Unraveling the Creative Process of Watch Design with Nodus Watches

Let's start off with a fascinating narrative from Wesley, co-founder of Nodus Watches. We delve into the heart of his brand's journey, the shared love for music and watches that fuelled its genesis, and the intriguing stories behind their watch names. Be prepared for a captivating insight as we discuss the initial pushback from factories and the subsequent triumph in implementing their innovations.

In this episode, we also get to pick the brains of our guest, a micro-brand watch designer who prioritizes quality over storytelling. We explore the creative process of naming watches and the resistance to conventional branding. You can expect to gain a fresh perspective as we discuss the brand's focus on durability and their unique design approach.

Lastly, we get candid about the highs and lows in the watch business, revealing the importance of a robust team and principled leadership. We share our vision for Nodus Watches' future, underscored by a relentless drive for innovation. Finally, we spill the beans on our annual Intersect event, a casual meet-up that has grown into a significant gathering for watch enthusiasts. Get ready for a riveting discussion that peels back the layers of micro-brand watch design!

Be sure to check out Nodus Watches
http://noduswatches.com

Transcript

Blake Rea: 0:00

What's up everybody, welcome to another episode. Hello the Lonely Wrist. Today we have one of my more interesting and exciting in my opinion exciting micro brands on the come up out of Cali, los Angeles, south Central, wherever you're at. Just kidding, I don't know, but we're from Cali. Yeah, notice, we have Wesley from Notice, what's?

Wesley Kwok: 0:28

up.

Blake Rea: 0:30

Tell us what you're wearing. Tell us why you're wearing it.

Wesley Kwok: 0:33

Sure. So I'm wearing a prototype, actually, of a collaboration watch that we're doing with Raven watches, based out of Kansas City, and it's based on our new Contro GMT platform. So the Contro had two iterations so far the first one in 2018, second one in 2020. And now in 2023, we're coming out with the last one. I say last one, but it basically what it means is that we finally landed on a design of that platform that we're happy with in the long term, and the way we're going to introduce it is actually not even with the actual Contro model.

Wesley Kwok: 1:08

We're going to introduce it with Raven watches and we're doing some pretty fun stuff with it. There's going to be a gray DLC coating on this watch instead of the typical black DLC that you typically see. There's going to be an engraved seracoded bezel, seracoded dial too, and basically the case was designed by us, but everything else the dial, the actual, the entire concept of the watch was collaboration with Steve from Raven, who's been one of our closest friends in the industry. He actually was one of the big reasons we even started this company in the first place, so it's kind of special to us to get to work with him on a collaboration now and yeah, it's a proper GMT. I can't show too much of it because it's a prototype, so no official photos We'll blur.

Blake Rea: 1:57

It We'll blur it. Teaser.

Wesley Kwok: 2:01

Yeah, so that's what I got on the wrist.

Blake Rea: 2:03

Justin, you're up.

Justin Summers: 2:04

That thing's beautiful man. I've got the Loco 42. It's the type B dial, just a classic man, just a good old pilot watch. Looks good. It's got the Miota in it, which we'll talk more about in a little bit as well Wesley about how you guys feel about that. But yeah, I love it. Man Loomed out like crazy and where's good. How about yourself, blake?

Blake Rea: 2:26

I have the mono face sub second reverse O the medium. I love this guy Where's really well.

Justin Summers: 2:34

Fancy, we're in a dress. Watch with a T-shirt.

Blake Rea: 2:39

I know I hyped myself up to Wesley that I'm the big brand guy, right. So I have to live true to it, right? So that's it. Yeah, let's jump. Let's jump right in, Justin, go ahead, Kick us off. Yeah sure?

Justin Summers: 2:52

So, wesley, one of my big questions for you, man to start everything, what inspired you guys to start a watch company?

Wesley Kwok: 2:59

Sure, so Colin and I Colin's my co-founder we met back in seventh grade, as you know, to pretty much the only guitar players in our school in our grade. So we bonded over that initially and you know we actually the day we met we started a band together. So we found a drummer and a bass player and a singer and all that and we started playing music together. Do you guys? Are you still playing? So we both still play, but not out Like we don't. We play for our girlfriends and in our league. That's about it.

Justin Summers: 3:35

That's right, the sweet serenade.

Wesley Kwok: 3:37

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, basically we bonded over music and you know we started writing and recording our own albums as well. And when I first started to learn that Colin has a Mac for building things and you know tweaking things, you know he's good with his hands was when we actually built our own guitars in 11th grade and, you know, did a recording studio and all that stuff, recorded a short EP and, fast forward to college I went off to study music in Boston and then he came out to California and studied at USC and you know we did our thing. We were still talking a lot, but our conversations over throughout college started to move away from music and guitar and more into watches. And it's funny, how we got into watches was like it was kind of serendipitously, we didn't, we didn't even know the other was getting into watches at the same time. We just sort of noticed that he noticed I was wearing a watch and I noticed he was wearing a watch and then the conversation just started to snowball from there Very quickly found micro brands. That's kind of where at least personally, that's really where I found the most enjoyment, because I feel like they iterate a little bit faster. I actually can speak to the person that designed the watch and runs the company. And so fast forward.

Wesley Kwok: 4:58

Post college I moved out to LA to work in the music industry and you know, turns out you don't make much money playing music. Who would have guessed? And so one day we were just drinking a lot of beer talking about you know how I don't want to say deflated, but I didn't. I felt like all this hard work I put in my entire life into becoming the best guitar player that I could possibly become, and then I come out here and it's like I can become a studio musician and make like 20 grand a year. You know, not that it was ever about money, but you know I got to survive. And it turns out that LA is one of the few cities in the US that you can make a living playing music in. And making a living means getting like four roommates living in a two bedroom play. I'm like this isn't really getting by. Yeah, I'm like that's not the life I want.

Wesley Kwok: 5:51

And we at that point, I guess, didn't lose passion for music, but it was a little bit soured and it kind of gotten like the whole of the whole music thing was replaced by watches. You know that we love talking about watches, talking about like everything too big brands, small brands. Kulin actually became a Seiko mother and he was doing a lot of his own builds throughout college and then after college, especially when he had more time, he was like really building out cool, cool builds. And one day we got a little drunk and we were just like, hey, let's, what would you do if you could design a watch from the ground up, instead of relying on the Helen Rowe cases or the Moki mods and all that stuff? You know what if you could actually design your own thing from the ground up? So we're like, well, let's just try it. You know, opened up Photoshop and started putting stuff together and then we landed on a design that we don't talk too much about it anymore because it was kind of like a test for us. We wanted to just use that first platform as a test to see whether or not the market wanted what we had to offer, and also use that project as a way to study supply chain and learn about what it takes to build a watch. And then, obviously, everything from from building a watch to running an e-commerce business, to marketing this brand, and pretty much it's our lesson learned. That was what that project was. So got the design done and we were like well, I guess we should make it. Then At least we wanted to make one, one for me, one for him. You know, we thought it'd be at least a cool project, kind of like how when we built guitars, you know, built one for me, built one for him, and it just just thought it was a good way to spend our time. We learned really quickly though you don't build two watches at a time, you have to build like 500 at a time. That's right. So at that point we're just like well, the only logical thing to do here is make 500 and sell 409 to eight of them. Right, keep two for ourselves, like we wanted, and just sell the rest.

Wesley Kwok: 7:49

Ended up being a total shit show. We ended up working with a Swiss movement, which was probably our first mistake. We didn't know that much about watch production, so we didn't really design around materials and capabilities. We just kind of threw everything at the wall and we're like well, let's hope for the best. So the watch itself, like the ones that got out, was fine, but the reject rate was like 50%. So we only ended up selling like 250 of them Obviously didn't make any money on that, but it did well enough.

Wesley Kwok: 8:24

Where we were like all right, there's enough money here where we should put enough back to fund another round of production. We didn't take anything out, we were just. We were both working on the side as part time just to pay the bills and you know, and ironically, I was probably making just as much as I would have working as a full time musician. Sounds of all right, yeah.

Wesley Kwok: 8:45

But yeah, we went through the process of designing a second watch and then a third watch, which was the Contrail, and then a fourth watch, and it was a fourth watch the Avalon when we really realized that there's something here. You know that that's kind of the watch that put our brand on the map. It sold out pretty quickly and we were like, I guess people like what we're doing, let's just go all in on this. And yeah, that was probably like a two year process of starting our first model and then getting to the Avalon, and we was like basically like a big test run. And then at the end of those two years, we're like, yeah, let's, let's go all in on this.

