Nivada Grenchen teaches us about watch creation
This is how the kind of ice blue or glacier blue or glacial blue Antarctic spider came about. It started because I was looking once again at vintage watches. That’s always a great place for people to start. It gives them a look at history rather than just modern marketing. And one of the watches that we always look at are these chronos from the 60s and around that era because that’s when they kind of really took off, that’s when they were developed. That’s when they became much more usable by the general public.
One of these watches that came about early on was from a brand called Nivada, which was started in the 1920s by Jacob Schneider, who developed it in Grenchen in Switzerland. Now, if you talk to vintage guys, they’re going to recognize Nivada, and they’re going to recognize Croton, which is the American name under which it was sold in the US. They were very popular because they were a nice looking, forward thinking modern chronograph maker fairly early on in the game. And as was the case for many watches, they were a small company.
I happened to end up talking with the guys who have started up Nivada once again, or Nivada Grenchen. And we got to talking about doing a collaboration. There were a few people doing collaborations on the chronographs that they do, and they’re really nice, and they give you a good amount of flexibility if you want to create something.
Then I saw something else.
I saw what they call the Antarctic spider.
Now this was a watch that initially was produced, as many were, for exploration, that kind of a “tough watch” thing. They created their first of what they called a “waterproof automatic watch” in the 50s and they point to it being used on the American Navy’s Deep Freeze One expedition when they went to the South Pole from 1955 to 1956. Which is what many watch companies did at the time, and this like the others was not a tough looking watch. This was what we would call a regular classic looking watch, which is what they all were at that time.
The Antarctic Spider had this kind of a sunburst set of radial lines coming from the center. It had interesting use of indices. It had a very 60s type of handwriting font on it, and I just thought it was very nice. It turns out I could do a collaboration with that.
Initially, what I was looking at was kind of a cream dial because I have this thing for cream dials. And so I got some workups for different watches, including the chrono and including the F77 and including this Antarctic Spider.
When I got the actual current Antarctic Spider in person, which is silver in color on the face, I found that it had this great level of attention to detail in terms of how they did the sunray dial. It really caught the light very nicely. And so I switched because a cream dial isn’t going to, in my opinion, make that great a platform for the sunray.
We got to thinking about what color to use now that would best take advantage of the sunray and I wanted something blue. We were looking at a few different hues, one of which was what you would call a somewhat popular and trendy subdued blue-green color. A lot of people would like this but I’ve never been hugely into it. I kept thinking Antarctic and I kept thinking blue. We ended on what we are kind of calling an Antarctic ice blue dial, or the ice blue Antarctic Spider.
Antarctic ice and Arctic ice kind of take their color from different things. You don’t think of it as blue, you think of it as white. In reality though there are a lot of different shades you will see as you go through the different areas of ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic. There are greens, greys, even reds. We settled on this kind of a light blue and they produced the sample dial and when it came out it look gorgeous. I was initially concerned about it when I saw it in photos, about the fact that I didn’t think the sunburst was coming out that well. This however may have been a function of the light and so they send a video with different angles and light sources.
Still, they did a little bit of work on it and the end result, when it came out, I actually found very stunning because it had a depth to it and it had a change to it in person that you didn’t see onscreen as much.
It got even better under sapphire crystal, it turned out. It kind of looks like a Fumé dial, but it’s all based on the work of the engraving of the sunray.
We had the new prototype dial put on the old watch for testing. This is why, for those of you that have seen me with the watch, it didn’t all match up. The hands had the luminescence color with kind of an aged patina but the look on the dial itself is the more white look, so non-aged.
The prototype watch was quite fun to wear and watch reactions. It catches color in so many ways, in so many different environments. I’ve had people from some really fine watchmaking companies, watchmakers, pull it off my wrist and ask me about it.
I had people at the highest level of watchmaking asking about it. And I also had people, both male and female, who just looked at it and said, Hey, that’s a really cool blue. It’s in a very simple case. And it’s on a beads of rice bracelet, which is both period-correct and pretty comfortable.
It’s just a nice somewhat unusual daily watch. And it’s kind of the start of this journey and I’m looking forward to doing more of them so that is somewhat the story of the collaboration with Nivada Grenchen and Cars And Calibres and me.
One of the things I like is that people notice different things about the watch. For example, one person noticed that that splaying of the radial lines from the center looks like the clocks we see from the 60s. Someone else said that font looks like Lamborghini’s, which also makes sense because this is a 1960s product and that was the trendy look at the time. One person liked the unusual vertical indices as a different but balanced design element.
Interesting note, the date/no date question has been pretty much split down the middle.
So all these little things just kind of come together in a watch that I don’t really expect to be appreciated by the mainstream. It was just something different that I found I liked and thought others might too. It’s only going to have 25 pieces anyway. And I thoroughly enjoyed understanding the process that people are going through. And I’m very happy to work with Nivada Grenchen on this because they have a new system in place for manufacturing and distribution that is very flexible and seems to be making enthusiasts quite happy.
So it’s kind of an easy thing to try. And I just think it’s going to be the start of a fun new journey.
