What’s it really like to make a watch with your favourite brand?

Luke Benedictus

“This is a golden age of sports watch design,” Rob Nudds says over the phone from Germany. “We’ve seen some absolute classics being made before us. And just like in the ’70s when there was this rush of novelty and competition that stirred this creativity twixt the brands, I believe we have that again now.”

Rob is always worth listening to because he knows an awful lot about watches. Today, he’s the Managing Editor at Fratello, but his career in the business goes way back almost 20 years. After a stint in customer-facing retail for Swatch and the British jeweller H.Samuel, Rob attended the British School of Watchmaking and graduated to become a watchmaker first for Omega and then Bremont. During this period, he harnessed his insider knowledge to start writing about watches, too, before pivoting to manage the retail network for NOMOS in multiple countries. In short, over the years he’s built up a deep understanding of the industry from multiple angles and along the way he became besotted with Czapek. “I would say that it’s one of the most exciting, modern renaissances that we’ve seen in the industry,” he insists.

A quick potted history: watchmaker Franciszek Czapek was the original partner of Antoni Norbert de Patek (yes, that one) and together they founded the company Patek, Czapek & Cie in 1839 before going there separate ways six years later. Patek, of course, would go on to work with a certain Adrien Philippe in a double act that would become one of the most venerable watch brands of all time. But Czapek didn’t do too shabbily himself. Founding Czapek & Cie, he became recognized as one of the greatest watchmakers of the nineteenth century.

After lying dormant for many years, the Czapek brand was revived in 2012 and one of their pieces, the Czapek Genève, promptly won the public prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2016. By this stage, Rob happily admits he’d become rather obsessed and this enthusiasm was only fuelled when he met and struck up a solid friendship with the brand’s CEO, Xavier De Roquemaurel.

But the Czapek release that really thrilled Rob was the Antarctique (above). “For me, the Antarctique, the H. Moser & Cie Streamliner and the Bulgari Octo Finissimo are the modern holy trinity of sports watches,” Rob says. “I would put them in direct comparison with the Royal Oak, the Nautilus and the Overseas.”

By this stage, Rob was at Fratello and overseeing the design for the current special editions. So he proposed to Xavier that Czapek collaborate with Fratello on a dream project for him. “I said: ‘Can we possibly work on this idea together? I want to do this mish-mash of Terre Adélie indices with this incredible flinque dial on the Passage de Drake and I want to do it in green because I was born in Dublin. Also I want an orange tip on the second hand to just round it off, so it’s like this marker point…’”

Xavier thought it over and eventually agreed to give it a go. Suffice to say, this was a pinch-yourself moment for Rob to work with a brand that he’s admired for so long. In retrospect, he suspects it was down to the trust that he’d built up with the brand over the years that got the project over the line. “You can try your very hardest to make rules and procedures and processes to accommodate for every eventuality in watchmaking,” he says. “But, ultimately, a lot of this stuff comes down to emotion. It sounds really woolly, and it sounds unbelievable that such a huge industry could be driven by the whims of a few people, but it’s true. It’s the relationships that make something happen.”

So what was it like finally seeing the Fratello × Czapek Antarctique Passage De Drake Viridian Green in the metal for the first time? “You know what?” Rob admits. “The first time I picked it up, I was a bit perplexed by it, because it wasn’t as I imagined.”

Rob was delighted with the arrangement of the dial and the flawless integration of the indices into the minuterie and the centre flinque pattern. In addition, the Pantone matching of the date wheel was absolutely pitch-perfect. But the colours were slightly different to what he’d expected. Handling the watch for the first time under fluorescent lights, the green and orange seemed a little flat. “When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Does this work? Is this too weak an orange? Is it strong enough?

“But I have this tendency in watchmaking to be incredibly patient and inactive in the moment. I never make quick judgements because nothing in watchmaking moves that quickly and so I’ve learned that it’s wise to not do the same thing yourself.”

This delayed judgement was prudent because the wrist-bound epiphany duly arrived a couple of days later. Rob was in Neuchatel in Switzerland and walking around in the shadows of early evening when he suddenly looked down at the watch.

“Dusk is the best time of day for this watch because the dial takes on this really deep teal color and the shadows on the flinque dial are really pronounced. The indices are catching those last rays of light of the day, so they’re really flaring up against the patterned background. And then that orange… I don’t know how it does it, because it’s not a mega vibrant orange, but in that light, with that background, it suddenly blazes into a neon, fluorescent orange. Suddenly, I was like, ‘Ah-ha! This is the moment in the day when this watch is perfect for me’.”

Rob wasn’t the only person smitten by the Fratello × Czapek Antarctique Passage De Drake Viridian Green. The 50-piece run went for €20,820 a pop, but sold out in just 39 minutes.

Today, Rob feels a mix of gratitude and pride to have one of these pieces on his wrist. “Every time you ask me a question about it I’m looking at it in the sunlight again from different angles,” he says. “It’s joy. It’s a real joy. A huge pleasure.”