Justin Summers: 9:21

That's awesome, dude, and I was going to say and I apologize to go down a weird tangent. It sounds like you and me share a lot of the same similarities as well. I'm a guitarist. I didn't mention that before. We mentioned some of the stuff off camera. I know there's a drum set in the background here. I kind of went down that same path as well. Like you know, should I pursue music? I've got the you know the Yamaha HS80 monitors, I've got the you know the all the recording equipment under my desk and all this music gear and come to find out that, yeah you, it's really tough to make money you know doing music unless you make it big, yeah, yeah. So I feel you on that.

Wesley Kwok: 9:57

Like, when we talk about it in terms of money, I think a lot of people have a misconception that it's like, you know, we got into this for the money. And actually this does apply to the watch watch industry too, right, Because, like, as soon as you start measuring things in terms of dollar return, it kind of like muddies the water, right, the creative aspect gets a little messed up, that's right. The passion aspect gets a little messed up. But when it comes to music, it was like I had done it for so long. You know, like as far back as I can remember, I was playing guitar and singing and playing drums and like, it's just like that.

Wesley Kwok: 10:29

A huge part of my identity was tied to it. So I think it was especially hard for me to let that go. You know, not in the sense that I stopped playing I still play, right but letting it go in the sense that when someone asks me what do I do, I can't say I'm a musician anymore, right, Because I don't do that for a living. Right Now that I'm a real adult, that question usually means what do you do for a living? So, but I don't know. I'm okay with that. I think I saw myself in something else that gave me my passion for music back, and the best part about all this is that it didn't sour my passion for watches right Like working in the watch industry.

Wesley Kwok: 11:05

So I think I finally found something where I can kind of strike that balance between I've got to make money doing this, but I still deeply care about the industry as a whole of the design process and the community and all things.

Justin Summers: 11:17

Yeah, that's awesome, good for you and smaller footprints, so you don't have you know a bunch of you know music gear laying around everywhere. You've just got you know the footprint of a watch much easier that way.

Wesley Kwok: 11:27

Well, no, I still have all the music you're laying around. That's my Berkeley amp in my Berkeley oh cool yeah that's awesome.

Justin Summers: 11:34

Did Love it.

Blake Rea: 11:36

We're kind of in the same place, like we're, we're bootstrapped, everything lonely wrist is Essentially like viewer powered is what we call it. Like we're not making any money, of course. Like we're just here investing our time and you know. Going back to what you're saying, like it's not about the money that comes in, that we Count us success, it's about the amount of impact that we have. That's kind of where our, our measuring stick is. But I'm also curious because, you know, I've went through, of course, your collection and it seems pretty straightforward. But if you could kind of give an executive overview of, like the Avalon, all your sector watches, the retrospect, the unity, some of the new pieces that you have, if you could give an executive overview For our listeners, what would that sound like? Or look like?

Wesley Kwok: 12:25

right, yeah, so, broadly speaking, our, I guess our specialty is sport watches, you know, which is? It's a very broad term and purposely, you know, we wanted it to be broad because a sport watch, yes, it could be a dive watch, but it also could be a pilot watch, could be a field watch, right? Sport watch to us basically means it's water resistant to a hundred meters or more 200 of it. To diver has to have some degree of anti mag, some degree of anti shock. These have all the bells and whistles that us nerds like, like the sapphire crystal Screwed out crown, you know, things like that. So durability for sure, and that isn't, that's not a result of us Ourselves being divers and like super athletes or whatever, it's, because that was simply, you know, kind of what. That's what we collected. You know, we really enjoyed the all the say go divers, the Orient divers, kind of like where we started, and then just turns out that most Micro brands also Specialized in dive watches, at least back then.

Wesley Kwok: 13:27

I think now it's a little bit different, you know, obviously divers are still very, very popular. But you know, monta has a very cool field watch mark to has field watches some. You know Laurier has a dress watch. So there there's a lot more variety now than there was when we started, but back then it was literally divers. That was it. You know that was pretty much it, but we love that we did. We didn't mind that. We just really enjoyed the functionality and the look of dive watches. So for us to venture out and do things like field watches and pilot watches was a really big deal for us. Now it doesn't seem like like, you know, it's like not a big deal now, but back in 2019, when we put our first field watch out, real like holy crap, this is really different. You know, this is groundbreaking for us.

Blake Rea: 14:13

One could argue that all the good micro brands started off as their first watch being like a diver. Yeah, oh yeah.

Wesley Kwok: 14:20

Yeah, yeah, I mean divers sell because that's just that's kind of what micro brand enthusiasts like you know.

Blake Rea: 14:26

Vintage style divers.

Wesley Kwok: 14:28

Yeah, so that's not to say we'll never do a dress watch, but you know our, our main focus is, is always really been on durability and quality. You know, and to some degree that was at our detriment because we never really we never really got good at like the whole story telling thing, which is probably the most important thing you need when you start, when you sell watches, because you have to sell a brand in order for people to, you know, to want to buy your stuff. That's right, but you know we're we've never really been great storytellers. We've always been like artists. You know, we always identified primarily as artists, like musicians and now designers.

Wesley Kwok: 15:05

So we always focused since, since the very first watch, we always focused on just getting the quality as high as we can. You know, which is Arguably most brands try to get. You know, obviously, the better the quality, the better the brand will be right, because we're in spreads and we check rate goes down and yada, yada, yada. But I think that that there's certain objective ways of determining good quality Watches and there are a lot of things that we can do to try to scale that quality across our line Consistently, and that's really been what we focus on, like basically the not so sexy part of running a watch business. Right, it's not the design, it's not the storytelling, it's the okay. How can we make sure that all the polish emphers are the same across our entire line of watches? How can we make sure that all these movements are regulated within 10 seconds a day? Right, all this stuff that takes time and effort and networking and finding the right suppliers and the right technicians.

Blake Rea: 16:09

Yeah, when I was at the wind up watch fair, like I was obviously at my first moment, I was at San Fran, I was actually working with the dealer and and, obviously, like I handle watches almost every day, right, like I would handle some Like 200, 300, I even had like a half a million dollar watch and the boutique, and so, obviously, like my thing is like the feel of a watch, you know the way the crown works, like the handling, the materials, the weight, like you know the attention to detail. And when I went around and not to knock the micro brand space, but and I'll Pick myself up here in a second but I noticed there was a lack of regard for what I define as quality. It's like, hey, this is watch is designed like crazy, like it's all. It's all designed focused.

Blake Rea: 17:02

It's not necessarily quality focused and there's a, there's a two, a few brands that have exceptions, right, and you know one of them and I'm glad you're here, you are the one, I'd say you fairer, and that's a plug in the other other brands, but you and fairer were the two that really stuck out that I was just like Wow, you know, like these guys actually take the quality approach instead of the design approach, like qualities first, design, second Right and the other other brands. Is design first, quality third, fourth Right, marketing is yeah right and I'll piggyback on that as well.

Justin Summers: 17:39

You know I completely agree with Blake is saying the quality feel of you guys's watches are, you know, fantastic, but I think that you have found your own little niche for how your watches are designed and how they're styled. There's not a whole lot of people out there that look like you guys's watches, which I really enjoy. I was telling Blake, you know I I've seen your duality. I don't know exactly when you guys released that first one, probably within the past two years or so 2019, 2019, okay. So I saw it probably back in 2020 whenever I was bored and sitting on my computer during cove, and so I was doing a bunch of research and you know I found it just really cool. You know it kind of had the sandwich dial, loom, everything. You know the dual crown, you know the diver style. I thought it was a beautiful watch. There was nothing else out there that looked like it.

Justin Summers: 18:26

And then you know, like I said, it's really a testament to the you know the craft that you guys have made, that you guys have really cool looks and the quality of the builds. So you know, I know that you're talking about all you know. You know we're just you were artists in a different way, but I think you guys have hit a pretty spot on that. You've got a unique product. Now I'm curious for you, wesley, to kind of segue into something different how do you guys get the names for each of your models, because I know that they're. You know You've got the avalan series, the sectors, the retrospects. Do you guys, do you and Colin just kind of, like you know, have a beer and talk about a name? Are they derived from somewhere or how do you get them?

