we asked Dominique Bertail to create a graphic novel for us – called the Perfect V (as in five) one of the main five characters was a woman (Cheng Xüe) with an octopus tattoo on her arm.
This sparked the idea of having an octopus drawn up and engraved onto a case. The first edition was an Oktopus (original version) with a Frederic Piguet movement inside upon which we engraved a drawing made by the famous Danish tattoo artist Henning Jørgensen of Royal Tattoo in Helsingør, Denmark. The drawing was then scanned into an engraving machine in Switzerland and engraved all over the case. As a little extra detail the hands had orange “tentacles” painted on them.
A later version was the Oktopus Moon Tattoo with a Svend Andersen developed moon phase where not only the 18kt gold case was engraved but also the dial and the moon phase depictions. Each depiction of the moon phase shows an aging “man in the moon”.
Johnny Dowell
Around 2014 we started working with renowned English artist and master engraver Johnny Dowell aka Kingnerd. Johnny trained with renowned British gunmakers James Purdey & Sons for 15 years as a gun engraver and has since built a business engraving an array of products.
Johnny had first come across our watches in a magazine in a hotel in Portugal and we traded messages for a few years before we actually boiled it down to an idea.
The first engraved watch was the Oktopus Reef (launched in 2015) and named after the original dive instrument and depicts and octopus with the tentacles climbing around the gold bezel. Each piece takes more than 100 hours of hand engraving and is unique as there will naturally be slight variances in hand engravings.
With the second series – The Crazy Universe (launched in 2016) – Johnny set himself a new challenge to engrave in the notoriously hard titanium grade 5. Combining the moon phase complication we decided to engrave a crazy whimsical universe with stars and planets.
The third iteration was the Oktopus Volcano and yet another challenge for Johnny Dowell. When Johnny first presented the idea to me I wasn’t sure whether it would work and as it turned out when we finally saw it neither did he. Sometimes one has to take the risk and trust one’s instinct – or in this case Johnny’s.
The piece is meticulously engraved titanium and fitted with soft 18k gold into each tiny groove, finishing by blackening the engravings under a microscope and magnifying glass. The unique case material and design reflects the boiling and cooling off of a volcano in action – the gold representing the molten rock, the titanium the ash and the blackening the cooling lava, transporting its wearer to the harshest environments on earth.
The trio represent the deep sea, outer space, and volcanic activity respectively. While this covers quite a broad spectrum there is still room for more ideas and it will come as no surprise when we launch the next.
The engraved pieces have become part of our identity and journey and they are some of our most particular and individual pieces. While they represent exceptional artisanship and craftsmanship they also are lighthearted and humoristic.
As a final note, Oktopus owners might all appreciate that each have an octopus (drawn by Morten Linde) engraved on the back case.