Micromilspec

I’m really into watches, and it was kind of funny — I had just sold my entire collection because it was taking up too much time. And then, as fate would have it, three months later I’m co-founding a watch company and designing watches.

Henrik Rye is one of the best founders I know. He has a rare ability to understand product, design, business, marketing, and sales. I’d worked with him on and off for about five years, so when he asked if I wanted to start this with him, it was a no-brainer. I don’t think I’ve ever said yes to anything that fast.

The original idea came from discovering that elite military units — especially groups like the SAS in the UK — loved custom engraved watches, but even they struggled to convince brands like Rolex or Omega to alter their production lines for small custom runs.

That became our lightbulb moment.

What if we turned the whole thing upside down?

Instead of treating customization as a disruption to production — what if custom work was the production model?

What made it even more interesting was realizing that many of the big watch brands originally grew by supplying watches to the military. That work helped fund the research and development that eventually shaped modern wristwatches.

Everything you see here is designed by me — from the logo and visual identity to the watches themselves.

I didn’t know anything about 3D at the start. I began in 2D, manually extruding shapes. As we got closer to production, I brought in industrial designer Thomas Jenkins, who helped shape both the first and second version of the case. To keep up, I had to learn CAD along the way — if you know, you know.

The company was built in a very iterative way. Before we had made anything physical, we pre-sold watches for almost 7 million kroner based on quick designs and a simple Readymag site I put together in an evening. With each launch, we improved things — better systems, better design, better copy.

By around the tenth project, we had a fully automated CMS and a 3D pipeline, where we could spin up a new landing page with a click. A lot of that came from Kim Ellefsen — my partner in crime on the tech side for more than 30 projects. The 3D work is done by Alexander Kadim, and the fluid 3D web experiences are built by wizard Mark Larat.

I’ve included both version one and two of the marketing site. What’s interesting is that version one is actually what we wanted to launch from day one — we just didn’t have the capability yet. There’s about a year between them, and you can really see the progression.

This company was honestly a dream. I had to step away because I promised my family I’d work less. But I loved every part of it — from the mechanical details of the watches to packaging and all the small accessories around it.

Hope you like it.