Designing Watches That Make You Look Twice

Welcome to The Micro Collector, a podcast where I talk with the founders and operators behind some of the most exciting microbrands and independent watch companies. I'm your host, Justin Dorfman, and in today's episode I'm joined by Wolfgang Heinrich, founder of HEINRICH Watches. HEINRICH is a German watch brand influenced by the bold designs of the 1970s. But what first drew me in was how Wolfgang has taken that inspiration and made it distinctly his own through unusual materials, colors, and an increasingly recognizable design language.

In this conversation, we talk about Wolfgang's journey into watches, how he built HEINRICH, and the lessons he learned launching his first watch through Kickstarter before taking a different approach with his second. We also dive into the evolution of the collection, his design process, the importance of German watchmaking to the brand, and why he's invested in both a full-time watchmaker and his own showroom in Stuttgart.

If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe for more conversations with the people behind these incredible watch brands. And with that, please enjoy my conversation with Wolfgang Heinrich of HEINRICH Watches.

All right, Wolfgang, welcome to The Micro Collector Podcast. I'm super excited to have you on today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, and looking forward to having a nice conversation. Yeah, happy to be here.

Absolutely. Well, I have to say I'm a little newer to your brand, but as soon as I checked out the website and checked out the socials, I was drawn in. I am definitely a fan of the 1970s era of watchmaking. I'm a fan of dive watches, and I really love how you're taking some influence and inspiration from that era, but really bringing in some of your own flavor, right? With the colors and the dial materials and stuff. So I'm very excited to hear about your background and how you built this brand, and really dive into the collection with you. So very excited for our conversation today.

Cool. Yeah, nice.

Well, why don't we start by learning a little bit about your background? I always like to ask: how did you get into watches before starting your brand? How did you get into the passion of watches in the first place?

Yeah, good question. My real first touch point with watches was, obviously, as a kid, more or less in the eighties. I was born in 1976, so an old guy already. I grew up in the eighties and nineties, and my first watch was a plastic watch, of course, a Swatch, which was a big thing in the eighties. I think I was around, I don't know, 10 or 12, something like that. And watches felt very colorful for me as a small kid, and almost something more than just telling the time. It already triggered something in myself, that it looks cool to have something on the wrist. So this was the first touch point.

And then later on came quartz watches in the digital phase, mainly in the 90s, where I started with Casio watches. At that time, the calculator watch from Back to the Future, which was also the end of the 80s, was something I was drawn into. As a kid, if you have a calculator on your wrist, which feels ridiculous today, at that time it was very futuristic and cool, and it also helped you during math class to calculate something.

Well, you know what's funny is I have an almost nine-year-old son, and he's getting into watches as well. And by the way, my path was similar to yours in the sense that, I don't know if it was my first watch, but my first love, my first step into collecting watches was Swatch, right? I loved the color. And even in my adulthood I went through a phase of collecting vintage Swatch watches, so I would try and find the ones from the eighties and nineties. But my nine-year-old son, this summer I got him the Casio calculator watch, and he uses it. The same thing as you said, he loves bringing it to school and doing calculations with his friends. So I think that interest in the use of that watch continues today.

You know, I did a little bit of research and I found that HEINRICH wasn't actually the first brand that you launched, I believe, right? You started with Tastemaker, if I'm correct.

Yep.

Maybe tell us a little bit about that experience, right? What did you learn from that, and what pushed you down a path where you decided to take a different brand and a different approach with HEINRICH?

Yeah, just to conclude how I then evolved into watches: later on, in my 30s, when I did a diving license, I started really with mechanical watches. My first watch was a Certina, and this was the beginning of building a smaller collection, but I was never in the luxury area like Rolex and so on.