Wesley Kwok: 19:02

Well, yes, to the beer part. For sure, we're drinking a lot of beer these days for inspiration, especially during, like, the design phase. But they're usually they're named after exactly what it is right, so that is to say, when the Contro, for example, when that was first Developed. We're trying to figure out what name to give it and we knew that we wanted it to be a traveler's watch, right, something that's, you know, obviously hardy and water-resistant. But we didn't want it to just have a dive bezel on there. So we put a poor men's GMT, right the 12 hour bezel on there, because we thought that would be ideal for someone that travels frequently. Back then they didn't have the jumping hour Viota Movement yet. So especially back then, when you know, when you had Swiss GMTs that didn't have a jumping hour or you could just do a three-hander with a poor men's bezel, that to us just made a little bit more sense. And we also. We did surveys and pretty much everyone said they preferred a basically a dive watch but with a bi-directional 12 hour bezel. So when it came to the naming part we were just like okay, how do you travel? Planes, planes leave contrails, that it's that simple. The sector series, literally. We wanted to make watches that had sector dials at different different iterations of sector dials too. Right, like the field watch has a raised sector, the at least the first skin diver had a depressed sector. We wanted bigger sectors, like on the sector deep we, so just like all these different types of sector dials so we called it the sector series, you know.

Wesley Kwok: 20:39

So it's really like pretty straightforward, because the only one that is a little more convoluted or a little bit more Esoteric, let's say, is the Avalon, and that one was because we were. So there's actually I'm in Long Beach, right? So basically, like the southern, southern part of LA, and off the coast of Long Beach there's a Catalina Island and in Catalina there's a town called Avalon and I was literally looking at a mat and then I thought it was a cool name. So I looked it up and you know, I mean I think most people probably know the story of King Arthur and that's kind of like the where there might Goes to straight, straight away from hearing Avalon, which is why the case back has X caliber on there. But yeah, that's really the only one that we thought okay, it's, it's kind of California related, king Arthur's tough, and we wanted to make this watch a really tough watch. So kind of kind of stuck.

Justin Summers: 21:36

Yeah, man, dude, that's awesome. I was gonna say I've actually been out to Long Beach. I went well watching when I was out there last time. Oh, nice, kind of in that in that Bay between Catalina Island, yeah, and that was a while because we saw this, this dolphin out there that was named bottles and it was this, a complete different tangent. Sorry everybody, but we went out there and this guy, who is a, you know, super avid well-watcher, he's like oh my god, oh my god, there's bottles. And dude, we're like what the hell is this guy talking about? Like he's went off the deep end and he's like no, no, no. He's like it's this albino dolphin that's been around in this Bay for like 25 years and it usually has this little calf dolphin that it that it keeps with it. So they're not sure if it's a. It's a male or female, because generally dolphins will travel in packs, but it'll only have its one little calf and so long story short.

Justin Summers: 22:28

I've been out there. It's a beautiful area so I know exactly what you're talking about. You know with a avalan the town name. But dude, just a funny story man. So but that's amazing. I'm I'm really like Kind of stoked that you guys have it so simple, like where you get your names from. Sometimes it's cool to hear you know a bunch of the stories like, oh, like how is this pulled? And you know there's so many like creative and convoluted ways that you can get a name. And Sometimes it's just as simple as like two plus two is four minus one is three.

Wesley Kwok: 22:56

You know, yeah, I mean you know, we we've always, like I said earlier, we're not really great story tellers and also our focus is not on the storytelling and the branding and all that, it's really on the watches and the quality, but in a way Like, in a way that is our brand, you know, I guess people, people know us, like when we go out to to wind up, for example, or we host this show intersect, which I want to come back to you in a minute on the topic of Long Beach as well but in a way it becomes our brand that we're very anti-brand, right. We're like the anti way of how traditional watch business has been grown. It's very meta. So, yeah, yeah, in a way right, and I kind of like that, right, I, I like it, not because I like being a rebel and I like being, you know, antagonistic, but more so because it Allows us to try newer, different things. And our factories are, you know, they, they know that about us as well Right, because we come to them with some pretty crazy ideas that they're like oh, you know, I don't, we've never done that before, a lot of these things that end consumers never gonna know or care about either, right, but just yeah, like changing the order of operations and building a watch, trying new things inside the watch, a lot of cool things that I can't really talk about right now, but a lot of novel, novel things, like different ways of building Movement holders and you know, just like really nerdy, geeky things that no one really cares about or will probably never see.

Wesley Kwok: 24:25

But we care about a big deal to. Yeah, I guess us three will care about it, but but it's a really big deal as far as manufacturing goes, because it basically takes 100 years of Experience and kind of turns it on its head. And these factories are kind of like man, you want us to shut down our entire line to do this one crazy idea for you guys who are a small fry, and we're like, yeah, we, that's exactly what we want you to do. That's pretty cool.

Blake Rea: 24:54

It always seems like you're always improving your watches too, when I look at your collection. So, like you're in the second iteration of the Avalon, you're in the third iteration of the retrospect, you're in the third iteration of the contrail, and then I think you're in the second iteration of the duality. So, yeah, you know, it's very few brands out there that just keep pushing Like their development of a watch. So, yeah, I'm curious to know, like what, what motivated that?

Wesley Kwok: 25:21

yeah, so those numbers are actually arbitrary, right, like the retrospect three, for example. That's actually not our third iteration, that's probably our like 17th iteration. Right, avalon two is probably our seventh iteration of that. But where we put the numbers are just kind of where we earmark. Okay, we've come far enough on all the improvements you want to make. This is what we're confident enough to put this out in to the market, right. But? But, like plenty of times, will prototype something and then just scrap it and then prototype it again, then scrap it and then just do that over and over again. It's a very like if we had investors, they'd be up our ass pretty much every every that's.

Justin Summers: 26:00

That's R&D. That's R&D in general, though, man, and that's good that you guys have that too, because it kind of keeps keeps tabs on you to make sure that you're putting out a Quality product and you're testing them.

Wesley Kwok: 26:11

Yeah, yeah, you know. But like how, how did we start doing that? I think it's. I Think it goes back to how Cullen and I bonded creatively. You know over over music. You know the songwriting process and, justin, you'll know this as well.

Wesley Kwok: 26:27

The songwriting process is iterative, you know. You start with Literally, you could start with a lyric, you could start with an idea, you could start with a chord progression, you could start with a melody, like you can come at all these different angles when you're writing a song, and it's very much the same way with a watch. You could start with a concept, you can start with the shape of an index. You can start with Literally, could even start with the color of the loom that you want. You know, like literally anything you want to, whatever that seed of an idea is. That's kind of what puts you on this path. That ends up being the contrary Avalon or whatever.

Wesley Kwok: 27:00

And you know that the approach that we took to writing and recording music, we kind of apply that to watches, to where, even though there's like a Final you know, final product, there's still something else that could be done differently, whether it's a new color or change the case shape or Do a complete overhaul, as long as the concept stays the same, right, like the contrails always going to be a traveler's watch, but the tooling and the shape of the hands and everything will be completely different, right? So yeah, we just we don't. I guess we don't take ourselves too seriously, we don't take our work too seriously. We're musicians at heart and we look at our watches like songs or like albums maybe would be a better analog. And albums can evolve, artists can evolve. John Mayer will put out a country album and then he'll put out a pop album and then he'll go down wherever his artistic mind takes him. And he's not limited because he's big enough to not be limited. Well, we're small enough to not be limited.

Justin Summers: 28:02

So yeah, yeah, it's got its pros and cons to it for sure, and once you start getting big enough, then you start to become more of an influence. Then you have to watch that, so be careful. But yeah, man, it's cool that you guys are still small enough and you know that you're making these waves and I think that you guys have a really good position that you're in to kind of segue us into something else. I'm curious, and I don't know if you can talk about this, but can you give us any insight into what has changed for the duality? I went on your website. Of course I know that you guys have it for your new and upcoming releases. I know we've talked about, you know, maybe whenever this podcast releases any certain thing that you'd like to talk about, but I've always been a big fan of that watch personally and I was just curious, as you know what made iteration to you. Know something that you can actually make you know obtainable?

Wesley Kwok: 28:51

Yeah, so the first duality came out in 2019, which is three years ago now, at least as of this recording and since then we've learned a whole lot about watch design, watch production. We've also made a lot of new connections in the industry, for, you know, as far as like engineers go especially, we tapped into a really strong network, and so the new duality a lot of the things that are changing are like aesthetic things Like, for example, the it's gonna be thinner. The indices are no longer gonna be that hybrid dial construction. It's just gonna be straight applied, but the applied indices are gonna be higher end. Then it's not gonna be like normal applied indices.

