Why iteration is the most underrated skill in watchmaking — and what each wrong turn taught me.
The first thing I got wrong was the size.
I started with sketches, dozens of them, exploring case shapes and lug geometries I had never seen anywhere. Some looked good on paper. None of them survived contact with a wrist. When I finally committed to a design and modelled it in TinkerCAD, I made the case 40mm across because 40mm is what most microbrand watches choose, and I did not have a better reason.
I printed it. It looked like a coaster.
That was prototype one. Too big. Unbalanced. The proportions I had spent weeks sketching disappeared the moment the object existed in three dimensions. I discarded it.
Prototype two was smaller — 37mm. Better balanced. Closer to something wearable. But when I laid the movement inside, I found seven separate problems I had not accounted for:
The diameter still felt slightly cramped. The glass opening was not centred. The lugs needed softening. The clearances at the base were wrong. The movement had no holder. The crown height was undefined. The glass dimensions did not match anything I could actually order.
I wrote all seven down. Then I opened CAD and started again.
This is the part of watchmaking nobody photographs. The part where you sit at a screen at three in the morning revising a diameter by half a millimetre and printing the same object for the fourth time. There is no glamour in it. There is only the slow, unromantic work of getting the geometry to agree with itself.
Prototype three was the corrected version — 40mm again, but arrived at properly this time, with the lugs extended and bevelled, the symmetry fixed, the interior redesigned around the NH38A movement. I used a 30mm plastic holder from a reference case I had ordered as a study piece, because it absorbed shocks better than a machined bracket would have. The glass opening settled at 28.5mm. I ordered the crystal.
Prototype four fitted. Prototype five refined the caseback. Prototype six was the one I took to Horage in Biel, where Laura and Richard told me what still needed changing.
Only then did I send the file to Stuttgart to be milled in 316L stainless steel.
Six prototypes. Six versions of the same idea, each one taking me further from what I originally imagined and closer to what would actually work. This is the part I did not know when I started: you do not design a watch. You reduce it. You keep subtracting mistakes until only the watch is left.
The strap arrived in the wrong length. The minute hand did not fit — I had ordered the wrong reference. The crown had to be glued because I had shortened the winding stem too aggressively and could no longer press it back in. Each of these things I discovered only by trying, failing, and trying again.
I do not think of iteration as the boring part of the process. I think it is the part where taste actually forms. When you build the same object six times in a row, you develop a very specific sense of what is essential and what is not. The features you keep are the ones that survived every revision. The features you lose were never worth defending.
INFINI N°01 is what remained when I stopped subtracting.
38mm. Faceted lugs. A glacier-textured dial that started as a spray-paint experiment. Two hands, one of which almost did not make it onto the watch. No indices, no date, no decoration that does not earn its place.
The next collection will start with sketches too. And I will throw most of them away, because that is the job.
— D.S.