But coming back, yeah, you did good research, I must say. Not all people know that I had a brand before. I started the first brand in 2018. It was Tastemaker watches, which I mainly developed as a proof of concept, more or less. I wanted to understand whether I could actually develop a watch at all, since I'm not a watchmaker. I'm coming from IT, and I'm just a watch enthusiast and watch collector. And to check if I could find the right suppliers, bring a watch into production at all, and also find, of course, customers to buy something like that. So it was mostly a learning platform for me, to go through all the phases of watch development: product development, design, suppliers, production, logistics, marketing, of course, and also to see if I could manage to build up a personal design identity.

These watches were mainly quartz, so I wanted to keep it affordable. That doesn't mean I think a mechanical movement is a better choice, but I always wanted to go into this area of automatic watches. So even if the watches I'm currently developing are not quartz based, this is nothing that I'm against. For me, the movement has to make sense for the watch and the concept behind it. So at the end, it doesn't matter to me personally if it's a mechanical movement or not. I tried it. This was more in the fashion area, because the watches were around 200 USD. But my long-term strategy was, of course, to go up. And with HEINRICH, I wanted to build a real mechanical watch collection around watches that I personally want to own. That was the bigger difference from the first brand.

And HEINRICH became much more about creating a recognizable design language. I hope you can see it at the moment already, but I'm still experimenting to achieve this goal, because I really wanted my watches to be recognizable from 30 centimeters, or one meter ideally, and experimenting with unusual materials, producing in smaller numbers today, and building a collection that can evolve over the years.

And what is also important: putting my own name on the dial, which Tastemaker was not, also changed something for me psychologically, I must say, because it created a completely different level of responsibility. If you have your name on a dial, you cannot really hide behind a brand name you came up with. So I really wanted to set up the second brand to be really personal. If HEINRICH is written on the dial, which is my last name, I need to personally stand behind that watch. And this is also the commitment I try to give.

You talked about design language, and I think that is such an important part of a watch brand. I always say the brands that resonate with me the most are those that have an instantly recognizable design language. If you hid the logo, or, to your point, if you see it across the room, you know it's a HEINRICH watch, right? How would you describe the design language of HEINRICH today, or how would you describe what you're trying to achieve with the design language?

Well, as you said already, my inspiration comes mainly from 70s watches, let's call it like that. But my approach is not to just develop another homage brand. For me, it's just taking inspiration from that era, because it was a very bold and courageous era, in my opinion, and it was very creative. Now some brands are really playing safe, and I don't want to do this. I want to combine this inspiration with interesting materials and a distinctive design language of my own. I love watches with character. Some of my designs are probably polarizing; some will like it, some will hate it.

But I think that's a good thing, because if you have a common design which everybody already knows, then you are not competitive, I guess. Just my opinion. So I never wanted to create something really experimental just for the sake of being different, but there's always a line for me, I would say, that I don't want to cross. A HEINRICH should make you look twice maybe, but it should also be the watch you put on in the morning and wear every day. So sometimes I call it a daily rocker approach, but still with a unique kind of twist. That's how I would describe it, in a longer answer.

Yeah, and I'll say you've achieved that. I mean, the first watch that I saw on the site that did make me look twice was, I think, the American football one, where, like you said, the design of the watch was familiar, right? I'm like, okay, 1970s, but what is that material? And then clicking on the image and reading a little bit about the watch, seeing that you've actually used the material from American footballs, is just so creative. So I think, like you said, it's a fine line to walk, but looking through the collection, I think you're walking that line, which is really cool to see.

Maybe tell us about that first watch that you launched. If I'm not mistaken, you launched that through Kickstarter. So what was that experience like? First of all, what was the watch, and what made you decide that that was the initial design that would be the launch watch? And then tell us about the Kickstarter experience and what you learned from launching through that platform.

Thanks also for the comment on the American football watch. This was released two weeks ago, and it was quite a next-level watch with a leather dial. The first watch was a diving watch called the Taucher 1. Taucher means diver in German, so I kept it simple, like my last name here.

