This can often leave the creative types at a real loss as to how to make their mark in their respective fields, and watchmaking in particular suffers from this in spades. Most people have a very fixed few about watches, something that really doesn’t help. 

ou either have the traditional two- or three-handed faces with a numerical face, or a digital watch with a fancy light-up LED screen. What can you do to expand upon that?

Of course nothing assists innovation more than challenges, even if the challenge is the rather circular conundrum of how best to be innovative. Gathered here for your interest are four watches that we feel have, in particular, been extremely demonstrative of how best to keep watchmaking moving forwards.

Kapten & Son is a highly innovative  globally recognized fashion brand capturing the attention of 18 to 32 year old consumers and hundreds of retailers across the world. Their founders are even part of Instagram’s official advertising campaign with brands like Mercedes Benz. The company had its start in Germany in 2014, they now sell to 700 specialty stores worldwide.

As such, Kapten & Son has unveiled a breathtaking  reinvention of on an old classic, achieving their aims at forging a vibrant but simple, elegant watch face. Joy features  large roman numerals marking twelve and six o’ clock.  Rather than using  tiny or obscure markings like many ordinary watches use, the Kapten & Son Joy instead uses a classic minimalist dial with unique modernized markings on a white background so you can quickly glance at the face and tell the time. 

Marked with the signature Kapten & Son anchor and featuring a colorful soft velvet leather strap,  the watch is the ideal timepiece to give your look a little taste of summer, all while expressing how stylish simplistic watches are evolving.

Remember when we said that it’s damned hard to find anything new to do with watches? Well Devon have proven everyone wrong when they released the Devon Tread 1&2, two watches that completely revolutionise how we see watches and how they function.

Doing away with the radial numeric display and digital screens, the Devon Tread instead uses the innovative Time Tread, controlled by a tiny microprocessor that monitors and regulates all of the watches mechanical workings and keeps it accurate to within a second a day. Hours are told by the horizontal belt and minutes on the vertical. The result is a watch quite unlike any you’ve seen before, with an appearance that looks rather out of this world.

Such was the vision and watchmaking pioneering that the Tread offered, that it was nominated for the 2010 Gran Prix d’Horlogerie de Genéve in the category of Design and Concept Watch, the first American watch brand ever to receive this honour. 

For those who are often away from home and live international jet-setter lives, or else have a profession that means they must keep up with a number of different time zones, keeping track of global times can be rather taxing. Many people have made the mistake of forgetting that one city may be so many hours ahead or behind their own local time, and this can make business a little more frustrating than it should be. Thus Italian watchmakers have developed the Meccaniche Veloci, or “Mechanical Speed”.

It features two distinct watch faces, both of which tell the times within two different time zones. As such one face could be telling the time in New York, while its twin lists the current time in Rome. This dual system makes it very valuable to a large number of different professions, and can really help make international communications more effective than trying to work out in your head what the time is in several separate hemispheres.

Beyond that the watch is highly minimalist and Spartan in its design, yet uses it to a very good effect. Discrete and professional, it can adapt itself well to a large number of different settings, whether professional, casual, or formal. Chances are the Meccaniche Veloci will quickly find itself used within a wide number of settings.

In keeping with the theme of time zones and needing to know exactly what the time is wherever you, no matter where you are, G-Shock has offered this little gem to the world of watchmaking and timekeeping engineering.

The GRAVITYMASTER GPW1000 is the first watch to utilise a revolutionary design that seamlessly blends GPS tracking technology with traditional clockwork. Using Multiband-6 technology to receive any of the 6 time calibrations signals being issued globally, in synchronisation with GPS satellites, the GPW1000 is able to constantly keep track of the time to a degree not before thought to be possible. Not only does it adjust to ensure it’s telling as accurate reading of time as possible, it can also take into account location for time zones, and even the time of year to adjust for summer time. It keeps track of 40 time zones and 27 cities, just for added insurance.

This means that no matter where you are with this watch, you will always know when you are.

Beyond that the design is also strong and bold, encompassing a very durable Triple G Shock Resistant casing and a sapphire crystal face. Water proof, shock proof, possessed of a strong battery and with a reinforced structure, you can take this watch anywhere in extremely punishing conditions and be confident that it will still run as always.