Wesley Kwok: 29:37

But the main and again, this isn't something else I don't think a lot of people are gonna care about but the main thing that we improved on are actually the crowns and the decoupling mechanism. It's just it's gonna be a lot better, and I could get into how we achieve that, but I would have to refer to like tech drawings and stuff to like show you the actual differences. I've tried to explain this in words before and it just was a fucking disaster. So, but the bottom line is that the crowns are being tweaked.

Justin Summers: 30:10

Cool. Yeah, I know I love that man and I'm a big fan of a good filling crown. I can't stand when watches like you get your hands on this really good looking watch, You're like man, that's awesome, and then you go to like unscrew it and it's just like super janky and like I hate that stuff. So it's cool that you guys are, you know, taking that and doing something with it to polish it.

Blake Rea: 30:30

Yeah, how do you see notice positioned in the whole micro brand space?

Wesley Kwok: 30:36

Oh, that's a big question.

Blake Rea: 30:38

That's the hardest question we'll typically ask yeah, so it gets easier from here.

Wesley Kwok: 30:43

I promise. Yeah, no, I mean, the reason it's tough is because I'm friends with a lot of other brands, you know, and we work with a lot of other brands too, especially on things like Intersect, the Intersect show that we put on recently in Dallas. We have one coming up here in Long Beach as well. So, you know, I have personal relationships with a lot of brands, so it's hard for me to decouple the business branding stuff with oh, these are, you know, just a bunch of my friends that we like to get drunk with whenever we do these shows together.

Wesley Kwok: 31:15

Yeah, but I think, broadly speaking, we're probably the innovation engine in the micro brand space. You know, we're doing things that no other brand does, and a lot of these discoveries are being shared with these brands, whether or not they know it, because of how our supply chain, our approach to supply chain, is a little bit different from other micro brands. Right, we can just, we'll put it that way and a lot of these things that we find work better for us, these factories apply that to other brands they work with, sometimes including larger brands too. So that's probably how I would describe notice. Right, we're the ones just that's, trying to figure out a better, easier way of doing things. Doing things better for everyone.

Blake Rea: 32:05

And so when you approach your supplier with this idea, you're like oh notice, these guys are crazy as shit. And then all your other friends can follow suit and be like oh okay, well, we can do this now, because, notice, push them.

Wesley Kwok: 32:17

Yeah, yeah, and I mean it's tough. It's a tough position to be in personally, because I am friends with a lot of these guys, like I said, and sometimes I see things that we came up with on their watches, but I can't necessarily say that, hey, you know, the reason it's on that watch is because two years ago we started this experiment here and I know your supplier and this thing that we did with that supplier, you know, started putting it across their brands. You know, and I mean a few years ago I got in a bit of trouble with another brand saying, hey, you guys can't make claims like that, and I'm like I can, but like I guess, I guess it's probably better if I don't right.

Wesley Kwok: 32:56

The micro brand industry is too small, not only on the brand side, but also like the market itself is too small for me to make grandiose claims about anything. And you know, and especially if larger brands believe it or not, like the larger Swiss brands, a lot of the times they do rely on things that micro brands are doing to help guide them right To do things a new way. You know, definitely not as far as like the storytelling and how they spend money on ads and stuff like that. But as far as like actual watch production, yeah, I mean like the truth is, they don't really have a lot of connections to China, even though that a lot of their watches are made there. So the brands that have connections to China are brands like ours, like smaller, more nimble brands. And it's not just China it was just like one example but watches are also made in Thailand and in South Korea, right, japan.

Justin Summers: 33:50

Yeah, yeah, we've talked about that on a previous episode, about like how whenever I personally got into micro brands, I got into them so much because I realized what they were doing for the cost of what they were doing. You know, not only just because outsourcing and you know factory and not everything being handmade and stuff like that, because I understand a lot of micro brand companies you know will use factory settings and things. That's fine. But, however, I've always told Blake this I just I like seeing new things and you know, personally I just don't like seeing the same Submariner released in a different color, you know, every other year. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just not for me. So whenever I really got into researching watches, I was just kind of like, hey, you know, like these guys have a small enough team to where they can put in the research, they can create something completely new you can use, you know, really reliable if you want to call them that makeshift parts and create something that's unique for a really good price. And that's why I always kind of got into them and found them really interesting.

Justin Summers: 34:57

And you know some people will fight you on that and I'm sure you've heard that. Oh, like you know there's no heritage to your brand and you've only been around for five years. Every brand has to start somewhere. You know you're always going to hear that stuff, so I think that it's really cool that you know. I've seen, you know, a lot of the specs on you guys' watches. You know Sapphire casing and Miota's, which are workhorse movements. There's nothing wrong with Miota's and I just I love that about. You know micro brands in general.

Wesley Kwok: 35:22

So sorry to go on that tangent, but yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate that, you know it's. It's like our approach to running this company has been inspired by a lot of the people that came before us, like, like, again, Raven, for example, Halios up in Vancouver, Mark II, A-Vig, right, these are some of like the OG, OG micro brands that you know. For better or for worse, they're probably not the biggest ones anymore, but they were the ones that made everything that we do possible and there was a level of transparency that they had in the early days that I think had kind of started to be lost as micro brands became bigger and bigger. You know, and a lot of people don't know how big micro brands can be, Like I can think of at least three micro brands that sell more watches than JLC, for example, you know. So, as far as volume goes, Right. So, like, micro brands don't necessarily have to be that micro. As far as business goes, it's still operated very lean, right. I think that's probably a result of, I don't know, American business core, American business culture, right. Like running as lean as possible. So that's why you still get to talk to the owner and the designer and the people that you know own and run the company.

Wesley Kwok: 36:34

But, yeah, that there was a level of transparency in the early days that I think has been lost as these brands got bigger, and I honestly hate it. Right, I'm not very good at keeping secrets. My mouth is way too big. I found myself in a lot of trouble from factories and larger Swiss companies and it's I honestly just I don't care enough, you know, I mean like it's whatever To me, it's whatever. I'm still going to be making watches and our audience is always going to appreciate the things I have to say and the things that we design and put out. So, but again, sometimes it's toward detriment, but end of the day, it doesn't matter. I want to stay true to what micro brands were in the days that I started falling in love with micro brand, the micro brand industry.

Justin Summers: 37:18

That's cool, man, to switch a little bit of gear for you, and I know I was just kind of peppering on for that and this probably segues into it. But can you describe the process of designing a new watch model, so from beginning to finish? How do you sort that?

Wesley Kwok: 37:34

Yeah, so a brand new model cause, getting a new model out and a I guess a sequel is a little bit different, right? Right, reiterating on something exists before. So for when it comes to a new model, it's usually very conceptual. We always kind of we do a survey or we'll just start to notice patterns at things like at windup, for example, where people would ask the same question over and over again and then after the show we'd be like hey, did you notice that? Like 13 people were asking us if we're going to make a 36 millimeter watch? Or, you know, 20 people asked us hey, are you guys going to make a, you know, a super deep dive watch, like a submersible or something like that. So it pretty much starts there, right, we just noticed a pattern. It could also be like YouTube comments, it could be Instagram comments, could be email exchanges, just anytime we identify a pattern and what people are asking for will be like All right, I guess there's demand for this specific type of watch or this specific color or something. Let's try to make it and then we design around those parameters.

Wesley Kwok: 38:45

I think in the early days it was a little bit different In the early days because we had, you know, literally one watch, we could have taken any direction we wanted to go. So we'd be like, all right, let's make a cushion case, diver, the Avalon. Let's make a traveler's watch, the Contrault. Let's make a field watch sector field Like, because we hadn't done anything yet we could have. We could literally do anything. Now that we have a bit of a portfolio, we can't just make another field watch because that'll be kind of redundant. Yeah, exactly, it's like we already have a field watch. What will we do differently? And also, because it came out from our brains, what are we gonna do differently? That's iterative, but not the same, right?

Wesley Kwok: 39:25

So, yeah, I can tell you, it's getting harder and harder to design a new watch, but there's still a lot of things that we haven't done yet. Right, we haven't done a chronograph, for example. We haven't done a solar watch, we haven't done. I mean, yeah, there's so much we haven't done. We haven't done like a TV doll watch. There's a lot of things that we haven't done yet that we have interest in doing, but no plans to do yet.

