How To Start a Watch Company
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It has been said that you don’t buy a Mr Jones Watch to get to your train punctually; you buy one to question whether you want to get on that train at all, and whether getting on that train is going to add anything to the sum of human happiness.
Established in 2007 by former fine art, sculpture and computer-related design student Crispin Jones, Mr Jones Watches are both immediately recognisable and unlike any other watch you've ever seen.
Before he got into watches, Jones made an office desk that answered questions.
The questions were things like “Will my love be returned?” “What do my friends think of me?” “Will I find my lost item?” The questions were contained on cards, 30 in all, and to obtain the answers the user had to place them over a metal slot on the desk.
“It was an attempt to use the computer in a similar way that ancient civilisations used oracles,” Jones once told Esquire.
‘The catch was, the metal slot became hotter and hotter as the answer came up". The piece was called The Invisible Force: The Amazing Psychic Table. A barcode was concealed in the pattern on the card, so when you dropped it onto the slot you triggered an electronic reader that slowly produced an answer on a dot matrix. The answer to “Will my love be returned?” would produce the answer “Yes … if … you … stay … true … to … your…”. By the time the answer got to “true” the card slot would be getting quite hot, but if you withdrew your hand the system would reset and you wouldn’t see the whole answer. The last – very hot – word was “ideals”.
Jones was interested in the way technology was changing our lives: what it gives, and what it takes away.
That's when he began thinking about watches.
“‘The watch is interesting,", he figured “because we don’t think of it as technology the way we do about phones or computers. And it’s an incredible survivor: most technologies that are 10 years old look incredibly outdated, so that if I use a phone from 10 years ago it’s almost a provocation, and it makes me look massively eccentric. But you’re wearing your wristwatch from the 1950s and it doesn’t seem extraordinary.”
Jones observed that. while many of us tend to walk around with near identical gadgets these days, watches remain one of the few outward signs of our personality.
“And with watches you can weave in a lot of interesting stories and remap the concepts of how we think about time,” he said.
So he began developing his own.
Early Mr Jones Watches designs included The Summissus, subtitled The Humility Watch. This was “an object designed to remind people that death should be prepared for at any time”.
The watch had a mirror face, and alternated between flashing the time and the message “Remember you will die”. (A simplified later version of this was later made available for sale, and was known as The Accurate.)
Then there was Avidus, also known as The Stress Watch.
This reflected the feeling we have of time speeding by when we are stressed, and time slowing down when we are relaxed. The wearer would press the two metal contacts on the face, and a pulse would activate the display.
The more stressed the user, the faster the time would run; the more relaxed the user, the slower, and a meditative state would cause the time to run backwards.
Jones soon opened up his design process to external illustrators, and today Mr Jones Watches concerns itself less with philosophical nature of time and mortality, and more with novel and entertaining ways to approach time-telling. Mr Jones Watches mostly exist to put a smile on your face.
Take Ricochet [sp], for example. This model displays three cartoon robots playing pinball. The three metallic droids, engrossed in the action on the pinball machine, are each hand-gilded in a different metallic foil, so that they twinkle as they catch the light. The scoreboard of the games machine displays the hours and the minutes. In other words, it's the bit that tells the time.
Or there's Monster Melter 3000, in which a spaceman is locked in mortal combat with a terrifying man-eating alien. The position of the spaceman’s ray gun indicates the minutes. The monster’s severed tentacle shows you the hour.
Or how about the Cyclops watch? Instead of conventional hour and minute hands, Cyclops uses a single black circle to mark the passage of time. Each hour is represented by a different coloured circle beneath. The Cyclops is not particularly accurate. That is the point. It is billed as “the perfect Sunday watch”.
The wearer is invited to glance down at their wrist and deduce: “Well, it’s roughly half past the hour”.
For everything else, there is always your iPhone.
Mr Jones Watches has always been an outlier. But in 2024 it finds itself sympatico with an industry where (one argument has it) dial design is prioritised over such historically important factors as the provenance of a watch’s movement, the alloy of its case, or links to some tale or other involving a race car driver or an astronaut or a mountain climber from six centuries ago.
Instead, how about a watch that looks unlike any other, and is whimsical, humorous and fun, into the bargain? For that Mr Jones Watches has your back.
