In Conversation with Benoît Mintiens

When Benoît Mintiens founded Ressence watches in 2010, their designs introduced an entirely new way of showing the time with their mechanical rotating discs. I was hugely fortunate to be able to speak with Benoît, about learn more about how Ressence came to be as well as the thinking behind both their designs and innovations.

In Conversation with Benoît Mintiens

WA:     Before you started Ressence you worked as an industrial designer, and I read that you worked on all sorts of things like high-speed trains, medical devices, but you’d never worked on a watch. What was it that made you want to change direction and start Ressence?

BM:     When you take these decisions, there are always a few reasons why you do it. I had been working as a consultant at a company for 12 years and as my boss was close to retiring, he was looking to sell his company. Well, guess what, nobody wants to buy a consultancy because it has no value, it’s not a good business model – you cannot work more than 24 hours a day so you can’t invoice more than 24 hours a day. There is no recurring business. I always wanted to create my own company, as a student I had a small company, but I thought “OK let’s do something again”.

If you are a creative person how do you valorise that, and how do you apply your creativity such that you can make a living out of it, more than creating for others but creating for yourself. I searched for a field where creativity would have a big added value, and I found that watches is a field where the creative dimension is super holistic. You have to create a lot of parameters that you don’t have in many fields. You need to design the aesthetics of the watch, you have to design the mechanics. There is the brand – you have to create a brand, the logo and the name, but this is the superficial part. Underneath, what is your brand? What do you stand for? How does that relate to the products you are designing? How do you make this whole thing coherent so that it’s one package? There are so many dimensions in the creative sense that I really thought this would be a nice field to do something. It didn’t mean it was a home run (laughs) but these are the reasons.

WA:     You mentioned the name there, Ressence, and I believe it comes from a fusion of “Renaissance and Essence”. What does that mean to you, and what made you choose that for the name of the brand?

BM: In the creative process to find a name, you ask yourself what are you standing for, what are you doing, what’s the reason why you would add another brand to the thousands and thousands of other brands. It comes from “renaissance de l’essentiel”, or “the rebirth of the essence”. The essence of a watch is to give the time, and the roots of the Ressence brand is the function of giving time. That’s the basics, that’s the core, of what I think a watch should be. We tend to forget it. Putting functionality at the core is not what happens a lot any more in watchmaking. So, renaissance de l’essentiel or the rebirth of the essence is really about how do you rethink the essence of a watch.

WA:     That’s really cool, and I guess one of the key things that differentiates yourself and Ressence from other watchmaker brands is that you’ve come from a design background rather than a watchmaker background. Do you think that’s been helpful in this process or has it made things in some respects more difficult?

BM:     I think it is an advantage in the fact you are not biased, so you can think freely if you are not from the world of watchmaking. That’s how you come up with ideas like putting oil in a mechanical watch or having the e-Crown technology or other things we are working on, because there’s no one that tells you how impossible it is. When you do it, you discover it’s really hard and you understand why they don’t do it! Today I know why nobody has e-Crown technology because it’s really hard to develop something like that, certainly at the scale of the organisation that we are.

With my first watches, I was fighting against being completely uneducated in the field of watchmaking, so I had problems with tolerances and basic errors that if you don’t know how much tolerance you should put here you learn the hard way, because it means you need to reproduce the components that you design.

The other part of your question, I always try to explain that the way we approach it is different. Take a simplified version of a watchmaker that creates their own watch brand; they will probably start with the movement because this is the core for a watchmaker. They will try to do special things, rethink certain processes, rethink certain innovations or maybe add something new on the movement, so start with the movement, then around the movement so the dial and the hands and maybe the case, and then finally a watch. The creative process will grow from the movement to the watch.

For Ressence, we start with you, the person that buys the watch. What do you need? What is the experience we want to generate when this person wears this watch? Why do we make this watch? What will it bring to the person that wears it? From there, you define a certain experience, for example that it is easier to read. OK, how do you do that, with discs for example. You create the concept of discs, then the whole gearing system that runs the discs, and then as the last thing you put the movement. It’s the last thing we do, to say “OK which movement can we use to drive this whole experience?”

WA:     So you define your function and then work your way in, rather than the movement and work your way out…

BM:     Yes exactly, so we go the opposite way in the creation process.

WA:     I like that, it’s an interesting approach to take! I remember the first time I saw the design of Ressence watches, I saw them on YouTube and it was a video where someone had sped up the movement so you could see how the dials and hands worked, and I’d never seen anything like it before. You’ve talked about being led by the function, how did you come up with that particular design, was that very much led by the fact that as you say it is easier to read?

