How to Use Collabs to Make Timeless Designs

0:00If you ask me to pick between the Neil Street Shop and our TikTok account, Every day of the week, I'm going for the TikTok account because the TikTok account is much more important for us for reaching new customers. Hello, welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm Shuang Esther Shan. There are some products that haven't changed much since the first time they came onto the market. Take watches, for example. The technology and design in a watch from 50 years ago, or even a pocket watch from 300 years ago, isn't all too different from a watch you might be wearing today.

0:35But our guest, Crispin Jones, has been pushing the boundaries of what these products can look like. He is the founder of Mr. Jones Watches, a company that makes unconventional watches right here in the UK. We're in the studio with Crispin and his cute dog, Stanley, who's the company mascot, and we're going to chat all about how the team collaborates with artists to create truly unique products. Thank you so much for being here, Crispin. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, I noticed your watches on TikTok a few months, maybe a year ago. So it's really cool to meet you in person. So I understand you come from an art background and you were originally designing these very unique watches.

1:19What drew you to the medium and what were you trying to create? So my undergraduate degree is in fine arts, specifically sculpture. And then I later studied for a master's in a thing called interaction design. Interaction design is sort of creative uses of technology. And really that was my way into watches. Like the watch fundamentally is a technology, but in the sort of landscape of technology, it's really unusual and distinctive because it persists. So most technology, if it's 20 years old, looks like it came from a different world. What's interesting about watches is that as well as being a technology that's persisted for like 100 years, there's also wearable technology.

1:58I worked for a while for Philips Design, so the sort of design arm of Philips Consumer Electronics, and specifically in a department that worked on wearable technologies. And it's so difficult to get people to strap bits of technology to the body and then use them. So I was kind of fascinated with the watch as this weird technological survivor but also as a piece of wearable technology and that was really my my way into it the very first watches that i made were a set of one-off pieces that were for exhibitions and they were really for for this sort of audience they were interested in not really art not really design but some like odd amalgam of the two so some space in between so they were more so provocative objects for making you think about technology and particularly the role of technology in our world in in society so for example one of the watches alternated the time with the phrase remember you will die so it was very much a watch that was designed to make you think about sort of humility and also your own transience in this planet rather than most watches kind of work on the the principle of uplifting you of making you feel kind of proud of yourself and like satisfied with your life's achievements and things.

3:15So I was kind of interested to twist that and make the watch work in quite a different way and go down a different route. Yeah, really highlighting our fleeting existence and the true essence of time really is that it's passing us constantly. Absolutely. I mean, it's fair to say like the one-off pieces for an exhibition looked very uncommercial and kind of deliberately, like they were more like props for these kind of short videos that accompanied the exhibition that they went into. But there was something sort of unsatisfactory about them because we're used to watches as objects that we interact with in our life, that we wear and touch and handle.

3:54So following on from the exhibition, I started to think about making a short run of watches as actual products that I could sell. This sort of coincided with a period where I was trying to make my practice more sustainable. So I thought I would make a short run of watches that I could sell. And then we would see how that did. And then maybe the year after I would make a different product that I could sell. But this would be my sort of more sustainable creative practice. So it'd be a kind of combination of commerce and art. Yeah. And it sounds like you didn't set out to create a watch brand or a business, but you slowly organically found yourself to be a business owner.

4:35And for the first couple of years, you were designing most of the watches yourself. How did you then find a model where you're reaching out to new artists, collaborating with them and expanding the business as well? I mean, you're quite right. Like the route into running a business was really building on this kind of small creative projects that I was making. I didn't go into it thinking I would make watches the year after. And this is back in 2007. So it's quite some time ago. And I thought it's a project. It's a speculative venture, but it's kind of interesting. I started emailing different watch factories I found online.

5:12I had no prior contact in the watch industry. I didn't know anyone who worked in that industry. And I started emailing different factories saying, I'm a designer in London. I want to make a small run of watches. What's the minimum order? Can I design my own case? I knew that was something important that I wanted to make it distinctive. I started off mailing, I think, seven factories. And after a couple of rounds of email, there was only one factory who was getting back to me. And they said, the minimum order is 500 watches. you can make as many variations in the 500 as you like as long as you pay the sort of setup charges for each design so with my background in fine art I thought I'll make five limited editions so each one a numbered edition of 100 pieces because that was another thing they could engrave like edition numbers on the back so I thought I'd make a virtue out of the necessity of I could only order 500 because I couldn't afford to order more what happened was so I released them in July of 2007 and quite quickly like two of the designs sold out with a third following quite soon after I thought great now people start to order some of the other two that's quite a lot left of so one of them had the word remember on the hour hand you will die on the minute hand so it was a kind of continuation of that previous one-off creative piece so instead that was the first one to sell out people emailed just saying when you're going to make more of the remember you'll eye watches.

6:37So I'd conceived of this as like a 100 piece edition, but then I thought there's nothing to stop me reissuing it and calling that the permanent collection. It's all like a semantic joke. It's ridiculous. There's like 500 watches. I'm now talking about the permanent collection. But as a sort of logical communication, it kind of made sense for the customers and it was kind of coherent. And actually that model is one that we still continue with today. So each design that we do is initially released as a numbered edition. Normally now we do 200 pieces. If the design's popular and there's enough interest afterwards, then what we do is we update the design.

7:15And we find it's a really successful model because it allows us to be super experimental with the designs that we do because we're never over committed to stock. We've not ordered a thousand pieces of this design. So I'm circling back to your original question, which was like, how do we go to working with other designers so initially I thought Mr Jones watches I'm a designer I'm an artist that means I design all the watches that's what Mr Jones watches is but after four years of designing all the watches I started to flag and I just was running out of ideas or the ideas weren't as fresh or as strong so I started to reach out to friends to collaborate with and initially I didn't collaborate with other designers I found individuals who had like an interesting conceptual link to time.

8:02So one, for example, was the cyclist, Graeme Abrey, who's famous for twice claiming the hour record in cycling. In cycling, that's literally how far can you cycle on an indoor cycling track in one hour. It's a really simple record, but it's really challenging for that reason. And I think there's been like maybe 12 people who have held the record in history. So Graeme Abrey is a very significant figure in the world of cycling. He really thought about aerodynamics and about how to optimize the aerodynamics of his position on the bicycle to allow him to go fast enough to achieve the record so he's kind of fascinating character so he was one of the people who worked on that first series and he's not a designer but he picked 12 words that had a sort of resonance to him in conjunction with the idea of the hour so he had one of those was like cherish or create the hour like just a sort of poetic sense that he brought to it.

8:58So there were different individuals who had that kind of link to time. One of the early decisions you made about the business was actually bringing the manufacturing back into the UK and make everything in-house. Tell us about that decision. I started to want to bring some of the production in-house. Prior to that, all of the designs had been done digitally and then sent to a factory in Hong Kong for manufacture. And that was a really successful model. I was really happy with it. The quality was excellent. My only frustration with it was I'd do a design and then I'd wait 10 to 12 weeks before I got the samples back.

9:36And then I'd spend maybe 20 minutes with the samples, change this, change that, this didn't work, this color is not quite right. And then I'd wait another 10 to 12 weeks to get either a further round of samples or the production. And my thinking was maybe I could eliminate that, at least one of those rounds of sampling because I could sample it in London and then I could tell the factory this is exactly how we want it and they would just go ahead and do the production. So I bought a pad printing machine I started to learn how to use it. Pad printing is a very industrial printing technology it's mostly used for printing on like pen barrels or golf balls is the really specific technical application of pad printing it's super industrial like boring process.

10:23Very unique. But, well, it was like, what's cool about it is they're quite small machines and they're very high resolution. You can only print one color at a time. You have to mix the ink from the base pigments and then load it onto the machine and print your one color and then clean it off and print the next color. So I think it was actually what we could do is micro editions, which were 25 piece editions of new designs. so we were printing them in house and then assembling them in house which had not really been my intention at the start I thought this would be like a sampling sort of option and what became quite clear once we started printing and assembling ourselves and specifically the printing because I knew what we could do and what we couldn't do I would do designs that just kind of stuck to our track what I knew we could successfully do and that was that didn't really work from a learning perspective because you know you need someone to come in and say I want to do this I want 20 colors I want these airbrush dials I want this gradient I want you know just crazy things I couldn't conceive of and that that really challenged us to get better at our processes so that was really the moment where I started working with designers to design and at that time It was friends who I knew who were illustrators who I would invite to come visit the workshop, see the printing, and then submit some designs and see how it went.

11:54And that really helped us to get better at the printing because they didn't really understand how the printing worked, what we could and couldn't do. So they'd just do a design and then we'd have to figure out how to make it. And that became a really important part of our kind of learning curve. Yeah. Well, it sounds like there was a lot of learning. And what's special about this process is you figured out this model that now a lot of direct-to-consumer brands actually teach about and vote about because they stress that you do need limited runs to keep people excited. I guess the second part of this, which is also really interesting, is that you have a very transparent model working with these artists.

12:36So talk to us about building out this commission model and why you've also expanded to working with recent graduates. Initially, I was working just with friends and illustrators who I knew. Obviously, I only know so many people. At a certain point, that runs out. And also, I guess, what was interesting as we started to develop some designs was we started to get people submitting ideas for designs. So we started working with different people who either submitted or were friends of friends or indeed who we'd seen online, like interesting people, interesting illustrators. At a certain point, we started thinking where the workshop is based, our main workshop in Camberwell, is just across the street from Camberwell Art College.

13:19And indeed, a lot of the people who I employ had studied at Camberwell Art College. Each year, they have a degree show where all of the graduating students show off their work and stuff. So we started to visit the degree shows with quite a conscious research agenda to find people who we thought would be interesting to work with. And that's been a really rewarding and really exciting part of the process, I guess, over the last few years, where we don't work exclusively with new graduates. there are kind of two or three of the perhaps nine, ten watches we do each year we'd aim to do with like new graduates but what's really great about it is they're really excited to work on a commission like they're just graduating and I know from experience like graduating from a fine art degree there's not an abundance of opportunities that present themselves so it was really nice to be able to offer some of these graduates I mean obviously we work with a tiny number but those few people who we get to work with, they're really happy that they have a project to work on straight out university.

14:20And they're really motivated because it's the only thing they've got kind of going on generally at that time. So we get really good engagement with them and really good work out of it. It's very interesting to hear about this model where it's transparent and also fair to all of the artists you work with. I believe one of them was actually able to pivot their career and pursue one of their passions. Tell us more about his story. So essentially the way our model works is we pay a one-off fee for the design, which covers the limited edition. If the watch is reissued into the permanent collection, then the designer gets a 5 % royalty as long as we keep making it.

15:03Initially, the royalty payments were quite small because the company was small like the number of watches we sold each year was quite small but that's grown progressively year by year and you're referring specifically to Christophe Devos who he's a Belgian illustrator he's one of the people who approached us speculatively I didn't know Christophe before he approached us and he used to work as a sort of commercial art director but also his real passion was designing children's illustrated books and he would kind of do that in the evenings like alongside his commercial practice. But yeah, after a couple of years of the royalty payments, he was able to give up his commercial practice in order to focus just on the book illustration.

15:45And subsequently, he's retrained as a teacher. So he now teaches art to high school students. But it's so rewarding, so amazing. Like as a story, we feel so proud within the company that we've been able to support him on that journey. I mean, he's the tip of the iceberg, pinnacle of the triangle, if you like. Like not all of the artists we work with are able to survive with their royalties, but we have been able to make good payments to quite a lot of them now. They get paid every six months and I think they're always really happy. I mean, I know they're really happy whenever they receive that.

16:18But I guess there's one thing to say on that. When I approach an artist to work with, I always set out in the very first email all of the financial provisions. I say, this is the fee for the design for the limited edition. Then you get the 5 % royalty. Here's the contract. We use the same contract for all the artists. We have the same fee for all the artists. We try to be really kind of level playing field. So whether you are a new graduate or whether you are a very established artist, it's the same fee. It feels like it's fair in a way because the royalty model works really well because we're paying a percentage of the money we're making.

16:51So it's always like affordable within the business. Yeah, it makes sense in so many regards. And it's really cool to see how far you've gone in your journey from an artist and also business owner. So very excited to dig into that more. I'm chatting with Crispin Jones, founder of Mr. Jones Watches. I'd like to take a moment here and thank you for tuning into the show. Please take a moment and subscribe to Shopify Masters for more conversations with founders and experts. Also leave us a review or comment for the show. Thank you so much. So I think the question here is you truly transitioned from artists to now I have to use this word, CEO, business owner.

17:40How have you mentally and emotionally adjusted to these chapters of change? I guess on some level, it's the story of me growing up, but it's kind of my journey. At first, I thought, you know, I studied fine art. I wanted to be an artist. Like that was my aspiration. And then I studied design and I thought maybe I could be a designer because that's a kind of commercial version of an artist. But actually, I didn't really fit into either of those worlds very satisfactorily i think it's been a process of being just brutally honest about what works and what doesn't like commerce is quite difficult to lie to yourself if we've got a bunch of watches and the ones that i designed didn't sell but the ones this other person designed did sell is kind of you can't like fudge that you can't say ah but the ones i designed will reissue into the permanent collection and the other ones that sell really well we'll just forget about it you know it becomes obvious like i guess my partner gets frustrated with me sometimes because i say like she says you you control the company like the you're steering it you're in charge i say i'm kind of the servant of the company to a certain degree because certain things like that i guess the customers tell you like which direction you should go in i guess on a kickstarter thing i'm never that surprised because i'm like you made a speculative thing maybe it's just a rendering maybe it's not even a real thing and you're like if i made this would you buy it whereas there needs to have that boldness of vision that says i really believe in this this what i want to make one of the things actually when we work with the collaborators probably our guiding principle is how good a representation of this artists or designers work is this watch like we never spend time thinking who's going to buy this how big a customer base might there be for this design are these colors part of some broader trend we always just focus in on because we can't really control any of that stuff i can't make the design like if i could make the design that's going to sell 100 000 watches each year of course I would do it in an instant but I can't like that's not within my remit to control all I can do is or I but part of the the wider team within the company all we can do is identify an artist who we think is really interesting and distinctive or has some quality that we've never seen before in their work and then try to translate that into a watch as best we can like that's the part we can control so that's the part we really focus on and then my belief is that if you're true to that and, you know, you have identified interesting people to start with, to work with, then I think the customers will follow.

20:24You've got to have some conviction in your decision. The part I want to circle back on is I feel like you bringing all of the production in-house, it was natural because you didn't like this 10-week lead time and having such a long wait time to see the second iteration. Now that you've brought things in-house, what advice do you have for other founders who are possibly thinking about the same, what should they think about when they're exploring in-house production? So I've had conversations with other people who run small companies, and obviously most people's model is I design stuff on computer here and then I email it to a factory, most likely in Asia, for manufacture, and then they send it back.

21:07Being able to do stuff in-house is so much more than that. And I guess I was a bit disingenuous saying the temporary reason was the genesis of wanting to bring some production in-house but the reason we persist with it is because we love that learning process but also we love the control like and there were points with the factories in hong kong where i don't know we would so pad printing you can print one color at a time so the factories didn't really like to print more than about eight colors on a thing because it's a lot of setup, it's a lot of faff, and we're ordering 100 watches. It's kind of annoying for them.

21:44Whereas now, if we do it in-house, the limit is like how many we want. As colourful as you want. Exactly. And then coming back to, you know, how good a representation is it of this artist's work? If we really believe this artist's work, the way to embody it in a watch form is we've got to print 20 colours on the dial, we've got to print 30 colours on the dial. If we really believe that, then we can do that. We're not at the whim of someone who's going to say, yeah, but the factory will do eight colors at maximum. You've got to condense the color palette. But I think there was a moment as well at the start where people would question bringing the production in-house and they'd say, but how does it financially make sense?

22:23Our experience has absolutely been that we can support the staff with a fair wage, like a London living wage payer, which maybe won't make sense to a North American audience. But it's a kind of benchmark for a minimum wage that's set by an independent commission in London. And it's higher, obviously, than most places pay. And you're offering artists a chance to actually work within their craft, which is, I think, also very important because you hire these assemblers and printmakers to be a part of the team as well. Correct. So basically the production is split into two parts, the printing and the assembly.

23:01The printing is almost exclusively done by people who come from a fine art printmaking background. the team of printers is maybe 10 12 people almost all of them come from that background and they're really good at problem solving like that's one of the things that fine art printmaking kind of embodies as like a core value that you have an idea it's maybe not the conventional way of doing things and you work out a way or a solution to to solve that problem so we find them really good at that work because they're so used to that creative problem solving mindset and for them presenting something, say we've got this design, we've never printed in this way before or used this material before, they're excited by that.

23:45That motivates them. Whereas I feel a more commercial, someone from a more traditional commercial print background might feel challenged by that or they think, well, I don't know how to do that. That's not my skill set. The other main team within the production is the assembly side. Because we're in the UK, there's a very small domestic watchmaking industry there just isn't the pool of watchmaking labor so all of the people who do watch assembly come from a jewelry background and specifically a bench working jewelry background and they have such good transferable fine motor skills they're used to working on a very small scale and we find it really easy to to train them up like the challenge for us really is getting them to apply because they think you know if we have a position we need to fill they think i'm a jeweler i don't know anything about watchmaking like it's not appropriate for me yeah there's so many sides of this business where you're supporting the artists that you collaborate with you've brought production in-house and you're supporting local artists who want to work for the company and the third part which surprises people i think is the prices of the watches are actually quite affordable in the world of timepieces.

24:59I think around two, three hundred pounds, you can get a piece from Mr. Jones watches. So how do you also achieve that side of the business? I wanted to make watches that were for my peers. I didn't want to make watches that were exclusively for the very wealthy. And one of my initial thoughts was, what if you had that inexpensive manufacturer, but with really high-end design. Design's not expensive in and of itself, or like really experimental design, like remember you will die on the hands. Like, you know, I thought that was a kind of really interesting combination. So rather than being an inexpensive watch that was pretending to be an expensive one, you had an inexpensive watch that was proud of what it was.

25:40So that idea of being affordable or keeping it as affordable as possible is absolutely central to what we do. I recognize as well, like, there'll be people listening who think£200,£300 for a watch is outrageous and no one should spend that amount of money on it. And I hear you, like, I absolutely recognize that, but that's about as low a price point as we can get it to. And as you say, in the world of watches, we're so inexpensive for our offering and for the amount of craft and hand assembly and hand work that's gone into it. I don't know of another brand that is putting that level of care into it, which I guess on some levels surprises me because I think, like I say, I'm not a philanthropist.

26:24I'm not doing this to, because I'm really wealthy and I'm able to subsidize it and make inexpensive watches for people. You know, it is a sustainable business. I feel like maybe there's an excessive spend on advertising or marketing and the sort of traditional watch world model is you have something that looks very conventional and then you've got to advertise very heavily to give people a sort of brand association with your brand to make them to desire it whereas our model is more like we make something really experimental so instantly it looks it differentiates itself from the rest of the watches and then our focus is all really on organic marketing we don't buy advertising, I think, at all of them.

27:06I think we haven't for several years now. We really focus on creating content on TikTok, Instagram, places like that, and just kind of promoting what we do as a way to sell ourselves. Well, that's how I found you. And I feel like you are literally going against the grain in the concept of watches and also the business model and how you run the team. It's amazing to hear. The other part I wanted to highlight is you also have a retail store in Covent Garden. So talk to us about how the store and the online business work together. So two years into the business, we opened the first shop. So 2009, we had a very small shop in the Oxo Tower in central London.

27:49It's a really nice location. It's by the river. The landlord has an agenda to do with supporting independent businesses. So it's quite subsidized rent it was very inexpensive certainly for the location it was very inexpensive but it was tiny and it was slightly difficult to find and we had that for well from 2009 up until 2021 and in 2021 we started looking at it and saying it's cool that it's really inexpensive this job but it's frustrating because it doesn't get much footfall like the people who go to it are our customers anyway and they're seeking it out because they want to see it. So we thought we're coming out of Covid, there was a lot of turnover of retail so we started looking around for what if we did want to open up a shop but in a prominent location this time that would have that kind of footfall and we feel really lucky that there wasn't a shop available in Neal Street.

28:47Neal Street has a really nice vibe of kind of independent quirky youth-based businesses so it felt quite aligned with what we were doing and I guess a bit like the collaborations we do and the everything else like we just wanted to make the best looking shop that we could so people who came to it would come away with this really strong impression of our brand and my belief is that over time that would be a sustainable sort of revenue model in itself. It's really interesting as well, like relatively speaking, the shop is a small part of the business, like the much larger part of the business is the online, but it has a very prominent position in people's understanding of us as a business.

29:34And I think that was something I really hadn't foreseen at all. It gives us a credibility in a strange way that being a purely online business, we would lack. And I feel like even when we had the tiny Oxo Tower shop even though most people would never ever visit it the idea that it was there gave them some sort of level of reassurance that i don't know it makes it kind of tangible and on some level i guess the the thing i always reflect on is that if you ask me to pick between the neil street shop and our tiktok account every day of the week i'm going for the tiktok account because the tiktok account is much more important for us for reaching new customers but people's perception is that the shop is a much more central kind of part of the business.

30:17Well, speaking of TikTok, we definitely have to get into that. I remember seeing the number crunchers watch and it was just so interesting because it's a picture of a little monster and the snack they're holding is actually the hour and then the minutes are in the monster's stomach. So it's just such a unique design. And I was pulled into your TikTok and I had to learn more about Mr. Jones watches. So talk to us about how the team is creating stories and sharing it with audiences around the world and turning them from viewers into actual customers. One of the things about our watches is that they look very different.

31:02So exactly as you've described, the number cruncher looks unlike any other watch. Putting it on TikTok, like the size of the phone screen and the closeness that you're looking at it you get to see all those details straight away whereas maybe if you're walking past an eel street shop and you thought i'm not very interested in watches and you looked across you saw the watches you wouldn't stop and you wouldn't see those those details um i mean tiktok has been amazing for us and at the start i was super skeptical i thought tiktok's a platform for children like it's or teenagers at most like it's not our audience our audience is a bit older than that they're sort of 20 to 30 years old and they're a bit more sophisticated and stuff i was really surprised at how powerful it is as a tool for like driving customers to us in terms of how that happens i wish i could give you like a clear explanation and it's one of our challenges and frustrations that the algorithm changes like Like stuff we don't expect to really blow up does.

32:04And stuff we think this, the most amazing content, doesn't do very well. And it really seems to be a little pattern to it. So we're a bit scattergun at the moment just trying to hit that. But I think, yeah, the core is that having the watch that large on a phone screen in your hand really forces you to see the details. Even if you're not interested in watches, you're instantly like, I understand how it works. or I'm intrigued to understand how it works. Like, and the TikTok video is sort of short enough that maybe it leaves a bit of a question hanging and you think, I kind of want to find out more because I don't quite get that, but it looked interesting, you know.

32:42So maybe that pushes people to visit the website right after, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I feel like all of the brands, all the creators are still trying to figure out TikTok. And to your point, it's ever changing. To close off the show, I want to ask you, because I feel like you're really good at adapting and changing and staying creative. And I feel like that's kind of a lifetime practice. So what is your advice now for those who are in arts or in business? How do they stay creative and how do they stay adaptive to the times? I mean, it's a challenge. Like I can easily get bogged down in the more administrative side of the business and just absorbed into that, into, you know, day-to-day running of the business.