Crispin Jones has workshops in Forest Hill and Camberwell in south London, as well as a busy shop in Covent Garden, and an online shop that ships worldwide. His watches cost between £225 and £695, making them a good first watch, a decent gift or a unique new piece to add to your collection. The company generally puts out around 10 new watch designs each year.
I've long wondered about the process of watch design, so many of them look the same, after all, and have been curious quite how much latitude a designer is allowed before market forces and the pressures of Q4 to shift more 40mm panda-dialled chronographs kicks in, and any fun stuff is relegated to a file marked "Maybe Next Year".
Those are not concerns of Crispin Jones.
The other week, between occasional appearances from Stanley, the friendly office miniature dachshund, Crispin talked to me about how the Mr Jones design process works, why market research is for the birds, and the endless playful possibilities of time.
Here's 35 things I learned.
1. You need method in your madness.
I think often people see our watches and think “Oh it’s just wacky nonsense. You can’t tell the time with this! It’s impossible!” But there is always a logic to it. There’s a structure, if you’re prepared to engage with it. You might need to relearn a little bit of how to recognise the time. But we’re not asking for much complexity. We’re really not doing things that are just confusing and arbitrary.
2. Start with a story.
One of the most successful watch designs for us is “the swimming pool watch” – A Perfectly Useless Afternoon. Kristof [Devos; Belgium illustrator and author] designed that. His starting point was this quote from a Chinese philosopher that if you’ve learned to spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing, then you’ve learned to live [the quote is from the 20th Century linguist and novelist, Lin Yutang: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live”]. And although you don’t need to know that narrative to appreciate the watch, that underpins it. I think it’s important for him that there’s a conceptual reason behind this guy lying in a swimming pool. That’s what it’s all about.
3. It's not just about pretty pictures.
The second thing with that watch is that there has to be a really elegant way to incorporate the time-telling function. That’s what we always aspire to. The “swimming pool watch” is a really good example, because at any time of the day, whenever you look at it, the image is coherent. It makes sense. And then, if you know how to decode the elements, you can read the time as well. As soon as someone’s explained it to you, it’s obvious. But the first time you see it, your reference is all scrambled because there’s no conventional minute hand. There’s no numerals on there. But the time-telling element is coherent with the image.
4. And sometimes it’s about even more than that.
There is a more intense subtext to that particular watch, which is explained in the booklet that comes with it. Kristof had an awful car crash where, I think, one of his very close friends died [In 2007, Kristof was holiday in Germany with his now wife, and friends who were newlyweds. The holiday was a wedding gift from Kirstof and his partner. There was an accident, and his friend Tina passed away. “We were all 26,” he has explained. “Nobody expects to lose someone, especially another friend. It was really heavy, it’s still really hard”] and that was his impetus to really cut back on work. He was doing commercial art direction for graphic design firms, which he wasn’t enjoying, and he also did children’s book illustration and authoring, which is what he really wanted to do. And when he proposed this design to us, he was trying to balance his commercial stuff with his more creative ideas. All the artists we work with get a royalty payment. And that watch is so successful that Kristof was able to give up the commercial art direction stuff and refocus on the children’s illustration. He’s now also trained as a teacher, so he teaches high school students. So that watch allowed him to reconsider what he was doing.
5. Market research? Pah.
If we did any sort of the analysis like that, we would probably learn some stuff. I just worry that that would sort of steal a bit the charm of the whole process. I feel like, then we’d go “Robots and cityscapes sell more than landscapes, so we need to do more of them in Q4”. But it’s never like that.
6. Try to be fair.
Our guiding principle is always: “Is this the best version of this artist’s work that we can make in a watch form?” Our business model used to be that we’d do a 100-piece numbered edition. And, if it was super-popular and it sold really fast, then we’d reissue it down the line into the permanent collection. But then the limited editions started selling out really fast, so it became difficult to judge what was popular and what was not so popular. So, then we scaled up to 200-piece editions, and then those started selling out really fast, too. They were going in 25, 30 minutes. What we do now is a 12-hour [order] window [and fulfil all the orders placed within that timeframe]. We’ve always had a lot of customers from the USA, for example. Before, if we did a 200-watch release at midday London time, which is what we used to do, that’s not really sympathetic to someone on the west coast of America, where it’s 5am. We had a situation with people going “I love the design, but I'm furious with you as a company, because I can’t buy it.” That wasn’t ideal.