Wesley Kwok: 39:50

But kind of in the interim, what we've done is we actually launched a program called the Design Lab and that has actually been a huge challenge for us, not only logistically but creatively. It's tough enough to design something new right. But when we open up the Design Lab to Matt Farah, for example, from the smoking tire or we worked with Redbar earlier this year as well right. When we opened up the design table to other heads, other people that have different ideas, that's even harder right. Because now it's not only about getting all the ideas on the table but distilling the ones that are good and the ones that are shit and actually making the final watch. So the Design Lab has been a blessing in disguise, because it's challenged us in that way and it's given us a lot of ideas for things that we can do in the future as well.

Justin Summers: 40:43

I appreciate that answer, man.

Blake Rea: 40:45

I know earlier you said when you got your first prototype watch together, the first notice piece, you said that using Swiss movements was kind of the worst thing for you. I mean, if I understood you correctly, can you describe why you're not using Swiss movements and how those experiences helped further advance your choice of Miota or whatever? Sure.

Wesley Kwok: 41:11

Yeah, so the first time we used a Swiss movement was using the STP111, which was supposed to be an upgrade on the ETA2824 architecture, right? So all of us nerds know that the 224, yeah, you have the Solida, you have the STP and you have now Aranda and they're all kind of like based on the same architecture. Dimensions are the same, thickness is the same, some have one less drill, some have one more drill or something like that. But what a lot of enthusiasts and watch buyers don't know is that there is a fundamental flaw to that movement, which is the reverser gear and the keyless works. So reverser gear is unique to that architecture. Keyless works is pretty much all the automatic Swiss movements SW300s, what's the GMT? The 330, sw200, and then all the counterparts from ETA, stp, whatever.

Wesley Kwok: 42:11

And for us in the early days, because of how much time we had to spend studying supply chain and talking to all the different suppliers, we didn't think that spending our time fixing Swiss movements was well A. We didn't even think that that would have had to happen because we thought you get it directly from the supplier STP being the supplier, we thought that it'd be perfect from the factory. We're happy to adjust it and regulate it in-house, and that's fine. But having to deconstruct the reverser gear, clean it, relubricate it, reassemble it, it takes way too long when we have to spend time doing other things in the building case.

Justin Summers: 42:50

You hear the Swiss kind of moniker and it has this prestige to it, and then you realize, oh crap, we're still going to have to fix half these things anyway.

Wesley Kwok: 42:58

Yeah yeah, exactly, straight from the factory, right, whereas when it comes to Seiko or Miota, coming straight from the factory runs a lot closer to our spec than an ETA would right or a Solita would. That's not to say we stopped working with them. We're still partners with both Solita and what they're well, I can get into the design lab thing a little bit more later because we are working with a Swiss supplier for our design lab projects. But the whole thing about the Swiss-made label is that we thought it would be smart to have a Swiss-made option for our first watch and it did sell better than our Seiko alternative. But we made way less money on that one Because the cost of the movement was not that far apart, but the follow-up cost of having to repair all the movements that was really expensive. Yeah, shoot, yeah. And ultimately, when it comes to watches and I think business in general it's not about making money again, right, I think when I talk about it I need to be clear about that, because what I say and what people hear are two separate things. But I want to be clear that the whole point of using good movements I don't care if it's Swiss or Japanese or Chinese or Indian or whatever. The whole point is that we have to align our incentives with the people that are putting their hard-earned money behind our product and unfortunately, what we found with this first run was that the Swiss didn't have their interests aligned with us and the consumer. They spend way too much money on the branding of Swiss-made and not enough money in actually making a good, solid workhorse product that is bulletproof, the same way the Japanese do. So that's really the only reason why we haven't put a Swiss movement in another one of our watches until this year, and that was when we found out that Citizen owns this Swiss subsidiary in.

Wesley Kwok: 44:59

They're called yep yep and it's essentially a Miota 9015 or 9039, depending date no date and what they did was identical construction, identical parts, identical architecture, but made and assembled in Switzerland. So For us that solved all the keyless works and reverse a gear issues. So we took a risk on them and we actually were. We're running a bunch of tests right now down the road that my partners place and we have about 150 movements that we're running and making sure that they're actually good Before we put them in watches.

Wesley Kwok: 45:39

But that was on request from Matt Farah from the smoking tire. He actually he requested so proud initially because he liked the idea of like a Swiss Japanese crossover. It's not. It's not that dissimilar from, like the him being a car guy. Right, he's thinking from auto point of view, that's right. Toyota Supra is basically a BMW architecture, right? So he likes that idea of like a European East Asian crossover kind of collaboration and, so proud, had done that in the past.

Wesley Kwok: 46:09

Right, the 810 was a architecture that was designed by Seiko and then, so proud, licensed it and Eventually bought out the entire design from Seiko. But then it talking to some of our friends that had used that movement in the past. They're like, yep, stay away from that shit. There's a reason Seiko sold it. But this was this was a good alternative because I'm a lot of good friends that in the higher up leadership that Not LGP at that citizen. So I had access to the big guys at Citizen to ask them hey, tell me the truth. Ljp versus Miota. You know we're still gonna be using Miota. You know that, no matter what, we're gonna be using the other products. But can we feel safe going into Le Jou parade movements as well? And they said, yep, you're not gonna have any issues. So took a risk. So far so good, but I guess we'll see in a year. Let's do this again in a year, so that we can we can follow up.

Justin Summers: 47:02

Yeah, that's right Question, Cool man. So while we're on the subject of movements and things, you know what materials and technologies are you guys most excited about incorporating Into, you know, your future releasing watches?

Wesley Kwok: 47:17

Okay, cool, I'm glad you asked that.

Wesley Kwok: 47:20

This is one of my my personal projects that I've been working on, and also the timing of this the release of this episode is gonna be perfect to line up with it. But so the sector deep I'm sure you guys know that watch, because that's probably our biggest at least this year has been the biggest footprint for us. It keeps selling out, no matter how many times we restock. We've done three restocks ready and every single time it just it goes in like a few days. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna retool it and do it in a titanium case, and in the titanium case we're we're developing this new movement holder that's both anti mag and anti shock. So there's a proprietary blend of this rubber plastic Hybrid that we're gonna be putting around the movement and then we're gonna put a soft iron cage behind that as well to further anti mag. So that's a pretty cool innovation.

Wesley Kwok: 48:15

We're gonna run a bunch of lab tests and then we're also probably gonna partner with another brand to put this out there. I can't take who they are yet, but we're negotiating the the you know the business relationship stuff right now. So we'll do the lab tests and we're gonna partner with them to do field tests with their audience in in the real world, because their audience is more like you know, not Computer divers, they're like in the real world doing real dives. And you know, overseas yeah, military guys and stuff like that.

Justin Summers: 48:45

Yeah, that's, that's the best, the best type of people to be doing that stuff with as well, because it's the people that are using those things on the daily, that are out there in the field using them, that you want their opinion.

Wesley Kwok: 48:55

Yeah, so that's probably what I'm most excited for.

Wesley Kwok: 48:59

And then we're also gonna continue iterating on nodex, our extension, clasp, the cloud, partnered with a.

Wesley Kwok: 49:06

Actually two really big brands we recently partnered with again, I can't say who they are exactly yet Because I don't know if we're gonna have this out by the time this episode comes out, but obviously, if it's out by the time this episode comes out, you'll know who they are. One of them is a Swiss brand, one of them is American and yeah, so just like really having fun doing these Research projects, you know, we we've actually been approached by a couple brands now that have ideas about things that they want to do but they don't really have the capabilities to. But we have the capabilities to, but we don't have the idea or the design done. So we've been contacted by them to kind of partner on getting some of these Concepts across the finish line for them. So that's a lot of fun too. But again, I'm signed to NDA so I can't say who those brands are, what the project is. But, yeah, my personal favorite one is this anti-shock, anti-mag cage that we're building out.

Blake Rea: 49:57

That's awesome.

Wesley Kwok: 49:58

Yeah, there's, can't wait.

Blake Rea: 50:00

Nobody really considers the design of movement holders because traditionally they've been just like these little plastic, or sometimes steel, little rings and there's just never really been, yeah, much thought behind them beyond that, just to keep the movement from Going forward and backwards and up and down. Yeah, so on on the topic of design, where do you guys draw your inspiration from for your design? It sounds like it's very abstract.

