Over the course of his more than 40-year career, Brinker largely worked as a professional jeweler, but ultimately, the job got a bit repetitive, and he could see he might lose interest. Around that time, he met a gem setter named Lew Wackler who was interested in Faberge work—little did he know in this moment how the stars would eventually align and lead him to Keel and 5280.
Wackler and Brinker bonded over the same lack of inspiration in their jewelry work and a shared desire to expand their artistic capabilities. Their original passion project was to design a pair of mantle clocks in the Faberge style— “but we never made those clocks,” Brinker admits. “We made all kinds of other stuff instead—we were just on a technical adventure largely centered around that look and depth you can only get with guilloche.”
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“We had a bunch of little silver discs about the size of a watch dial,” he continues, “and we’d experiment with the engine turning machinery we’d bought and the enameling techniques I knew. We ultimately made a couple dozen pretty decent guilloche enameled discs with a variety of engraved patterns, and we took them with us to the Tucson Gem Show. We set them out along with the gemstones Lew had for sale, and they caught the eye of a man named Andreas von Zadora-Gerlof, a prolific artist known as America’s Faberge. He ended up hiring us for some commissions, and once we were in the door, we became part of this incredible stable of specialists.”
Brinker’s work with Zadora continued from the mid-90s to the late 2000s, but after the 2008 financial crisis, work began to fizzle, and he returned back to the Midwest and back to his jewelry roots. Here, we worked through the next couple decades before Keel approached him in 2023 with his concept for 5280.
“A mutual friend connected me with Bill,” recalls Keel, “We had dinner, and I told him what I wanted to do with 5280. At first, he was very skeptical,” Keel admits. “Enamel doesn’t play nicely, and when you combine it with guilloche, it gets even more challenging. It was a risk to center our entire design philosophy around this artform, but Bill was ultimately willing to take that risk with me, and it’s paid off.”
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Each 5280 dial takes more than 25 hours of meticulous work at the hand of Brinker to complete. In addition, the brand’s location in the Mile High City presents inherent challenges that impact bake time in the kiln thanks to the altitude and lack of humidity. Yet, the bigger limitation of executing these techniques—even more so than painstaking guilloche and enamel work itself—is the shortage of materials.
“There’s definitely a scarcity of materials,” confirms Keel. “Some of the colors we use are no longer made—they haven’t been made in 30 years—there’s no more on the planet other than what we’ve procured and what exists in a few other workshops like ours. Take our Aoki 105B Red, for example,” he explains. “This color is no longer made, and it’s incredibly temperamental. We fired one dial, and it came out bright fuchsia, but we knew it was supposed to be red, not hot pink. So, it took us a while to figure out the exact process to bring out the deep orangey red we wanted to see in our final product—turns out, it’s literally the difference of a few seconds in the kiln.”
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In addition to the unique Aoki 105B Red, 5280 currently offers a range of 13 absolutely breathtaking dial colors in a variety of guilloche patterns. Every dial substrate is a base composed of .999 fine silver. The final vitreous enamel dial is protected by sapphire crystals on both sides and housed in a solid 316L stainless steel case. Each timepiece is exclusively powered by top-of-the-line Swiss Sellita movements meeting COSC Certified Accuracy standards and custom-designed industry-best D4 finishing. These incredible, custom-made timepieces are available for pre-order and priced from $3495 to $3995 each—a literal steal for this level of artistry. 5280
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