7. Unsolicited ideas? It's tough.
We’re not systematic. There’s no set of rules for something that makes a Mr Jones watch. We do have substantial numbers of unsolicited submissions, as you can imagine. We do weird designs, so people think “They do anything! I've got an idea for watch, I’ll send it in to you?” We have a submission form. There is a layer of filtering which the customer service team do. But they're instructed to not be super-rigorous. I guess what we always look for is someone with a distinctive quality that we haven’t seen before. Also, someone who brings a story to the design – a narrative. So many of the design submissions we get fall down… There’s a sort-of witty visual pun, and you're like, ‘Yeah, it’s kind of funny, but not really’. Like, they've not really integrated the timekeeping in an elegant way that’s coherent with this narrative they're trying to tell. It is a pretty challenging thing to do. I’d say we get about 250 submissions a year.
8. Keep your overheads low.
Our threshold for recouping our costs is very low, because everything we do is all done internally. We only need to sell maybe 100-150 of each watch in order to recoup the money we’ve invested. And we always sell more than that. That means we can be really free with the design. We don’t have to focus-group it, get a bunch of the customers together, test it…“Do you think this colorway, or the black colorway?” I guess it’s arrogant, in a way. But I think it would lose a lot of that magic if we introduced another voice into the internal company assessment of a design, coupled with the external artists. What if they’re competing voices? Who wins? We’re in a sort of luxurious position where we don't really have to do that.
9. Embrace your mistakes.
That's not saying we don't make missteps. There was a watch we did called Tadaima [designed by the London-based Japanese illustrator Yo Hosoyamada], which has a view of the Tokyo cityscape. The limited-edition version had this cat looking out the window, and the minute hand was a bird. There was this nice narrative between the domestic cat that was captive behind the window, and the bird that’s flying free. For the reissue, we sampled it, and we sampled it without the cat, because the cat sat behind this window frame, and it closed in the design quite a lot. It just looked nicer without the cat – it looked more open and less fussy. That watch sold quite well. But now we’re forever getting people saying “Where’s the cat? I like the version with the cat”. So, that was the example of: we’re so fixated on making the best version of that design, and the purity. To my mind, it was a no brainer. The cat was clutter on an asymmetric image. But for a lot of the customers, the cat was really important. So we learned something. We are toying with the idea of bringing the cat back in the new year. But I know what will happen. Then everyone who bought it in between, will be like “Could I return my watch and get the cat version instead?”
10. Have a system.
We’ve got a pool of illustrators we work with, as well as a number of designs being done in-house each year. Before the illustration is agreed, there’ll be a round of rough sketches where we work out the theme for the watch – the basic design; the core elements; what the timekeeping [function] is going to be; what the feel of it is. There’s a bit of roughing out, so we can get a version of the design that the artists can be happy with. We spend quite a bit of time getting it right and working on screen before we commit anything to engraving plates and mixing up inks, because that gets quite expensive.
11. Use a lot of colour.
Once we’re happy with the basic proportions, we’re committed. Then they'll mix the inks from Pantone references. We use standard colour references, the same graphic designers use. We can generate a recipe for each Pantone shade. They’re fairly good, but they’re not always perfect. So there has to be a bit of by-eye adjusting as we go along. Each colour is printed in turn. It’s a bit like silk screen printing. It’s a combination of screen print and lithography. We’ve got an engraved plate, and then we're printing a single colour at a time off that. Mixing the inks and then setting up the ink on the machine for printing is the labour- and time-intensive period. We need to be fairly confident before we do a sample, because it’s a substantial commitment of time and effort. If there’s multiple colours, which there generally are on our designs, we tend to use pad printing [a prainting technique that uses a silicone pad to transfer a 2D image onto a 3D object, used in the medical, electronics and car industries], but in a fine art way. Pad printing is really an industrial printing technology – originally developed in the watch industry. But mostly in the watch industry it’s used for single or two-colour printing at most. I think the most colours we’ve used is 16. So that’s 16 layers of colour being laid down.
12. Tweak as you go.
We never really have it where we go “Oh, this idea is non-starter”. You do often get things where the proportions aren’t right. This monster one [Monster Melter 3000] is quite a good example. What we were testing here was we’d print the monster on the glass, but we’d leave the mouth open and have some printing on the dial to give a sense of 3D-ness. The spaceman on the side is the minute hand, and this severed tentacle is supposed to point to the hour. So, it’s saying a quarter to four in the picture. But doing that, we felt the proportions of the two were a bit wrong. The spaceman was probably too small. So, the monster became larger. We scaled up a monster's head and that made it more impactful. But then we felt that the spaceman could also come up in size, which is in the final image. The planet sitting in front of the monster’s tentacle didn’t work either – it made it kind of incoherent. It should be behind by rights.