BM:     It’s not so simple to understand the creative process. When I remember my dreams, I always try to understand why did I dream this, where does it come from. Sometimes you can relate it to something which happened a few days before, or maybe something that someone has said to you. I believe the things that you absorb maybe during years and at a certain moment, your brain makes sense of certain things that you saw.

WA:     Like a light bulb moment!

BM:     Maybe a light bulb moment, more like a sweat ball moment! It’s a moment where you cross certain influences that you had, arriving at a concept and you say, “OK yes this would work”. Then of course there is a lot of sweat to transform the idea into a real product. I remember the day I decided to design a watch for myself, I went to Baselworld and I was really frustrated about what I saw there. It was all the same, it’s like cars today, they’re all the same. Take an expensive car or a cheap car, a Bentley or a Dacia, the way they are conceived is the same. The architecture of the car is the same. It is a bit comparable to watchmaking, if all these watches have the same architecture you can never come with something really innovative.

If I were to say you put the engine in the middle of an existing car, it’s impossible because the concept is like it is. The 911 is more like what Ressence is doing, because they put the engine at the back, not in the front. They have a construction of the car that is different than any other car because of that conceptual choice, so it turns around the whole thing. It’s their only car with an engine in the back, all the others have an engine in the front. Products are cheaper if we all do the same, all the manufacturers who produce whatever – glass for the car, windshields, well the concept of a windshield in a Bentley or a Dacia is the same. Maybe it’s a bit thicker, there’s maybe an extra layer in a Bentley, or maybe you can have a sun-reflector so your car isn’t too warm, but the manufacturing process is the same.

That’s the logic behind mass production, if the whole industry is producing the same way, if all the hands in all the watches in the world are produced the same way, your hands will be the cheapest to produce. If your colleagues do the same, and you can sell your watch for more because your hands are red and theirs are green, well then you do a good job because your hands cost nothing to produce, and the paint is the same price for everyone.

That’s the opposite of what we do – there’s nothing standard in a Ressence watch. Very often for most of the independent brands this is why they are so nice from a conceptual point of view, because there’s nothing in common with what other watchmaking companies do. We call it a watch and hopefully you can read time on it, but the way we bring this is so different. How do you define a watch? Really going to the fundamentals and conceiving something from a blank canvas.

When I started, I imposed on myself a few criteria: the watch should be affordable for me with what I earn, I must be able to buy the watch because independent watchmaking is so expensive, I couldn’t afford it. Secondly, the concept should be special in that I was hoping that the press would write about it because it was an interesting concept. I put a lot of creative energy into the concept itself, and then – very importantly – the concept cannot be too special. To find that balance between being special but not too special, because it still had to be recognisable as a watch.

One of the things that was very fundamental is how do you read time, how do you project the information of time. Once we have learned the totally not intuitive way of interpreting time that we are used to, it’s very efficient. How do we transform that into something very different conceptually, and then try not to make it too expensive. It’s easy to make expensive, but it’s very difficult to make it not too expensive and have the same experience. Having that same experience for a lower price – that takes creativity!

WA:     Definitely! You’ve mentioned the e-Crown that you brought in with the Type 2, and I can imagine that it must have been a whole new world of challenges for you. What were the biggest difficulties you had with that, and then is there something that you’d like to do with electronics again in the future that’s maybe different to the e-Crown?

BM:     The Type 2 with the e-Crown was the most difficult thing I did in my life! It’s extremely challenging and I’m super happy that we could finalise the project. It was like, if we go back to cars, inventing a car when we only have wooden wheels. You have to invent everything. There is the mechanical watch, but then there is the electronic, digital part of the watch. So, integrating micro-electronics, components that are the smallest on the market, the least energy consuming you can find because you need to charge it with light, this makes them the most high-end components.

On the mechanical side, we had to reduce all the tolerances in the watches by half, so the space between the discs was 0.05mm and we had to make it 0.025mm. I’ll tell you a list of what we had to invent just to give an idea, I know it’s boring (laughs) but it gives you an idea about what we had to imagine!