Wesley Kwok: 50:25

If, yeah, yeah, piecing that properly, it could be literally anything from you know, from like a color that we see when we're driving down the highway. Right, we're driving down the 405 and we see a cool Like Porsche or something. Right, it's always a Porsche, yeah, yeah.

Justin Summers: 50:40

Yeah, I don't know, it's tough because we don't.

Wesley Kwok: 50:42

We don't really we're not designers by trade, like we never went to design school or anything. So even if I knew where the inspiration came from, I would really know how to articulate it properly. That's still awesome, but you know what we're? Obviously we're big watch guys outside of our own brand, so I get inspiration from a lot of my friends. To be honest, just like other other brands in the space, I like a lot of the things that they do, like, actually, all day. I put this watch on for this interview, but all day I was actually wearing the foster 11. At most I'm wearing other watches more than I've am my own Designs, you know. So I get a lot of inspiration from from doing, from what I've been doing, inspiration from from doing from well, from talking and and seeing my friends and just seeing their work as well. So there's that, at least as far as like the watch inspirations. But yeah, like colors, for example, we anything we see, any cool color we see in the real world yeah.

Justin Summers: 51:41

Cool, I was gonna say speak speaking of color, and this one's off the records, blake, we don't have this in your questions, but I'll go on a little tangent. The unity model, I love. I love the colors that you guys used for the unity, the topaz, and then like the pink color, that blue is amazing. The blue, yeah, the blue is sweet. I'm personally I'm a big fan of like rose color dials or like salmon color. So the the pink is just, I love it so much. But where where did you guys get the inspiration for the color of those two? Just while we're on that, that subject.

Wesley Kwok: 52:12

Yeah, so that was just like from from nature. When we first designed that watch we were, it was in the summer here in LA, you know, that's not to say the winter is any worse. It's nice year round, but I'd say, isn't it always summer? Yeah, but yeah, we, we just it's a very colorful place during the summer. So we're like, let's try to Figure out what colors you want to do. And we actually, to be honest, we had a whole palette of colors that we wanted to make. But you know, the big challenge with the unity is the ceramic insert on the outside. Uh, because ceramic is just a pain in the ass to work with. So those two colors were the only two, uh, ceramic inserts that actually ended up making it to a place that we were happy with. But we're still experimenting with other other colors that again inspired just by nature the color flowers yeah, mostly flowers, bugs and birds and stuff too, and that makes sense.

Justin Summers: 53:04

You have to match the, the, you know ceramic bezel, to the, the dial and things like that too, and I know that's a. That's a whole thing in itself.

Wesley Kwok: 53:11

Yeah, yeah, I mean we're we're one of the first brands to come out with that that it's not really tiffani blue. It's a little bit darker than tiffani blue, but that blue color ceramic and the yield rate on that is still only like 40 percent, right? So we have to make more than double the amount of inserts for the amount of watches that we're making. So it's just, it's one of those again, one of those weird Little nerdy things that I don't think anyone's ever going to know, nor they're going to care about. They'll buy the watch if it's nice, but it's one of those things that we're like. I mean that color has to be exactly that color that we see in our head. So we're not going to print it out unless we achieve that color.

Justin Summers: 53:48

So I love it, man. And the date color, the date match. You know, yeah, color match date will excuse me. Yeah, it's a beautiful looking watch man. Appreciate that, thank you.

Blake Rea: 53:58

It sounds like you guys are big on on qc, so it's kind of perfectly segues into where we were hoping to go, like tell us about some of your quality control processes. And you know, it sounds like she said Colin was running like 150 movements right now or something like that. So, so it seems like you guys like spend more time in qc than than anything else.

Wesley Kwok: 54:22

Yeah, I mean that this year has been kind of weird for us because we've done a whole bunch of different iterations of the qc process. It used to be that we would qc everything and repair everything ourselves because we just didn't know how to train other people how to do it. This year we hired three technicians, all from more, more or less different backgrounds. Like one guy is primarily a seiko mater, one of them was trained actually, both of them were trained in like swiss swiss watchmaking school, and what we found was that, you know, obviously the guy that's a mater isn't going to be able to service movements, but the yield rate that we were getting from him was way higher than our two swiss trained watchmakers. And that's not not like not being Degrading or that's going on to them at all is just they're kind of looking for for different things, they're kind of trained to look for for different things. But what we decided to do just recently actually which is why cullen has 150 movements running in his bedroom is we actually want to go back to taking control of everything ourselves and Basically we will go through the inspection process for every single part and then every single assembled watch and then from there what we'll do.

Wesley Kwok: 55:38

All the stuff that needs to be fixed, we put it all into a database and then we send these watches out and matches to all of our three techs and that they kind of balance that Rework process.

Wesley Kwok: 55:50

That's what we call it reworks right where they have to like take out the hand because it has like dust or something or whatever. Whatever they have to do, it flattens the the amount of work that they have to do, because warranty also comes in ebbs and flows. So they'll do a warranty work and then when there's a kind of a downturn in warranty claims, they'll have stuff to prop up their workload, which is the reworks that they have to do. And really the biggest challenge here and this was something we really had to shift our mindset around was that in order for this model to work, we had to plan out 12 to 18 months of production instead of six months of production, which is what most brands do now. We needed it to have like a much longer horizon so that we could give them enough stuff when warranty could still be, you know, super fast turnaround, but when there's a downturn in the amount of warranty work, they have something to prop it up that we don't need you know immediately their, their priority could still be the warranty stuff.

Blake Rea: 56:46

Wow, yeah, yeah.

Wesley Kwok: 56:49

So it's yeah, we're definitely taking on more of like the hands-on watch work ourselves, like we'll handle every single watch. We just won't fix every single watch.

Blake Rea: 56:57

Well, that's what we talked about in the past, like that's what separates you. It's like Before our discussion. I could never answer any of these questions, obviously, but for somebody like me, when I pick up your watch, I feel. I feel it. I don't know what it is or how it is, but I feel it.

Blake Rea: 57:17

Yeah, you know what I mean, and and that is the rare opportunity that you have when you get two seconds to connect with your customer through your product. Right Like that is, it's the best opportunity you could never have. Yeah, very small amount of time to do it.

Wesley Kwok: 57:33

Yeah, I guess we're doing something right then.

Blake Rea: 57:36

I would say so because I was trying to get one of the the unity watches like for my wife. I just didn't have the opportunity yet. So I'm gonna buy a notice Just waiting for the opportunity.

Justin Summers: 57:49

Yeah, so, um, I'm curious, uh, you know, while we're talking about these great things, what has been your most challenging moment In the business and how did you and colon both overcome it?

Wesley Kwok: 58:03

Yeah, if you asked me a year ago, I would have said 2018, pretty much the entire year, because that was our yeah, like like earlier I was saying about how, how we had like 2017 and 2018 to test the market and you know, figure shit out.

Wesley Kwok: 58:17

But 2018 in particular was really tough for for us as a business and for me personally, just because, like every single dollar that we maybe put back into the business right, it was still like early days re-investing everything. So just Merely surviving was very, very difficult. And then any any kind of like Like product issues that came up we would have to deal with, because we didn't have the money to pay a technician or pay a consultant or something Like we literally had to learn everything Ourselves. As we were, as we were going, for a moment it felt like like we're in an airplane. It was like it was going down and we had to like sew a parachute for ourselves. You know, yeah, like there were like moments that, like Colin and I would go 13 days straight, waking up at five in the morning and sleeping at midnight, just so that we could get all this stuff done, because of how how much work had to be done to these watches. So that's what I would say.

Wesley Kwok: 59:14

A year ago, yeah, 2018, terrible year. But uh, now I would say this year actually has been particularly hard. But, that being said, I think I'm a lot better conditioned to deal with the pressure and and you know, figuring, just generally problem solving. And the reason why is because this year we expanded the team like crazy. We don't fulfill any more watches. We still touch every watch, but we send it all up to Washington state, where the watches are fulfilled out of, and our Volume also has grown tremendously this year. So now having to, you know, balance the or to handle that volume, managing the people in Washington state and also managing our techs across the country. You know, it's a little bit of a of a challenge, uh, a whole nother beast in itself, yeah.

