On the occasion of the second edition of the annual Time to Watches event, we sat down with the CEO of Behrens, Lin Bingqiang, to discuss the brand’s new 11G, its cultural significance, and the future plans for Behrens in the global watch industry.
For someone who is not familiar with Behrens, how would you summarize the brand?
The reason why we have named the brand Behrens is because Mr. Peter Behrens is known as the founding father of modern industrial design. We named the brand after him to pay respect to his contribution to the design industry.
Can you talk to us about your new 11G? Why did you want to make the lightest mechanical watch?
First of all, there were two watches which were nominated for the GPHG award in the year 2020. In the year 2021, we came up with another new release which was a combination of both the “Time on Mars” as well as the “Time on Earth” models. The name of this watch was “Project One”. Then, in the year 2022, we were able to create our own in-house movement for the first time. It was a systematic and modularized type of watchmaking for that represented the past three years. If we continued that systematic route, we would run the danger of becoming too predictable. People might say “this is all that Behrens can do; this is their entire ability”. So, the core team of Behrens made this crazy plan to challenge themselves. That is the reason why we came up with this idea of making the lightest watch in the world – to challenge our past, change our route and give people a big surprise.
What was the most challenging aspect in developing this model?
There were two main aspects that were challenging when developing this model: the design perspective and the technical perspective. From the technical perspective, it is extremely hard to manufacture, using existing machines, due to its curved base for the core watch movement. A traditional watch movement is completely flat. As a result, it is a really huge production challenge when you have a 15-degree angle from gear to gear to assemble and combine them and make sure they are working accurately. Our team worked really hard towards a successful outcome and we never stopped believing that we could achieve this.
From the design’s perspective, the challenge was to create designs for Behrens products that don’t resemble other brands’ design languages or ideas. It is really hard to avoid that as there are so many watches on the market already. As a result, it is hard for people to see Behrens as completely different from other brands. However, through a lot of original thinking and design work, we made sure that this novelty implements Behrens core design concept.
How important is it for Behrens to integrate elements of traditional Chinese culture into their watches?
Watchmaking is a combination of different industries like art, science, engineering, design, physics, culture etc. What Behrens wanted to do was imbed the traditional Chinese culture into its designs in a very subtle way. We do not want to reveal this aspect in an obvious way, but implement it subtly which allows our customers to discover the hidden message. If you think about the design of our novelty, it looks like a board which was used in ancient Chinese culture which ministers held in their hands when seeing their emperors as a sign of respect. The design can be extended to the box for the watch as well, which takes the same shape.
Where do you see Behrens in the future?
Behrens is still extremely young. First of all, we want to make sure that Behrens is more of an open-source platform, not only for themselves but also for the entire industry in the future. An example of this could be a design war concept, whereby we offer designers the opportunity to compete in designing a watch where we can build the winning idea. This will allow designers to hugely benefit by participating and showing their talents. Secondly, we are going to put a very big emphasis on customer requests from the market. We will take these very seriously. In addition, we want to make Behrens more multicultural and more open in terms of design, technologies, and branding. In terms of our logo for the brand, at first glance, it looks like it is comprised of from the letter B and R, but the true symbol behind it is to express a more inclusive view, not only for our own history and culture, but for others as well.
