Designing a Timeless Timepiece

We're often asked how we design our products. 

Truth be told, in the watch industry, it's very common for brands not to design their watches at all. Instead, they visit one of several large watch fairs a year and choose ready-made designs presented by factories. Slap your logo on, order a few hundred pieces, and a few months later, you're in business. Even big household-name brands do this.

This makes the barrier to entry in the watch industry very low, as you don't even have to design a product to start a brand. But it also means there are a lot of not-so-great looking products that are designed with little thought and are made to optimize for using up spare (and usually cheap) materials at factories.

This is not how we do things here at Linjer. If you want a top quality product with carefully considered details, you can't buy it off the shelf...

Here's how we designed our Classic and Minimalist watches, starting from the beginning.

In designing our watch collection, we wanted to create beautiful and long-lasting watches without the usual inflated prices of other luxury brands.

We started with inspiration from a famous landmark: the Oslo Opera House designed by Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta.

The Oslo Opera House - the building that inspired "The Classic" and "The Minimalist" watches.
Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

The Opera House’s clean lines and beautiful Carrara marble rooftop are reflected in the crisp lines of the watch case, subtle dome of the crystal glass, and lacquered varnish dial of both styles of our watches. We added dimension to The Classic with a two-layer dial and enhanced The Minimalist with refined details.

Our designs were then transformed from two-dimensional drawings into physical prototypes. We went through many rounds of prototyping with multiple factories, with each prototype taking an excruciating three to four months to produce.

Through this 18-month process, we obsessively adjusted and fine-tuned every aspect of our watches until they were perfect:

• The shape and finish of the hands were completely redesigned to be more elegant and balanced.

• The dial was changed from a run-of-the-mill “paper” finish to a special varnish to reflect light more beautifully.

• The hour indexes were given a different finish and shortened to minimize the shadows they cast.

• A circular brush finish and screws were added on the case back.

• The angles of the lugs were adjusted to be more linear and crisp.

"The Classic" in Rose Gold / Tan. This unisex watch model features a two-layer lacquered varnish dial, a Swiss Ronda movement, a domed sapphire crystal, and Italian vegetable-tanned leather straps. See it in men's sizes. See it in women's sizes. 

Our past personal experiences with watches also influenced our design decisions. We were fed up with scratched mineral watch glasses -- and so we only use scratch-resistant sapphire crystal for our watches.

The other components selected for our watches are also of the highest quality. From the Swiss Ronda movement to the same full grain, vegetable-tanned leather that we use for our bags, our watches are timeless in construction as well as aesthetic.

After all, if there is one accessory that should be timeless, it’s your timepiece.