Undertaking a completely new movement production in the Swiss watch industry of today is an extremely rare occurrence. Looking back at the last 40 years of Swiss watchmaking there has not been a brand develop their own movement at their inception. Doing such could be coined as either crazy or revolutionary. Time, costs and an immense amount of talent is needed and for investor driven brands the risks simply are too high to take on such a project.
Therefore the go to work around for most was and still is today to take a shelf movement from a supplier and together with existing components and modules modify a movement to meet the desired complication and design of a brands watch.
Reliance on an unstable supply of movements, purchasing of old technologies and not having ownership to our development IP were core reasons for us to take on the impossible. After 7 years we emerged with K1 and demonstrated that it is in fact possible for a new brand to develop a completely new movement from the ground up.
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An incredible amount of time and knowledge went into K1 as we looked to both past, current and future challenges brands faced with the movements available to them today before actually starting development. We realized that modularity of a movement could significantly reduce brands costs. The reason for this is that as non-modular movements have modules added to them a watches case must also change, thus increasing a brands case inventories. This old methodology drives a brands sales speculation on what the best sellers might be and can cause over stocking on items that are not selling well. The solution for such a path is to dump soft sellers in the grey market to recoup loses.
We set our sights on changing this old and costly way of movement production. By offering five core base functions; Big date, Date, Power Reserve Indicator, Small Second and Center Second, K1 would enable brands to create up to 18 different variations with a consistent movement thickness of 4.95mm, thus freeing brands from the burden of changing case size such as when they desired to add a power reserve to their three hand, calendar complications.
Industrial precision and flexibility to meet manufacture quantities was a must. Looking to lean manufacturing processes, optimizing our production line and instituting the most advanced technologies in horology K1 would be a marriage of the industrial and manufacture movement worlds.
Utilizing a silicon escapement and modern engineering K1 delivers a 65 hour power reserve and reaches COSC level accuracy. Stability in movement construction is consistent whether it be 1000 or 100,000 movements produced per year due to lean and quickly scalable production processes.
K1 is the foundation for our family of movements. K2 our future micro-rotor and our tourbillon movement both share core components with K1. Sharing and continually optimizing our components enables our team to expedite future movement development and further contribute to an innovative Swiss watch industry.
It’s with great pleasure that we share with you this short animation of K1, the movement that would bring Horage to the world.
Till next time…
Landon Stirling