And yeah, I actually launched it on Kickstarter, because I didn't use an out-of-the-box design. I designed my first watch on my own with pencil and paper and then converted it in Illustrator, which I taught myself. And I also wanted to use a Swiss mechanical movement. Since the investment was quite high already, because for the case, dial, hands, and everything I used my own design and not off-the-shelf products, the only chance to bring this to life was through Kickstarter, because there you have the pre-order phase, of course, and you can also track if there's interest at all or not.

So Kickstarter was quite important for me for the first watch, because I was a completely unknown brand, first of all. And it was also a real-life test of whether people outside my own circle would put money behind it. Let's put it like that. And fortunately they did. The first Taucher was successfully funded at that time, I think with 70k US dollars, and that gave me the confidence to continue with my brand.

And one thing I noticed is that the second watch you launched, you actually didn't launch through Kickstarter; you launched directly on your site. I wanted to ask you about this because I get this question a lot. I was actually talking to an aspiring brand founder yesterday, and he asked me the question: should I launch through Kickstarter or should I not? Is it worth it?

Maybe tell us a little bit about that decision not to launch the second one through Kickstarter, and how would you answer that question if there's an aspiring founder listening today? You've done both approaches. Is Kickstarter still the best way to launch initially? Or do you have to do Kickstarter first to earn the right to launch on your site? I'm just curious to get your opinion on that.

It's also an interesting question because, as always, it depends, I must say. But for the Taucher 2 I actually started with Kickstarter, to be honest. I canceled the Kickstarter after 10 days, but I need to explain the reason for that. I launched the Taucher 2 in February 2022, and at that time there were certain circumstances which made it probably not the right time for Kickstarter. The war in Ukraine started, and we were still a bit in the COVID phase. So it was a very, very uncertain time. The campaign I launched didn't get the traction I wanted. I think I collected 30k US dollars, and then I canceled the campaign, for several reasons.

There were a lot of scammers and skepticism around Kickstarter campaigns when I launched it. Before I launched, I was already a bit cautious, and I think that turned out to be reality, because during COVID times there were a lot of fake projects out there where people just put out renderings and maybe some real photos, collected the money, and then ran away. And on top of that came the circumstances with the war and COVID and so on. I needed to act on that.

And probably the Taucher 2 was also not a perfect product for the typical Kickstarter audience, because it was much more costly than the Taucher 1, which I launched for 500 US dollars. The Taucher 2, which was a bit more complex watch already, was much higher. I think I started at 800 USD. And for Kickstarter, when I look at the successful campaigns, they are mostly watches below 500 USD. This is maybe a more generic statement, and it also depends, of course, on how much you spend on marketing and so on. But I see the lower prices being more successful, to be honest.

So it's hard to advise a brand owner what the best choice is. You really need to do a 360-degree consideration of the watch, the project, the marketing budget, and how you want to position the brand itself, whether it's below 500 USD or even higher, and so on. There are different factors that count. But yeah, you are right. I canceled the Kickstarter and then decided to just do the pre-order phase on my own website, because when I canceled, a lot of people said, "Yeah, I wanted to back your campaign, and now it's too late." So there was some interest, but I think people were just cautious because of the circumstances I just explained. So I decided to take the risk, produce the watch in smaller quantities, and then move to pre-order on my own website. At that time, it really felt like a bit of a setback, to be honest.

But looking back, it was probably one of the most important decisions for my brand, because it forced me to become less dependent on crowdfunding, start building my own customer base on my own, and not rely on a crowdfunding platform. It also allowed me to communicate directly with my customers and build a long-term relationship, which is quite important for me now because I have repeat customers. That has even accelerated the personal connection between the brand and the customer, more than just being a brand on Kickstarter. And then the Taucher 2 still came to life. I sold all 100 watches, luckily; not all through the pre-order, but maybe 80, and 20% later when the watch was already there. So that experience taught me that crowdfunding is a good way, but at some point I think you must decide whether you want to keep launching projects through that platform or establish your brand on your own website, which has a lot of advantages as well.

But I know there are also brands like, I think, Xeric. You know this brand from the US, probably?

Yeah, yeah, Xeric, yeah.

Xeric. Yeah, they are still very successful. They launch every watch project through Kickstarter. So that's not the golden rule; this is just my view on it. But they are very successful and do this with every new watch. They only launch on Kickstarter, so it's quite interesting.

Yeah. They have very unusual-looking watches as well. So I think in a crowd of Kickstarter campaigns, where a good majority of the watches look similar, they stand out. So perhaps that's the reason why it's become such a good platform for them.

I wanted to talk a little bit more about the collection as it stands today. We talked about the Taucher as your first watch, right? And now, browsing through your website, I can see you have some other models that you've launched since. Maybe walk us through each one and how they fit into the collection. You talked earlier about creating a common design language. What role does each play, and what ties them together within that design language?

Yeah, sure. As I said, the first watch was a dive watch. This was the beginning because, also from a commercial point of view, a dive watch is of course something everyone still likes. So this was the first watch, to create a robust mechanical watch. Also, I have the diver background; I'm a recreational diver now and then, and in the past. So this was quite cool for me. And I could easily combine it with the vintage influence. So I have these bold indexes in orange on the Taucher 1, and the green dial was very popular, a green dial with these patina indexes, which were very bold. So this was the first thing which, I must say, hopefully already drew some attention to my kind of style, which I love.

And then I continued with the Taucher 2, which was more like, I would say, a turtle case. So not as edgy as the first Taucher watch, but it still had influences from the 70s, of course, with an integrated bracelet and a leather strap, which is also quite controversial because the leather strap is open on the arm for 50%. But that matched very well with the design idea of taking inspiration from the past, because Senet or other brands used that kind of leather strap before, in the 70s.

And then the next level, moving away from the dive watches: I wanted to develop a sports watch, a robust watch with diver specifications, but without a rotating bezel. Just a sports watch you can use every day, a bit slimmer than a diver, but still keeping a recognizable design. For that watch, you probably saw it, there's a bezel with 12 screws on it. You could say maybe Audemars Piguet or Hublot have some similar things, but we really tried to distinguish this from other watches. We also played around at that time with stone dials, like aventurine, lapis lazuli, and amethyst, and finally, two weeks ago, something more experimental with the football leather, which had more of a personal story, because my son is now in the US doing an exchange year.

Twelve months ago, we decided that he'd go there, and I wanted to come up with an idea that would not be expected from a German brand: an American football watch made of real leather. That was the background of that. But it's still the same watch, the Helicoprion, which is an ancient shark, by the way. A complicated name, but it also has some diving background.

And after that, I released the Radiance, which is, again, another segment. So we have a dive watch, we have a sports watch, and the Radiance was a more dressy approach. There I'm using a hand-wound movement, the ETA 7001. It has a really slim case, eight millimeters high, more elegant, with a polished bezel and also strong geometry and a lot of 70s character. So you see some Universal Genève vibes maybe, but we still want to distinguish it in the overall design if you look at it. I think the feedback was quite good about that as well. And at that time we also had a new movement: not an automatic movement, but a hand-wound movement, which some don't dare to do in the early phase.

But this was quite clear for me, because if you want to have a dress watch, you want to keep it slim and have it under the cuff. And that also gave me the chance to have an open case back and let the movement shine. If you have an automatic movement, of course you can decorate it nicely, but you always have the rotor in between. With a hand-wound movement, in my personal opinion, you can do a lot of nice things. We have the Côtes de Genève, we have blued screws, an engraved logo, and an open case back, which the other watches didn't have so far, of course. So there's always a bit of evolution, hopefully, which you can see.

Yeah. And one thing that I noticed as I learned a little bit more about your approach to making these watches: you mentioned that you designed the first watch, and there are a couple of moves you've made earlier than a lot of brands that I thought were really interesting. One is bringing in a designer to work with you, and the other is bringing in a full-time master watchmaker in-house. Tell me a little bit about where those decisions came from, especially at this early stage in the brand, and what it has really allowed you to do since bringing them on board.

Okay, so the watchmaker, to be honest, I've only had for one and a half years now. I started the brand in early 2021, and one and a half years ago I got to the point where I have my own watchmaker. But I can come to that later. For the design, yeah, that's right. The first design was really my own, and I'm still proud of it. But as the brand developed, I realized that bringing in a professional designer and another creative perspective could make the watches even better, so that I don't come up with something in my own room and then maybe ask some friends who will say, "Yeah, it looks fantastic." I'm always open to an outside perspective. So that's when I started to search for actual watch designers, which is not easy to do.

It's hard to find watch designers who are open to supporting a small brand, because the famous watch designers work for Swiss companies, and I couldn't afford that at all. My whole brand is bootstrapped. I don't have rich parents, so I need to be cautious with my budget. Everything is built on my own.

Then I did the research and found a designer from the UK. Already in the first conversation, we had a really good match. We had the same interests. He's also very interested in 70s design and had a similar past to mine. He's also a diver. But I didn't just hand everything over to him. We work together now; it's more of a collaborative approach. Usually I come to him with a strong idea, a concept of what I want for the next watch. I already have the overall concept, references, proportions, and mostly all the details. Then he supports me to bring this to life, and during the design phase we challenge each other with these ideas. He brings a real industrial design perspective and sometimes finds solutions I wouldn't have found myself. But at the same time, I can also be quite stubborn about the details I want to achieve.

Some things I have in mind are pretty complex. Some can materialize, some not. But it's always interesting to have someone you can discuss these kinds of things with, who has experience in the industry, and to challenge each other, to be honest. This is also very productive, because we go back and forth until we reach a point where it feels right for both of us. This feels like a good approach.

And it doesn't mean that I stopped designing watches myself completely. Once we have agreed on a fundamental architecture, like for the Helicoprion, I always design the dials on my own, since the platform already exists, and also to grow the collection overall. A lot of the experimentation you see, for example with the guilloché dials or unusual materials, still comes completely from me, because my designer sometimes, I wouldn't say he's conservative, but maybe he doesn't dare to do some things. But this is a good thing, because you have different views. And then, as I said, it can hopefully be quite a good product at the end.

And how about the decision to bring in the watchmaker so early? Where did that come from? And also, reading your website, I get a sense of the pride you have in being made in Germany, Pforzheim, and the traditional history of watchmaking there. Tell me all about that and your drive to invest in local watchmaking.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. At the beginning of my journey, the idea was to do everything completely in Germany. But then when I asked suppliers about all the components, okay, the movement I cannot source in Germany at all, because there's only Glashütte, and then the watch would be beyond $10K. But even if I sourced all the other parts completely in Germany, it would be a watch for $7K USD. So first of all, I wouldn't have had the budget. And secondly, I don't think that would materialize if you start a new brand. So I still want to do as much as possible in Germany, because I'm a German brand, and that's why I still source the majority of parts there. But the main challenge is, of course, also to build the watch itself in a country with high labor costs.

For a small brand like me, it was a significant investment one and a half years ago, as I said, to have someone really dedicated to working for my brand. In the past I worked with freelance watchmakers and private-label companies in Pforzheim, which is close to where I live. Pforzheim is in the south of Germany, where there are companies like Laco or Stowa, the flieger companies. There you find some freelance watchmakers, not a lot, and private-label companies.

But when I worked with them as a small brand, you quickly run into the problem that you're competing for capacity. These private-label companies also do quartz watches below $500 USD or so, in quantities of around 1,000 watches, and of course they earn much more on those. If I come in with my 50 or 100 watches, with eight different dial colors, we bring a lot of complexity. So they say, "Yeah, we can do it, but you pay a higher price, or you need to wait in line until we are done with the major brand."

