Watches with enamel dials are as frightfully expensive as they are ethereally radiant. The watchmakers whose names are usually associated with the art of applying ground crystals of soft glass or enamel to a metal dial base and then firing it in a kiln include the likes of Ulysse Nardin, which owns enamel specialist Donze Cardan, Jaquet Droz and Breguet. But over the last three-odd years, anOrdain, a tiny startup, based in Glasgow, has been creating exceptional enamel-dial watches at extremely attractive prices.
The watchmaker’s two collections—Model 1 and Model 2—feature smoky dials in a range of vibrant colours, with a starting price of around a lakh. In an interview to Moneycontrol, founder Lewis Heath, a former electronics entrepreneur, talks about the philosophy behind anOrdain, the learnings from the consumer electronics space that he applied to the watchmaking business, the new enamelling techniques being pioneered by his company, and its next launch.
You founded RHA before setting up anOrdain. Are you an audiophile who always wanted to make watches?
I’ve been obsessed with music and design for longer than I can remember, so creating RHA was a natural progression when I left art college but anOrdain was what I’d always wanted to do. It had always been a daydream, one which I didn’t feel capable of taking on, both in terms of my abilities and resources, so it stayed as an idea for many years. There are British-based watch companies but there’s really no manufacturing or knowledge here anymore, so it was a daunting task to start afresh.
What kind of learnings from the consumer electronics space did you apply to the watch business?
In many ways, anOrdain was a reaction to what I didn’t enjoy about working in consumer electronics. It might sound bizarre but in those early years of anOrdain there was no desire to launch or eventually make money—we were a small studio, which I supported financially on the side of my day-job, in the same way some businessmen might buy expensive cars or exotic holidays, and it was very much a cathartic experience for me.
I found the constant manufacturing problem-solving, the fluidity of the interaction between designing and making to be completely intoxicating. With consumer electronics, that model of outsourced manufacturing was frustrating. As a creative, you’re coming up with ideas, articulating them as best you can by email, then they’re tested thousands of miles away in the factory and you get a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ a few days later.
But actually, some of the great developments come from seeing what happens when things don’t quite work—that’s incredibly fertile ground for the imagination but only if you’re there to see it and really understand how the manufacturing processes work. It wasn’t really an option at RHA to bring that back to the UK because of the scale we got to and the interwoven supply chains in Asia.
That desire to have everything under one roof—the studio inside the factory—was why I started anOrdain. I left RHA after years of meteoric growth at a point where it was doing really well and walked away to focus on building anOrdain. The creation of anOrdain was, unconsciously, probably more like a CE or a tech startup than a watch company. We really invested heavily in people and knowledge and equipment rather than outsourcing, and that meant factoring in a long period of being unprofitable, but it’s paid off.
Affordable enamel watches is a very interesting proposition. How did it all come about?
In terms of affordability, the business was born in a direct-to-consumer world, whereas our traditional contemporaries in Switzerland or Japan have to build in distributor and retailer margins into their products. So off the bat, if we sell a watch for £1k (Rs 1.1 lakh), a traditional brand would have to sell that same piece for £3k (Rs 3.3 lakh). We’ve also invested in in-house production whereas the vast majority of enamel dials in Swiss watches are outsourced, which adds another layer of cost.
We got into enamelling because no other material comes close on a watch dial. Traditionally, enamel dials have been quite conservative; white with black printing, but enamel is the most fantastic material for rendering colour— there’s a depth to it which just can’t be matched with any other material. So we saw this world of potential to bring in colour and modern design ideas to this really traditional craft. Plus, perversely the difficulty involved was appealing.
Enamelling is mostly done by a few small, specialised firms. How difficult was it for a startup to achieve a high level of craftsmanship?
Very! There are no books or lessons or people you can ask. The knowledge is with a handful of people around the world who are understandably guarded and so we spent three years working on it. The team was already professional silversmiths and jewellers but making watch dials is another level in terms of precision and detail compared to jewellery enamel. Our technique was developed in isolation, so the finished product is ever so slightly different from other enamel dials.
It’s not a business which you could scale easily—each watch takes two or three days of labour from highly trained people and that’s not including the time we spend on new model development but it’s a business which is constantly challenging and engaging, and for me that’s why I love it. We’re now at the point where we’re doing things in enamel, which nobody else is but there are so many techniques which you see on antique dials that nobody alive today could do and that lends a certain feeling of excitement and exploration to our work.
What kind of new enamelling techniques is anOrdain pioneering?
Bringing modern tech like lasers into the process is an exciting area for us at the moment. Enamel dial making hasn’t really changed in over a century, so nearly every technique is done as it was in say, 1850, and I’m sure if they had all the toys we have today back then, they’d not be doing it that way. Some of what we’re doing is outside of enamelling too—we’ve invested in movement design and the fruits of that should come to light soon.
What should we expect from the Model 3, your next collection?
We nearly launched it last year but the failure rate was just too high so we decided not to at the last minute. It’s a design in champleve enamel; it’s beautifully simple to look at but wickedly complicated to make. Champleve is rare even by dial-enamelling standards.
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