What is Kollokium? The Mysterious Details Behind the Projekt 01

If you frequent certain corners of Watch Instagram, you likely came across a new and somewhat mysterious project last week called Kollokium. They appeared almost out of nowhere with minimal teasing, and presented a watch that you can’t yet buy that is certainly unique. The real story, though, is in the ethos of the brand itself. Part of that ethos is that they don’t actually consider themselves a brand at all, but a “project based platform” that exists to explore alternatives to traditional watchmaking. 

It might help to start with the people behind the platform. Kollokium was founded in 2020 by three watch industry veterans: Manuel Emch, Barth Nussbaumer, and Amr Sindi. Emch is perhaps the most well known of the three, and has been leading Louis Erard since 2020, overseeing the brand’s incredible turnaround from through the smart execution of desirable limited editions with interesting collaborators. Nussbaumer is a watch designer who over the years has worked with Louis Erard, Petermann Bedat, and other brands (you can follow him on Instagram here). And Amr Sindi will be more familiar by his Instagram handle, @thehorophile. You might recall that Sindi collaborated on a limited edition release with Louis Erard earlier this year, and you’ll begin to see how these three individuals are all tied together, and the collaboration begins to make a bit more sense as a creative outlet that can exist apart from their respective day jobs. 

OK, so, the watch itself. They call it Projekt 01, and before we get too deep in the weeds, it’s worth mentioning that this is a closed “friends and family” edition, limited to 99 pieces, and is not, strictly speaking, for sale to the general public. The Kollokium team, however, has indicated that a more widely accesbilbe release is in the works for 2024, so we’ll be on the lookout for that. In any case, what they’ve created with the Projekt 01 is a watch veering into the avant-garde, under design principles that are in one sense wide open, and in another quite restrictive. Their press release reads like a mission statement in a way that we rarely encounter, with talk of “materializing timepieces that transcend the confines of traditional watchmaking” in an environment with “no established or inherited framework” and indeed “no defined artistic direction.” 

What grabs you first about Projekt 01 is almost certainly going to be the dial, which resembles, to many of us, a pin art board of the type that were popular in the 1980s. It consists of 468 cylindrical markers in six different diameters and heights, arranged to vaguely resemble the calling cards of a watch dial. The effect is almost eerie – it kind of looks like a very blurry generic dive watch dial if you let the markers kind of blend together, but at the same time your eye is naturally drawn to the intricacy of the design. Furthermore, each cylinder is filled with white lume that glows orange, which gives the dial a completely different character in a low light setting (and, once again, underscores the craft involved here, as the lume is also hand applied).

The 40mm case is steel, but instead of being milled and machined, it is manufactured through a die casting process. This is a rarely used manufacturing technique in watchmaking, but here it allows Kollokium to give the Projekt 01 a finish that is, effectively, not finished. According to Kollokium, the desired result was a uniform, industrial appearance that could only be achieved through an old-school injection molding process. An important aspect of the case design that is definitely worth highlighting is that there is no bezel, just a box sapphire crystal affixed directly to the case, which allows the wearer to see the three dimensional dial details that would be impossible with a more traditional three piece case construction. 

It’s tough to know exactly what to make of this project at these early stages, but we certainly appreciate the creativity involved and the willingness to try something new and different. Kollokium can certainly be added to a growing list of adventurous, affordable independent brands (sorry…) that seek to offer real ingenuity, craft, purposeful design at a price point that is accessible to any curious and adventurous collector. This edition, which again, you can’t buy, has a retail price of CHF 2’666.66, so we’d anticipate that a future release would be in the same general neighborhood. While certainly not for everyone, that’s a lot of design for the money. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Kollokium.