13. Subtlety, be damned.
I wanted something really visually impactful [for Monster Melter 3000]. Our stock green and pink inks were not the brightest, so we sourced some fluorescent inks. That was exciting for the workshop, because they’d never used them before. You get a sense of how much more vibrant it is. At first, we thought “Oh we’ll use them sparingly”. “We'll use them on the monster or maybe on the dial, but we won’t go crazy”. But once you see them on some bits you go “Oh, we’ll just put it on everything! What’s the point of being subtle with it?”
14. Empower your collaborators.
Onorio [D’Epiro; the designer and illustrator who worked on Monster Melter 3000] was really nice to work with. A lot of the artists are working remotely, so we’re having to do it all over email or occasionally Zoom calls. But Onorio lives in Bedford. That’s not super-close to us in south London – but he became really engaged with the process. He came in for a bunch of the key review and resample meetings. We’d sit down and go – “All right, let’s try and brighten the colours”, and maybe we’d make some minor adjustments to the illustration. We can engrave new plates, mix new inks, print a sample, everything from start to finish, and we can do that in half a day. Because Onorio can be there, I can be there, the head of production can be there. We can all review it together – and talk about what's working, what isn’t, what the next step is.
15. And don’t forget the technicians.
Print technicians are really highly skilled. They tend to come from a fine art print-making background. And it's really nice for them to be recognised, and not be seen as just “the technicians”. What that definition misses is all the problem-solving and the little tweaks that they're doing to the artwork, that go into the printing process to get the best possible result. That’s why it’s nice if the artist comes in. Then they can stand side-by-side with them and watch what’s going on.
16. Our artists are a happy bunch.
I don’t think any of the artists we’ve ever worked with has ever designed a watch before. So, they’re always super-motivated, because even if they’re quite established commercial practitioners, they haven’t been asked to do a watch before. And particularly they haven’t been asked to a watch like ours.
17. Designing a watch is unlike designing anything else.
The difference of working at this scale cannot be overemphasised. Most people work on a laptop, so they’re at least working at A4-size. Once you’ve scaled that down to 32-millimeter diameter watch size, something really nice happens with the designs. That focusing of the design in the smaller space. And the pad printing is capable of such fine resolution that you can put a lot of detail in there and still it doesn't get lost. If you’re working on a screen, you get fixated on really minute details. In the reality of a watch, it’ll be so minuscule as to be inconsequential. That’s a good reality check.
18. I have described myself as a control freak...
I guess it’s not so much a control freak – it’s just more an insistence on getting things right. When we used to work with the factories in the Far East, we’d have a design, get it sent out and they’d do a pretty good job. But we wouldn’t be able to have a dialogue like, “This red, it looks a bit washed out. How can we make that more vibrant and more impactful?” Because they weren’t really engaging on those terms. They were like, “Well, you sent the Pantone reference. We’ve matched that, and we printed it. How much more can we do?” Unless you’re really right in the thick of it, up to your elbows in the ink and stuff, you can’t engage on those terms.
19. Don’t be boring.
We work principally with two pad print suppliers and they both really value us as clients. Because the work they’re used to doing is printing on pen barrels – putting a one-colour company logo on a pen barrel, to give away at a trade show or something. It’s really boring. So, we’re an unusual client for them. We’ve got odd demands, and high quality demands. And they’re not used to dealing with that.
20. Employ fresh blood.
Our second workshop is in Camberwell, just across the road from the Camberwell Art College. We go around the degree show with the workshop staff, where all the graduating students are showing their work. The last couple of years, we’ve cherrypicked a couple of graduating students and approached them after the show and said, “We’d like to work with you to design a watch”. I graduated from a sculpture BA, many moons ago. So, I know what that’s like –it’s kind of horrible to be released from the cocoon of the art college environment into the real world, without a project.
