Every now and again, a message arrives that reminds Danielle and me exactly why we started Helicon. Most recently, an early customer – someone who discovered Helicon when we were still finding our feet – got in touch.
He was already working with several of the biggest and most recognisable watch brands in the world. He knows and understands watches, and the stories behind them. His review spoke about an emotional connection, rather than simply owning “another watch”.
His message, and that final thought, stayed with us. It sums up Helicon better than anything we could write ourselves.
We’re a tiny, family-run British watch company. We don’t produce thousands of watches. We don’t have enormous marketing budgets or celebrity ambassadors. We make watches in small numbers, try to do things differently and put an enormous amount of ourselves into every project.
The Master 62 was where so much of the Helicon story began.
Each colour was deliberately limited, and when an edition sold out, it was gone. We resisted the temptation to simply make more of the colours people wanted because we had made a promise to the people who supported us.
Today, the entire Master 62 collection is sold out.
That makes messages like this particularly poignant.
These watches have gone out into the world and started developing histories that no longer belong to us. They’re being worn on holidays, taken diving, given as presents, worn to weddings, collected alongside watches costing many times more – and sometimes they introduce us to people who subsequently become friends.
That’s something no specification sheet can adequately describe.
From Customers to a Community
When we started Helicon, we wanted to build good watches.
What we hadn’t fully anticipated was the community that would grow around them.
Some people have bought one Helicon. Others have returned for a second, third or fourth. We’ve exchanged hundreds of emails, had long telephone conversations about watches and plenty of conversations about things that have absolutely nothing to do with watches.
This customer, who spends his professional life around some of the world’s most famous watch brands, told us that our Lichen Green Master 62 is “one of the most special” watches in his collection – a sentiment Danielle and I don’t take lightly.
Not because we think a Helicon needs to compete with those watches. It doesn’t. It’s special for completely different reasons. And perhaps that’s the point.
The watches we remember most aren’t necessarily the most expensive, the rarest or the ones with the most impressive name printed on the dial.
They’re the ones connected to people, places, experiences and stories.
Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment we could hope for. We may have designed and built the Master 62, but its story doesn’t end when it leaves us. It continues with every person who wears one, every place it travels and every memory it becomes part of. And knowing that is something we’ll always be incredibly proud of.
So thank you to our customers, for taking a chance on a tiny independent watch company in the first place. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for becoming part of our story.