There’s Something Very Strange About the New Timex Collaboration with Pop Trading Co.

When you were a kid, did you ever attempt that prank where you’d move the clock in the classroom ahead in an effort to trick the teacher into letting you out of class early? I feel like that’s a thing that almost every kid has tried, or at least it feels that way. It’s one of those activities that’s burned into our collective consciousness from sitcoms, comic strips, and stories told in the school cafeteria whether or not you were an active participant. This is what the latest release from Timex immediately made me think of. It’s playful and almost subversive in the way it taps into your inner juvenile delinquent. 

The new watch is a collaboration with Pop Trading Co., a Dutch apparel company I was heretofore unfamiliar with that is deeply rooted in skateboarding culture. The watch, dubbed simply the Timex MK1 x Pop Trading Co. takes the familiar 36mm Timex field watch design and shifts the hours such that the “1” is at the 12:00 position, “2” is at 1:00, and so on around the dial. Pop’s unique wordmark, a grouping of the letter “P” in a square with an “O” at the center, is recreated on the dial with the hand stack standing in for the “O.” A black resin case matches the tone of the dial and keeps the focus on the unusual layout. 

There’s no other way to say this, but looking at the dial of the Timex x Pop collab is an immediately disorienting and disconcerting experience. It really reminds you, if you look at watches everyday, like we do, how accustomed we are to a particular format in time telling. The idea behind the design was to poke fun at the image of the traditional skateboarder (“always running late…”) but what Pop and Timex have landed on is something that’s actually quite a bit weirder. The watch, of course, tells the right time, but when you read it, it’s always wrong. 

The Timex x Pop Trading collab is a fairly minimal affair when it comes to specs. You get a simple quartz movement, a pair of fabric straps, and water resistance to 30 meters. The case comes in at just under 10mm tall and utilizes an old fashioned acrylic crystal. Besides the unusual layout and Pop branding, this has all the hallmarks of a vintage field watch. But that one very strange adjustment really turns the watch on its head and makes it a real curiosity. At $119, it’s squarely in impulse buy territory, and the kind of unusual conversation piece that could be a lot of fun at a watch meetup. 

Get more info on the Timex MK1 x Pop Trading Co. collaboration right here.