Wesley Kwok: 1:00:10

Yeah, yeah, you know, like, in a weird way. You know, like, in a weird way, like you would think that you hire someone to offload some work and then they're finally fully onboarded and they're doing their job. And they're doing a really, really good job. We hired great people to do, to work for us and you would think that that is off your plate and you don't have to deal with it anymore. But you know, oddly, it feels like the work this year has piled up right. It feels like there's more tasks. My to-do list is growing even faster now. Don't have it to result of having to manage people now or just because the business has grown to a certain scale or we have a certain amount of momentum. Now it's hard to really nail down why or where the work is coming from, but it's something you could think of at once.

Wesley Kwok: 1:00:59

Yeah, it could be all of it right, it could be all of it.

Justin Summers: 1:01:02

The heyman diamonds are formed under pressure.

Wesley Kwok: 1:01:04

Yeah and you know, the best thing is that I get to work with my best friend and the team that we put together. We've been personal friends with them the entire time. Before they worked for us, fulfillment in Seattle area is my mom and my brother, so I had personal relationships with these people before they started working with us and I think that that's a great thing, because now I get to spend time with them. I know people say you never want to combine business and personal life, but at least at this point I'm only going to combine personal and business life because if it's an excuse to talk to you or hang out with you and work with you, don't need to work on building up trust. I already trust you, you already trust me. We have the same goals, right.

Justin Summers: 1:01:51

It's cool that you can do those things and have them together, and it doesn't work for everybody, but you have to learn how to separate that stuff as well and respect both your personal life schedule as well as your work life. Me and Blake have talked about this as well. Outside of doing the lonely wrist, this is more of a passion project, but ultimately it's work for us. We're friends outside of this, but we've had to set those very strict standards of when are we doing this, when can we do this? Of course, we don't step on each other's toes and get mad at each other, because every time that we speak it's just like hey bro, what's been going on? What watch are you wearing? You learn to separate those and it's good that you guys can find that cohesion.

Blake Rea: 1:02:36

I guess you could say We've been working together for so long. A long time ago I think, we worked together for at least four years and we kind of separated and did our own thing. Then, I think about it, a year ago, he came on board with the company I work at now and then we got into watches together and we've just always been working together on everything. We've had a few ventures that didn't work out together and yeah. So it was like all right, dude, you ready to get your ass kicked again?

Justin Summers: 1:03:11

You missed 100% of the shots you don't take. We'll start again.

Blake Rea: 1:03:16

Yeah, and that's how it all came to be. I feel like and it sounds like you guys have a lot of core values, as we do as a content creator we just want to stay grounded and we don't ever want to compromise on our integrity If that comes at a cost of pissing off somebody who may have wanted to come on the podcast or who may have been feeding us content for the website. I'm not going to prop you up and I'm not going to do your dirty work, because there's a lot of that in the watch industry. There's a lot of shady shit that goes down. If you listen three or four podcasts ago, you'll know what we're talking about to a degree. But yeah, and that's kind of where we stand too.

Wesley Kwok: 1:04:19

But that's the thing that makes it a lot easier to run an organization that's growing very fast when you have the core principles that have always guided you as the founder and your partner. Those core principles don't have to be explained over and over and over again to every new hire, because, especially if you're hiring people that have been there in the journey with you our press marketing guide Buffalo, for example he was a customer back in 2018-2019, he was a customer first and then became friends and then now he works for us you don't have to explain it to people that already know what NoDis stands for or whatever brand, lonely Rest or another watch brand. This applies to literally any organization. If the people you hire already know what you stand for, what your goals are and what the market knows you for, onboarding is easy as pie.

Blake Rea: 1:05:20

It's crazy and I've never really told Justin this, but I get a lot of direct messages from people like readers and stuff, and they're just mostly podcast listeners. Our podcast is by far our biggest platform right now, once it gets a lot of traffic. But we have in the backlog Justin and I have almost 130 blogs. We need to get live. We're just trying to. We're backed up. I actually have a lot of people that genuinely like will send me a DM. It's like thank you for being an actual outlet that is so grounded because a lot of these other media channels they're doing paid publicity, they're doing paid watch reviews.

Justin Summers: 1:06:17

We just like talking dude yeah.

Blake Rea: 1:06:21

I mean, we've never told somebody to not send, and a lot of the content that we produce is very alternative. We don't do a lot of watch reviews. At some point we'll get there, we're working on it, right. But I don't think there's ever going to be a day where we can take a watch in and then somebody can say, hey Blake, hey Justin, say this about a watch. I'll be like dude, go to hell. I'll send your watch back to you. No, thank you, right, because it's on our means, right. We control what we put out and our reputation is on the line with every podcast, in a way, every article, and people really respond. Well, I get a lot of gratitude, which I never really expected.

Blake Rea: 1:07:08

This is early into the game. We are so new, we're so new. The amount of people we've had on it's just crazy.

Justin Summers: 1:07:17

It's been a fun ride so far.

Wesley Kwok: 1:07:20

Embrace it. Yeah, like I said earlier, the industry is small enough where, if you do any shady shit, people are going to find out. Somehow some way people are going to find out whether you're a podcast or a writer, a watch brand, a watch brand owner. If you do something weird, people won't know.

Justin Summers: 1:07:40

Yeah, I'll switch gears for a second. We don't want to keep you too much longer. Wesley, I know we're over an hour now and you probably got a busy life and you got to get back to it. How do you envision the future of notice? What's coming next?

Wesley Kwok: 1:07:54

Yeah, I think I alluded to this a little bit earlier, but our focus has always been, again, supply chain, quality, innovation the things that make us excited. Ironically again, if we had shareholders I would not. I'd probably get a year full after this interview. But we don't want to grow too much more. I think we're at a place now where we're happy with the number of watches we sell. We're happy with the number of customers we have. We're selling out of our watches pretty fast. We're not the biggest watch company out there. That's all Rolex and Tudor-level stuff.

Wesley Kwok: 1:08:34

It just doesn't excite me. I don't want to be a business person. I don't want to have to deal with the business side of things too much more than I already have to. I want to innovate more. I think I want to probably put more time and more resources into doing new, cool, innovative things. Especially, we can bring more work back to the US. All our stuff is already assembled here, which is probably the best we could do, at least if we come from a standpoint of aligning incentives with our customers. If we want to deliver the best quality possible, we have to still rely on a lot of international supply chains At a certain point. I would love to figure out a way to do small batches of watches in the US. Again, I don't know if that's going to happen. I want to be very clear that it's an idea. It's one of 100 ideas that I have. But really innovation and breaking the mold the more we can do that and the more time I can personally put into that, the happier I think I'll be.

Wesley Kwok: 1:09:41

I don't feel like notice is here to sell 50,000 watches a year. I feel like we're here to set an example for what's possible for brands that are going to do pretty much everything better than we are ever going to do things down the line. Notice could be the I don't know like Squalay made cases for Blancpain at one point. It wasn't because Blancpain needed them per se, it's because they just couldn't do it better than Squalay. At the time they were like the innovation powerhouse. I don't mind being Squalay. Not the Squalay today, the original one, not the one that was sold and bought and sold and bought 50 times and it's a bastardized form now, the original version of them. Or a brand like Gruen, for example, another brand that's defunct, but they were an innovation powerhouse back in the day. They're the reason why brands like Rado and Hamilton are still around, even exists Yep Right, so I don't mind being a defunct brand Again. Shareholders are going to hate me.

Justin Summers: 1:10:53

Interesting way of putting it.

Wesley Kwok: 1:10:55

Yeah, no, but seriously, I just want to innovate. I want to do more cool things. I want to do more fun things. I want to collaborate more with other brands and other designers, maybe even with enthusiasts. I want this little corner of the industry to be fun and to be creative and to be new and refreshing at all times. That's the hardest part Just staying excited. And staying exciting is extremely difficult to do when you do this day in and day out.

Blake Rea: 1:11:28

I'm sure that's where the design lab is at.

Wesley Kwok: 1:11:32

Yeah, For you that void.

Wesley Kwok: 1:11:35

Yeah for sure. Yeah, we get really cool projects from, for example, the smoking tire was a huge challenge because Matt Farah wanted us to do something from the ground up. But, man, it was so fun, like going to his garage designing a watch in the middle of his garage with all these $250,000 cars that won out of like nine in the entire country. That's an experience. And I literally texted this to Matt the other day a picture of Matt Farah at our booth because we did a show at his garage. It was like cars and coffee kind of meetup and Matt Farah was working our booth for like a good chunk of the time and I took a picture of it and I sent that picture to Matt Farah and I was like yo, these are the memories. I'm going to look back at in like 10 to 15 years and just smile. So that was, I mean, was and still is an incredible project because we're still working on new things. We're working on a new color, working on a new, totally like ground up new watch as well.