The biggest problem in a mechanical watch is friction. But at a certain point, there is an interface between the mechanical watch and the digital crown, the e-Crown. They need to talk with each other, the digital part of the watch needs to know which position the mechanical watch is in, which position the hands are, without touching anything. From the moment that a contact slides over something, any small micro friction in a mechanical watch will stop it running. We had to find encoders that read the position of an axle without touching it. We solved this in two ways, one is with micro-magnets that are 1mm diameter and half a millimetre thick; orienting the fields in these magnets in a certain way, as the axle turns, the fields turn. The encoders measure the direction of the magnetic field that come from the minutes, and there’s another one which measures it for the hours. There is a part called the selector in the watch, which tells you in which position the watch is running, whether it is in timezone 1, timezone 2, is e-Crown off.

This is also a mechanical system that is a hand with the discs like all our watches, but you need to measure this. There was not enough space to put a magnetic encoder, but also it didn’t have to be very precise as there are only 4 positions. The minutes need to be measured very precisely, we have a 1 degree precision. Here, we only needed 4 so it wasn’t too complicated, and we did it with light. There is a camera, and a disc underneath what you see with 4 translucent colours – red, yellow, green and blue – and a micro-LED so small you can’t even see it. This sends light through the disc and a camera on the other side measures the colour, so if the colour is blue, we are in timezone 2.

You need to find batteries. There’s a 3mm motor but it’s still an electric motor to set the watch automatically. Where do you find batteries that strong? We found them in ear pods! Then, how do you get energy in the watch, you can’t do it with a plug like your phone, so how do you charge it? We started with a concept where you had a kinetic generator so by wearing the watch, similar to winding it mechanically, but there was another rotor generating electricity with a micro-generator. It worked out that it didn’t generate enough electricity, so we changed the whole system to photo-voltaic cells which we had to develop, because there were no photo-voltaic cells so small in the shape that we need them.

Then you need an accelerometer because how do you communicate with the watch? We needed to develop that technology so we took it from FitBits, and this system is also integrated in the watch. You have Bluetooth technology and antenna because you need to communicate between your watch and your smartphone.

We needed to develop the operating system in the watch – you cannot buy it because it doesn’t exist! You need to develop an app, and that’s the easiest part! Then, you also need to develop a calibration system, because the first time you assemble the watch, you need to teach the electronics that the hand is now at 1 minute – it doesn’t know it if you don’t tell it, so you need to have a calibration system. That calibration system is based on facial recognition technology because the watch moves very slowly and with the camera, it looks at which position the hands are in, and then says to the watch “hand is at 1 minute past the hour, hand is at 1 minute and 30 seconds past the hour” and so it registers the calibration.

I’ll stop here, but the array of technology that you need to develop, the challenges that you have to go through, are so huge, that the chance that a project like that never ends, is big! So… the Type 2 was challenging, and I know why nobody has one!

WA:     Another question I had is around the oil that you put in between the dial and the sapphire to reduce refraction. Given that is a key part of the Type 5 being a dive watch, when you first set out to solves the refraction problem, was it something that only after you had finished the Type 3 you thought would be useful for dive watches, or is it something that you thought from the outset would be good?

BM:     The oil in fact fills the complete mechanics of the top section of the watch. Our watches are built up in two layers, there is the movement which we buy from the market and heavily modify it, but it’s an existing calibre, and on top of that we put the whole system – ROCS as we call it, Ressence Orbital Convex System – and it is driven by the minutes. The minute shaft coming from the movement is the only shaft that we use to drive the whole Ressence system, and the rotation of all the other time dimensions are generated by the module. This module is completely in oil, on the Type 3, like you said, there are about 215 components, they are all in the oil. But the movement is in an air section, so the watch is split in two. In the middle, there is a closed plate, on the top you have oil, and on the bottom, you have air. The transmission is done magnetically through the titanium case, so the movement of the minute hand rotation on the bottom is a small disc with little magnets on it, and on the top side you have the same disc that follows it, in the oil.

When we designed the Type 3, I did not think it was because I wanted to do a dive watch after, no. It’s a case of you design the technological platform. For example, you asked about e-Crown and whether you are going to do something after with this technology. Well, yes, but first I needed to have e-Crown to think of this new thing that we will do after.

Same here, we had the oil technology and then we thought it’s not a bad idea if we would do a dive watch with this, because it would make it a better dive watch. Why? Most people know that you can’t compress a fluid, so from there you can you say that maybe it’s not so bad to put oil in a mechanical watch because you can make it lighter. Let’s not forget you wear a watch underwater maybe one day a year, so all the other days you have a heavy watch, just because maybe one day a year you might need it underwater. If you make sure that the watch in itself is strong so that the pressure has no influence on the watch, well you don’t need to make it that strong.