21. Originality is hard.
We get so many submissions where you have a design where you have two spots where you read the hours and minutes, but not in a particularly integrated way. They always suggest numerals. No one ever says “What I’m going to do is rework the hours as different colours. So that you need to learn to read that blue means two o’clock, and green means three o’clock", or whatever it is. I'd really engage that! We get slight variations of the guy in the swimming pool watch So, there'll be a ball and someone playing football or a ball and a dog chasing it. We do get a lot of dog watch submissions – because of Stanley [miniature dachshund/ Mr Jones office dog who also features on a line of t-shirts]. We get endless submissions on that. They think that’s the way to my heart! It’s always a dog chasing a ball, or a dog chasing a bone. People do spend a lot of time on them. It’s kind of heartbreaking. There’s some really talented people out there. They’re just not quite right for us. I wish I could support more.
22. There's more than one way to tell the time.
When you look at the “swimming pool” watch, you can read it without having to numericise it. You don’t have to say “12.35”, you can say – “Oh we’re nearly at lunchtime”, or whatever. You process time in a different way.
23. Necessity is the mother of invention.
We started off doing the skull watch [The Last Laugh, a skull design linked to the tradition of memento mori. Instead of hands, the skull’s teeth display the time.] The hours were on the upper jaw, the minutes on lower. That was the first time I looked into using jump hour mechanism [a watch complication that displays the current hour numerically, in an aperture. When the minute hand completes a full revolution the jump hour mechanism instantly "jumps" to display the next hour]. Because originally that watch used a two-disc quartz mechanism. So, the hour disc was constantly moving. The minute disc was constantly moving. But it became really challenging to read. Because, say at 1.30 – the hour numeral “1” would be in the middle of the jaw. The “30” would be directly below it. By the time you got to “1.55” you’d begin to get the numeral “2” appearing – so then you’re like “Well, is it 2.55 or is it 1.55?” That’s when we bought into getting jump hour modules. And now we use them on several watches. Before that all the watches we did were quartz because I always had the sense that our customers didn't really… I was going to say they didn’t really understand. They probably did understand, but they didn’t really care. They were buying our watches for the design rather than the movement. I feel like now because we’ve been around in the watch world for a while and what we do is quite distinctive, a bunch of people who love [mechanical] watches have found their way to us. They might prefer mechanical watches, so we do them with a slightly higher price, and with a slightly different size case.
24. Okay, so sometimes our dials have been a bit too busy.
The Zombie Pizza watch [created by the artist Mariana Calderón] was another limited edition. It sold well but it didn’t do well enough to get reissued. It happened not to be super-commercial, but that’s alright. Not every watch gets reissued. It doesn’t mean it was an unsuccessful design. Mind you, if we’re speaking in strictly commercial terms, having a watch where a severed finger points to the top the minute and a fly points to the hour… that is quite niche.
25. Don’t be afraid to try something new.
There’s a logic with the Cyclops watch [designed by Crispin Jones]. The width of the black circle is five minutes. So, if the circle [crosses over a coloured one beneath it] on the left-hand edge, then that’s five past. But if it’s the width plus the same width as the circle below then that’s 10 past. Equidistant between the circle then it’s half-past. Just touching the preceding circle and it's a quarter-to. [Congratulations if you're still following this, by the way - Ed.] We have thought about it a bit! It’s not just because I liked those colours.
26. We were early adopters of the truism: “These days, nobody actually needs a watch”.
Nobody needs that really functional timepiece anymore, because functional time is taken care of by digital technology: like your phone, your laptop, the screens at the railway station, or whatever. Functional time is all around us. So that’s freed up the watch to be a purely expressive, personality-carrying piece of male jewelry. It’s a way to have male body adornment, where fewer of those opportunities traditionally exist for men. There will always be people who want a flash accessory that embodies some of the technical precision of the world, a watch like a chronograph, for example. But dial design has definitely become more of a central focus, more recently.
27. Embrace external influences.
At the Royal College of Art, I was influenced by former student Anthony Dunne, whose book Hertzian Tales argued for a more considered critique of electronic products, not least a reexamination of everyday objects on aesthetic grounds. In 2004 I wrote a manifesto posing two questions: "How could a watch undermine its wearer?" and "What if the watch could express some of the negative aspects of the wearer’s personality?" But his most provocative question was "How can the watch represent time in a more unpredictable and provocative way". Dunne was interested in what he called critical design, which was using the language and tools of product design as a form for social critique. My background before then was in fine art and sculpture. So then coming on a design course, I was naturally drawn towards something that was a bit less utopian and a bit more strange. One of the things that he talked about a lot was called value fiction, where an author’s values and beliefs are revealed through the plot. So that language, how we think of the watch – the personality, and the communicating aspect – has become the most important thing. I think that stuff is really interesting. That was my way in to designing watches.
