REVIEW: Sevenfriday – Fun, Fad or Future Classic?

Felix Scholz

If you’re a; into watches and b; on Instagram – the chances are we don’t need to introduce the horological phenomenon that is Sevenfriday. These brightly coloured, industrially styled watches burst into the watch world a little over a year ago and through a brilliant, and seemingly organic social media campaign. Based on the company philosophy that you should live everyday like it’s Friday (that’d be seven Fridays in a week – get it?) it became an almost cult-like ritual for owners to share their watches. Especially on Friday.

Another significant factor in the popularity of these watches is undoubtedly the price. Retailing in the vicinity of $AU 1200-1500 it wouldn’t be fair to say that these watches are impulse purchases, but they’re certainly more accessible than many luxury watches. And these watches have been clearly marketed to serious watch owners. Sevenfriday is the watch you wear on casual Friday, when you’re giving your Audemars Piguet the day off.

But what about the watches themselves? I expected these bright and undeniably fun watches to have the same sort of plastic fantastic appeal as the Swatch watches I collected as a kid, so I was seriously surprised at the heft and weight of the watches – and the overall quality of construction. The watches I had the chance to play with were from the original P1 range, with a 47mm case. The watch wore smaller than expected because of its lugless design. The multilayered dial, with it’s technical looking hands, discs indicating seconds and 24 hour display, and  glimpses of the movement’s balance wheel give the watch a real depth and texture that adds to the quality and visual interest.

I also was pleasantly surprised that the watches featured a bumper of rubber on the outside of the case, giving these guys an almost soft feeling, and probably adding a little bit of shock resistance for those accidental bumps.

So at the moment Sevenfriday live up to their name, and brand ethos, perfectly. Bright, poppy watches designed for warm summer evenings and balmy weekends.

But can Sevenfriday be better than this? I think they can. At the moment they’re the flavour of the month, but if they want to be around next month something will need to change. Firstly the website. It’s terrible. Not quite geocities bad, but it certainly doesn’t showcase the watches to their full potential. Also it’d be great to see these guys push the envelope a little, experimenting with higher end materials. We’ve heard rumours of a custom made rose gold case, and honestly I think the brand is strong enough to support more high end case materials – gold, ceramic, even platinum!

And let us be real for a second here, I can thank of one other brand that started off with a distinctive, brash design and an emphasis on ‘fusion’ case design – Hublot. It’s been 10 years since Jean Claude Biver released the iconic Big Bang, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere but up.

I hope Sevenfriday as a brand is here to stay, they’ve made a very impressive debut on the watch scene, let’s hope their (notoriously difficult to get right) second album continues to impress.