Wesley Kwok: 1:12:40

But then we also get stuff like trying to think what am I allowed to talk about? All right, so we got, we got approached by a SWAT team, florida, and they want to do a group watch for their SWAT team. They want to do like 45 units and I'm like, okay, what do you need? Well, they need something really hearty, something that's water resistant and shock resistant, but they also need a GMT hand. So I'm like, all right, I have a few ideas. So you know, like everything from the Matt Farah to like people that actually have a use case. So you have, like, the designers and you have the people in the field that have a functional need and I can I can work throughout that entire spectrum and that's a lot of fun.

Justin Summers: 1:13:24

That's awesome yeah.

Blake Rea: 1:13:26

Yeah, we didn't have much more for you. The final question I mean you kind of Already kind of touched on it, but you know I mean future releases, yeah, anything innovating, innovative that you're working on, that you know you can put out there, that you could talk about, that you could give us a taste of.

Wesley Kwok: 1:13:48

I Think I talked about this, all this stuff I'm allowed to talk about, but can I talk about intersects for just a, for a quick minute? You please stage? Okay, cool, yeah, so intersect is a watch show. That is that. Well, we started it here in LA back in 2021, but that like it. Actually, the very first unofficial Intersect was in 2018. We basically we launched the Avalon and then we emailed all the orders in LA or in like the surround, so like down to San Diego and then up to, like, I think, ventura. We emailed all the people that ordered in that, that region and we said hey, if you guys want to pick up your watch, we know it's a drive for a lot of you, for the majority of you, but if you want to pick up the watch in person, we'd love to open a tab at this, this location at this time and it was in the middle of K-Town here in LA at this, like greasy, like dive bar, like we walked in and Colin I were like we looked each other like yo, we probably should have picked a nicer place, but we again, we couldn't afford it. It was 2018. So we walked into this like beer stained bar, the bottom of our shoes were sticky and Met up with like seven other guys that picked up their Avalon. It was like the weirdest, weirdest scenario to find ourselves it. But that was like where we got the idea of doing this thing annually.

Wesley Kwok: 1:15:12

And then pandemic happens a couple years later and 2021 comes around and there's this huge demand for for events again. So we started to invite other brands to our annual get-together. I mentioned Raven earlier. He came out, he flew out here, he Along with Mark two. He didn't mark two didn't come out, but sent a bunch of watches and people loved it. They had a great time.

Wesley Kwok: 1:15:38

And then last year we did it again and it was Probably like the best get-together I've personally ever been to. But we had a whole bunch of brands come out. Raven again came out, seals, foster yeah, a bunch of different brands came out and some other brands sent stuff out as well. This year what we decided to do is expand it across the country. So we did one in Dallas last month. We had over 400 people come to that one. Wow, 10, 10 brands. We hosted it at Jack Mason's showroom in deep Ella. That was so much fun and we're gonna keep doing the LA one.

Wesley Kwok: 1:16:13

That happens every November. So we're gonna do it November 11th here in long in downtown Long Beach, and we're bringing in some really cool brands. Yeah, jack Mason and and Foremex are gonna be coming out, haraj Mark to bill yow himself, and mark two is gonna come out and you know, that's another. That's another one of those cases where, like bill Yow has been a hero of mine since Like literally the fulcrum back in like 2016 or 2015, like that was the watch that got me, you know, like neck and deep into the world of watches. So he'll be coming out, dryden's gonna be coming out and then next year, in March prior, I think, I think it's a third or fourth weekend of March we're gonna be doing intersect Atlanta. So this is probably our biggest. One of our biggest projects in the next few years is to put this show on around the country, make it bigger, make it better, bring more brands and figure out ways to make it more fun for the, the enthusiasts that come out to Hang out with us.

Blake Rea: 1:17:15

Yeah, I'll definitely be there. I just added it actually to my calendar.

Justin Summers: 1:17:18

So can do it here.

Blake Rea: 1:17:20

Anything you need. I mean, obviously, if you guys are doing the road show. I mean, you know, like you guys are essentially in my backyard.

Wesley Kwok: 1:17:28

Yeah, interest like Vegas maybe. Yeah why not? Why not, let's talk, let's talk.

Blake Rea: 1:17:37

I'm gonna go a lot of event opportunities. These days I'm pretty much turning into a party promoter now, like not gonna lie.

Wesley Kwok: 1:17:48

Yeah, I mean that's that's. I think you'll start to find that in the watch industry, like you'll start to work on a lot of things that are not watch related at all.

Justin Summers: 1:17:55

People just like to get together and just talk and you know, yeah, relay and check out watches and it's a fun crowd.

Blake Rea: 1:18:02

Yeah, you know it all revolves around the same passion. Right like this, it's very Cohesive.

Justin Summers: 1:18:11

I don't know cars for this, but music watches cars, guns, watches.

Wesley Kwok: 1:18:18

Yeah, beer, beer.

Blake Rea: 1:18:21

We all. You might be my next project.

Wesley Kwok: 1:18:23

Maybe, maybe next year We'll do a notice brewing. Yeah, I can't sit still, as you guys can tell, I just can't sit still. I'm always like I always want to do something new.

Blake Rea: 1:18:33

Well, that's actually super funny because I actually used to work in. I actually started marketing for a beer company, like that was where I might. My introduction to marketing was at a beer brewery and we actually sold it Ingredients and equipments to brewery. So we weren't really like a brewery, but we were a supplier to them, yeah, and During that I picked up home brewing. So I've been brewing beer for probably like 10 years now, like I literally in my garage is like a little mini and it's good oh.

Blake Rea: 1:19:05

Yeah yeah, try to do it for iterations I put together this like it was like a hybrid beer, but it was like 40% fermented honey and like 60% fermented malt, which essentially is like a braggat. And and then, yeah, I used a bunch of like the like super IPA style hops, you know Like Citra and galaxy, and then I used, ironically, like a lager yeast To like make it so smooth. Right it, I've got some. So if you come to Vegas, I've got some.

Wesley Kwok: 1:19:42

So basically, what you're saying is intersect Vegas is gonna be fully catered by by your home brew beer. I don't know yet the open bar. Can you make enough for 400 people?

Blake Rea: 1:19:53

Jesus Christ. Well, actually, ironically, there's a lot of breweries out there that do contract brewing. So you just go and just say, hey, I want to buy X amount of volume, and here's the recipe, and then they have a formula like a calculator yeah, that essentially was big, okay, it's gonna cost this much for this much beer, and it's actually a lot. It's very easy, it's like it's very. It's unlike any other industry because, like, alright, well, you just start with your water and your base ingredients and, like you know, you have these big, these big fermenters and these big kettles and, you know, have to fill them up all the way. You know what I mean. Like, tell me how much beer you want. Like, I can make that much beer. I can make five gallons, I can make 500 gallons again, depending on the brewery capacity, right. But it's unlike any other industry where where you can go from here to there, like as long as they have the resources, right, oh, wow it's not like they notice IPA then so it's possible, it's very possible.

Blake Rea: 1:20:54

I mean I've got a million IPA recipes on my computer that could be branded as notice IPA amazing. So when I come I know I'm coming to LA, yeah, about 13 days. It takes me about 20 days to pop a beer out. So okay to give or take. So we're gonna have to reschedule that.

Wesley Kwok: 1:21:16

So yeah, okay.

Blake Rea: 1:21:18

I'll work on something though.

Wesley Kwok: 1:21:19

Yeah, I mean you're close enough, and I haven't been in Vegas in over a year now.

Blake Rea: 1:21:23

So yeah, well, whenever you come, I'd yeah be happy to to host you whatever you need for me awesome.

Wesley Kwok: 1:21:30

I appreciate that.

Blake Rea: 1:21:31

Yeah, we've got a lot of resources here, like for like, even you know, the watch society based watch society, which is the new project that we haven't really talked too much about publicly. I mean, we're still in the back Back process here with GC and everybody else, but, um, but yeah, I mean we've got a lot of people that are coming together for this and it's very collaborative, is very Is. Yeah, it's just gonna be so amazing cool.

Wesley Kwok: 1:22:02

Yeah, I look forward to it.

Blake Rea: 1:22:04

Let's end the podcast on a strong note, so Thank you everybody for listening. Wesley, hang out if you want. We're gonna stop the recording and From from here, see you guys on the next one. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone.