Garrick S8 Update - Why the S8 lost a millimetre
If you’ve been following the S8, you’ll have seen that we previously said it was going to be 40mm. That figure has changed. The case is now 39mm, and since we’re the ones who put the first number out, it seems only fair that we explain the second one.
It’s a small change and an easy one to skip past. We’d rather not skip it because the reasoning is more interesting than the number. Also, because it’s a reasonable window into how a watch like this actually gets decided.
First, it’s still alive
Worth clearing something up before the millimetre. The S8 was not launched at Watches and Wonders earlier this year. We weren’t even officially at Watches and Wonders per se. We were in Geneva that week, showing to clients and a few invited guests away from the fair, which is a rather different thing and suits us better anyway.
What they saw were early renders. That is, computer-generated images of a watch that was still being worked out, rather than photographs of one that existed.
Renders are useful. They let us talk about a design before there’s anything to photograph. They also have a habit of being mistaken for a finished product. So then, when several months pass with nothing new, people quite reasonably start to wonder whether the whole thing is still happening.
Don’t worry, it is. We’re building the prototype now and hope to have it running in the next few weeks.
What it is, roughly
For anyone arriving cold, the S8 is skeletonised and open-worked. There’s no conventional dial closing off the front, and excess metal has been cut away from the plates and bridges behind it so that you see through the movement rather than at it. Everything that would ordinarily be hidden is on display, and has to be finished as though it were the front of the watch, because now it is. This is a modified in-house calibre, with an added subsidiary seconds at 8 o’clock, and copious amounts of hand bevelling and black polishing.
A skeletonised movement leaves nowhere to hide. On a closed watch, most of that finishing sits under a dial where nobody will ever see it, and a maker can be forgiven for hurrying it. Here, every component is in plain view from the front, and all of it has to stand being looked at closely by someone who knows what they’re looking for. It’s done at the bench, by hand, one component at a time. There isn’t a faster way that produces the same result, which is most of the reason this takes as long as it does.
Where it came from
The S8 started as an answer to a question we kept being asked. The S3 Mk2 and the S3 Deadbeat Seconds have done well for us. Well enough that the waitlist runs long, but a good number of the enquiries that come in end the same way. People like the watch, but at 42mm it’s more than their wrist wants.
That’s a frustrating thing to hear repeatedly and do nothing about. The S8 is the response. Not a shrunken S3, because a design doesn’t survive being scaled down, but a watch in the same family and working to the same balance, drawn from the start at a size that suits more people.
So, the millimetre…
Here’s the honest version. We changed our minds late, and we did it on a feeling about how the watch would sit on a wrist rather than on any formula or calculation.
The starting point was the S7, which is 38mm. It’s a popular size, and it suits that watch. However, enough people have told us it runs a touch small that 40mm looked like the obvious correction. On paper, it was.
The trouble is that a skeletonised watch doesn’t read the same as a closed one. With no dial to shut the front off, the eye travels all the way out to the edge of the case. The whole thing carries more visual weight than the same case would with a solid dial. Give it 40mm to spread into, and the case starts running the watch rather than framing it.
So, 39mm. Enough presence for a piece with this much going on inside, without tipping over into a watch that wears you.
That is about as much as we’re saying for now, and there’s a reason for that at the end.
Nobody is going to spot it
We’re under no illusions here. Put a 39mm case next to a 40mm one and most people will not pick out the difference. It’s easier to measure than it is to see.
Fair enough. But you don’t wear two watches next to each other. You wear it on your wrist every day for years, and small details that are ever-so-slightly off have a way of nagging at you over time. None of that shows up on a spec sheet, which is exactly the problem with deciding these things on a spec sheet.
The timing helped. The case was still in development when we made the call, so committing to 39mm was a matter of settling a drawing rather than unpicking finished work. A millimetre is cheap while the case is still being drawn. It gets quite expensive later down the line.
Why you’re not seeing any of it
We know that a project update with no pictures in it is a strange sort of update. But that’s on purpose.
A watch like this only gets a full reveal once. If it arrives in fragments over six months, a component here and a close-up there, then by the time anyone sees the whole thing, they’ve already assembled a version of it in their head, and the real one has to compete with that. We’d rather it landed in one piece, in person, with someone able to turn it over and look into it properly.
So the images and the specifics stay with us for a while yet. Not to be coy about it, just because the alternative spoils something we’ve spent years on.
The ratio of the job
We published 40mm because we were asked, and it was true at the time. Then it stopped being true. Both of those things are entirely ordinary in a project at this stage, and the only real mistake available to us was leaving the old number sitting there uncorrected.
One millimetre, and a good deal of work either side of it. That’s about the ratio of this job.