The cherry on the cake of course is that the refraction is gone. When you are underwater, you need to face a dive watch straight on to be able to read it. A few degrees off and you can’t read it, it becomes a mirror.

When you loop back to where we stand for as a brand, where we stand for functionality and making products better, and making a diving watch which is readable underwater made a lot of sense to us. That is why thought OK, for us it’s a natural thing to come up with the Type 5 dive watch. This process is really an organic one – you first have a basic technology, you develop it, and from there new ideas pop out and you dig deeper into certain niches for something like that.

WA:     The other recent innovation that I only read about a couple of weeks ago is the “time by colour” from the research you did with Harvard University. Can you tell me a little about how that works as, again, it’s like a whole new paradigm of presenting time?

BM:     Again, it’s about functionality, how do we improve the way we represent time – not only underwater but above the water! Professor Harvey contacted us and said he was conducting a study about how the brain transforms the image projected by a watch to putting yourself in the dimension of time, how do you understand where you are in the dimension of time from reading a watch. Of course, I’m not a neuroscientist so I can’t go more in detail than that, but he said the way Ressence represents time is potentially more efficient than a normal watch with hands, and he ask whether we minded him doing a scientific test to work out which of the two concepts was more efficient. I said yes – that’s always a good thing to say to the journalists when I can say it’s more efficient to read!

He did the test, showing 40 people 40 representations of the time on the screen and they had to type in what time they saw, but they only saw it for 0.65 seconds, just a flash, because that’s what we do when we check the time on our watch. A correct answer was considered as plus or minus 3 minutes. Well, from 40 people and 40 representations, totalling 1600 representations, 63% of the answers were correct. He did the same test with the Ressence dial, and it was only 55%, so I was disappointed and thought that’s not good!

Professor Harvey said that no, this is good, because these people know the first watch for 20 years, for 30 years, for 40 years, they have been using it every day. They know Ressence for 10 seconds and they already have 55% correct, so it is very efficient, and he was sure that if they wear it for longer periods for a month or a year, that we would have much better results.

But you can do better, he said. He taught me a few parameters that the brain uses, the eyes, physiological parameters and how you should display the information and so we worked out a new concept. He did the same test again, and we ended with 93% precision.

Time by colour is a lite version of that concept. One of the parameters that we used was colour because for your brain, it is super efficient to read a colour, you don’t even need 0.65 seconds and a colour is recognised. The information that a colour can bring of course needs a context. If I don’t tell you this is time information that you’re reading, if I say “yellow” you have no idea. But if I say “this is temperature”, and I say “blue”, you know “cold”. In a fraction of a second, you see blue but it’s not precise. Cold, but what is cold? Is it dark blue, light blue? You have a parameter there, if it is light blue, it’s not very cold, if it’s dark blue, it’s very cold. If you know that, you can read whether it’s very cold or a bit cold immediately. Another parameter you can add is the size, big or small you can give information there. By having a graphic, or really an image, because let’s not forget a watch is an image that is projected, if you can do that with parameters that are more logical for the brain you can make it a lot more efficient. I hope in a few years to come out with that concept that we worked on as a watch, it is just that mechanically it is a bit complicated to realise. The concept of time by colour is really a spin-off of the concept that we had together.

WA:     Wow, I’ll look forward to seeing that one in a few years’ time!

BM:     Me, too!

WA:     Finally, as we’ve kind of touched on what’s next for Ressence, if you could share one piece of advice that you’ve learned since starting Ressence, what would you share?

BM:     It really depends on the person you have in front of you or the problem this person has or would like to solve (laughs) I think being holistic and creative at the same time is an important lesson I learned. If you are not holistic, you will miss a part, you will not come up with a new reality. If you say “I’m only going to improve the engine of the car”, you will not have a better car, because you can put a better engine in it but if the rest of the car is not following, it’s not a better car, or a faster car. You can put a bigger engine in a Dacia, but you cannot go faster in it because the whole car cannot go faster than a set speed in a corner or cannot brake faster because the brakes are designed for a small engine not a big engine.

When you say holistic, all the dimensions need to be coherent with each other. And then of course you need the creativity to get there, and for me that’s the basics. For me when you ask that now, I answer that, maybe tomorrow I’ll say something else!

WA:     That’s brilliant, thank you very much it’s been a pleasure to meet you!

BM:     Thank you!

 

To learn more about Ressence and Benoît Mintiens, please visit RessenceWatches.com

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