Then, one and a half years ago, I had the opportunity to find someone who had been in the watch industry for 20 years. He worked for Maurice Lacroix, a Swiss watch brand, in Pforzheim, Germany, where they had a headquarters for servicing and so on. I decided to take the chance, and luckily, he agreed to work with me. That was a big step for the brand, because suddenly I had two decades of professional watchmaking experience, first of all. And I have a dedicated resource of my own, which also helps a lot, because it gives me much more control over assembly, regulation, quality control, and service. When you outsource, to be honest, they might fool you. You need to trust them; they do what they want and they charge you. This was a big, big challenge for me.

Now we can analyze things directly instead of passing the watch between different external partners where everyone blames the other. It also gives me a much better feedback loop when it comes to prototyping or product development, because I can immediately get feedback from him, and we can learn quickly whether some details can be accommodated or improved. And for future servicing it makes life easier, because he knows the watches he builds and knows my product very well, and you are not just one of a thousand other watches out there.

Yeah. It sounds like a great move. A lot of the challenges I hear from other microbrands and independent brands that do outsource are after-sales service, capacity, the prototyping, and the iteration. It seems like having your own full-time watchmaker obviously addresses a lot of that, so I can definitely see the appeal.

Tell us what's next for HEINRICH. Anything coming down the pipe in terms of new models? I also know you're going to be at a couple of events, so maybe you can talk about places where people can find you and check out the watches in person, and also where they can follow you online. And I think you also have a showroom, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.

So this was the next big step this year. I opened a showroom here in my hometown, Stuttgart. This was in March, when I found a nice location, because the rent is really high here. I don't need to tell you, if you live in San Francisco, but Stuttgart is also a really high-rent place. I had been searching for such a space for a while, over a year. And in February I got the chance to rent something which also matches my brand very well, because it's an old building with some vintage character. It was built around 1890, before the war, and it's still in good shape, which is sometimes not common here in Germany.

So I opened that one. This was the next step because I didn't want to go into traditional retail. Retail margins in the watch industry are very high, around 50% or 60%, depending on who you work with. I didn't want to increase the prices, because I always wanted to be a direct-to-consumer brand and have a really direct relationship with my customers. I want to know who's buying my watches, hear their feedback, and stay connected to the people who support the brand. If you have a retailer in between, I think you could maybe sell more watches, but you might also risk losing contact with the audience, which I think is a unique factor for a smaller brand like mine. Otherwise you are just one of many.

The showroom will be a touch point, of course; if you are based in the US, it doesn't help. But I have also had some US visitors here in the showroom who were doing a European trip and just showed up. This was fun. I'm also doing trade shows. The next stop will be Windup in New York in October, and this year I was also in Washington, DC, for District Time. So now and then I'm at trade shows in the US or in Europe. In Germany, of course, Düsseldorf. There's a big trade show in Prague called Micro Praha, which I've been attending for four years, since the start. It's a really nice trade show for microbrands and independent brands. That's how I travel around the world. I want to go to Singapore for Spring Sprang Sprung next year, maybe; let's see. But mainly, it's Europe and the US where you can find me, and in my showroom.

Yeah, well, I'm excited to see you and see the watches at Windup New York, so you can definitely count on that. But I would also love to get over there and check out the showroom at some point as well.

Yeah, just come by.

Like you said, it aligns with the brand. I usually go to Europe in the summer, so maybe we'll do a stop in Germany as part of that.

Well, this has been such a pleasure. As I said, your brand came on my radar recently, but I immediately understood the essence behind it and was intrigued to learn the story behind it. So I really appreciate you taking the time today and sharing this story, and I'm really excited to see you out there and continue to cheer you on as you continue building out HEINRICH Watches.

Thank you very much, Justin. And thanks for the time and for having me to tell my story. Thank you. And see you soon in New York, maybe.