28. Watches say more than we might think.
I worked for Philips Design for a while. Philips Design in the late 1990s, early 2000s, invested a lot of money in wearable technology. They did collaborations with Levi’s and made these kind of funky snowboarder jackets with built-in MP3 players. It was kind of cool and interesting. But it wasn’t leveraging something that was genuinely happening. Snowboarders were not sellotaping their MP3 players to their sleeves in order to be able to access the controls on the slopes. So, it failed. But I thought the watch was a really interesting [object] because it has this really long history – at least back to First World War, if you’re talking about wristwatches. And if you’re talking pocket watches, you go back another couple of 100 years. Its enduring appeal is partly for those reasons we’re talking about. It communicates something about personality as well as being this sort of functional tool.
29. Learn to let go.
One of the fundamental shifts from when I started Mr Jones Watches, is that I thought that meant I needed to design all the watches. That's what it was! Other people can go and do Fred Blogs Watches. I’m Mr Jones Watches! But after four years, I was kind of flagging, and the quality was slightly deteriorating, and I thought it would be interesting to collaborate with different people who had an interesting relationship to time.
30. Park your ego.
Early on, I asked an illustrator, Fanny Shorter, who I know quite well, if she would do some designs for us. And that was really nice. I knew her a bit. But I didn’t know her so well that I would feel an obligation to realise her design. She was really good, because she didn’t understand anything about what we could and couldn’t do [ie: any limitations in watch design]. She mostly did illustration for textiles and for wallpaper, and mostly worked in screen prints. She didn’t do one million colours on her designs, which was important, because we can’t do a million colours either. She really helped us to drive things forward. [Shorter’s watch design, The Promise of Happiness features a tiger playing under moonlight. The hour is displayed in the moon, while the minutes are camouflaged within its stripes]. That was really good for growing the knowledge of what Mr Jones watches could be. That’s when I stepped back more and had other people do the designs. I wouldn't have expected that, when I started the company, because my ego wouldn't have allowed it. So there’s been a growth from my side as well.
31. Know your strengths.
The skill set we have as a company is really to do with editing designs. When I say “I’m an editor”, it sounds quite lukewarm. It doesn’t sound as glamorous as being “the creator”. But, actually, having a design and recognising what’s strong with it, and what’s working, and refining it down, that’s the hard bit. And that’s what we're really good at now.
32. I've over mortality.
Putting the word “remember” on the hour hand, and “you will die” on the minute hand, that was my idea. That was really my statement piece. But I can’t keep coming up with iconoclastic sayings like that, year after year. My background is not really doing the pictorial-type designs. And that’s what our company is good at now. The pictorial image with a time-telling function integrated into it.
33. Ideas can come from all over.
The skull watch [The Last Laugh] was a collaboration with a comedian [it was created with the comic William Andrews, and features artwork by the British tattoo artist Adrian Willard]. I thought comedians had a really interesting relationship to time and timing. [Andrews] talked a bit about dying on stage and how people would say to him, “You’re so brave doing what you do”. And he’d say, “If I have a bad day at work, the consequence is = people don’t laugh”. But if you're a surgeon or something and you have a bad day at work the consequences are far more serious.
34. Consider the postie.
I just thought watches generally work as gifts. And if you’re giving a watch as a gift, there’s always that moment of opening it. Most watch brands sell the watches on a little cushion with the strap done up, so the box needs to be quite big. But if you fasten the strap then it's marked the strap before you've even opened it. Also, our boxes fit through the letterbox.
35. Ignore the haters.
People say we’re gimmicky. Gimmicky implies something is flashy or no good or has no substance. But there’s a coherence behind our work! I don’t want to slag off other people, but there was a company that were making something they called watches, but without a time-telling function. They were these little things you wore on your wrist that had a sort of duck pond on them, that were three-dimensional. That’s my definition of a gimmick. Because someone will get that and say “How do you tell the time with that?” Well, you can’t. Even when our watch is something playful like a pig escaping from a tractor beam [the Beam Me Up! watch], it still functions.
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