Stepping into the Wide World of Watches

This week we are beyond excited to announce our first watch, the ACR-100!

I have loved watches my whole life. It's my mom's fault, really, because she loves watches. Thusly, I've always worn a watch. Back when I was deciding what to work towards and design with BRACE, I thought that watches were so far out of my league, so unobtainable and far fetched, that I went into bracelets instead (hence BRACE Design). That is why I'm so incredibly stoked to be here and to share my very first production ready watch with you.

It has been an incredibly long and hard slog to get here though. Almost two whole years of research and development. Countless hours of practice and hand finishing. Hundreds of prototypes. Thousands of dollars sunk into tooling and parts. Plenty of failures and hurdles along the way and almost giving up. But here we are!

I didn't get in to designing this watch for the sake of making a watch, either. I tackled this project for two reasons:

The vast majority of watches out there are all clones of each other, all looking the same, all following the same rules. Classical watchmaking teaches that you make watches the same way they have always been made, and I'm over it.
I abuse my watches a lot, like I literally bang them against everything (on accident, my brain apparently doesn't know how wide I am, or where my arms are). But I love wearing luxurious mechanical watches. Unfortunately, luxury watches aren't made to handle abuse, they are made for showing not doing.

So I set out to create a watch that breaks the norms of traditional watchmaking, and not only looks and acts like a luxury watch, but can perform under and withstand heavy abuse. Utilizing almost a decade of experience designing the toughest mining equipment for literally the hardest conditions man works in, as well as the latest state of the art manufacturing and 3D printing technology, and nearly two years of research and development, I dare say that we have made that dream possible.

The ACR-100 features:

an oversized protective bezel to help protect the crystal, which in itself is made from scratch resistant sapphire glass (rank 9 on the Moh's hardness scale, just under diamonds).
an overbuilt case made from an extremely abrasion resistant stainless steel / bronze matrix.
and a newly designed, compliant "shock ring" system to insulate the watch movement (the fragile part that keeps track of time) and protect it from hard impacts that the case might receive.

Currently I'm aiming to have the first batch of watches available mid to end of July. The journey to get here has been tough and sometimes frustrating, but definitely worthwhile, and I look forward to sharing more about this in the coming month!

-Jeremy