Dear community,
Thanks for all your input, passion and critical feedback. This post likely will be a bit shorter and less professionally worded in English because Landon our "content-master" is spending well deserved time with his family at the beaches of Madeira.
Leaves the job of trying to explain truely unexpected news about our "Great Hands Debate" to Tzuyu and myself (Andi). And it is not just unexpected, it is perhaps the most lucky thing we have experienced along this project.
Intense internal discussions of how to interpret the votes in comparison to the vivid/controversial discussion, has plagued Tzuyu with sleepless nights. Although Tzuyu did pretty much most of the calls for solution finding around this hands problem, she as a perfectionist on the one hand and a manufacturing cost procurement expert on the other hand just could not rest.
Yesterday in the morning it came to her mind that she could call up another expert in the field of working with luminous materials. He is into it since 30 years and known for making the impossible happen. Typically factories with certain scale need color codes and then mix it accordingly along an SOP (Standard Operating Process) There is not much room for playing around which belongs into the realm of R&D. And with lumnious the color codes of pantone & Co do not work very well and it is more about tyring and the amount of aces up on your sleevs when searching for solutions.
So after the call with Mr. Luminous, she went over to his workshop with her baggage full of orange-luminous-problems to figure out if he might have some material combination which comes close to what we have been shown during the early stages of Supersede CGI (Computer generated images).
With a smile he opens a drawer and pulls out this sample below which is a stunning orange luminous drop splashed over a piece of paper.
V4 says pretty much all... he also needed to play around a lot and playing with Superluminova is an expensive exercise. Luckily he did find the "secret sauce" and packed one gramm of the left over orange material combination for Tzuyu to take home and apply on some sample hands.
With a smile she hurried back to the office and sent out the one gram of material to our hands supplier in Seoul, Korea.
Being a design and manufacturing expert with more than 25 years experience Tzuyu can quickly judge on if things work out or if we run into trouble during production. Her smile on her face indicated to me that she is 95% sure that this material combination would likely produce the desired result matching our expectation from the CGI´s we have come up with in the early days of this project.
So what are the implications on the next steps?
Here is a table of what we are looking at right now and before we have not yet received sample-hands back with the magic luminous orange we look at the-state-of-the-second-hand as follows:
This means, in any case we will produce a couple of red hands to satisfy orders.
Tooling for both the hand itself and color mixture red and orange non-luminous have been done already. Therefore, IF... then the "Magic orange" comes along as we hope we will produce the orange hands as originally shown. This means we will skip the orange (non-luminous)only version and very likely we think we all can conclude that we can also skip the Lollipop version, thus saving us time and tooling cost. But as said only IF things work out with the “Magic Orange” if not then we revert back to the lollipop and non-luminous options.
Concerning your order adjustment:
Since we have this new opportunity, please hold back with your order change requests for now and lets wait on this sample hands. Then we will make a next post and a live to make the final call... hopefully 😂.
Offering a Journey or "Faith Accompli"... Lesson Learned.
We have been facing some pretty rough discussions in the background caused by some of the changes we had to do come up with. For us product makers day in and out since 25 years it is a normal journey of countless changes and adaptations between imagination, simulation, sampling and final product. Computers are helpful to get a very good idea by using photo realistic technologies, but they obviously can lead us into a difficult position like in this hands and case debate.
We have decided to make it part of our business model and product development approach to let people become part of this journey of course trying to reduce the visible setbacks for our community to a minimum. But realistically we cannot eradicate them and we also believe it is important to let you as people get insight into a tiny part of the challenges the design and manufacturing team is facing along this journey.
However we understand that some become more emotionally attached than others to some early stage design suggestions, and it can become hard to accept that some changes we present are just in all our best interest and an expected struggle for us day in day out. We always want to reach the best possible outcome and try to give the best we can do so. But sometimes we have to accept trade-offs because there are limitations in our skills, infrastructure or just physics.
So we apologize to the ones which felt some sort of disappointment that we cannot always live up to the motto "what you see is what you get" and we will spend more effort in future to point out potential pitfalls and manufacturing related limitations about our early design suggestions.
So please accept our apologies on that side and we will try to make it more clear in future where we enter the realm of CGI-reality versus manufacturing limitations.
Overall we think we should continue with our open and inclusive style of bringing products to live, because most people not only understand the limitations and changes, but also embrance the journey. This makes us happy and drives us to improve.
Here are more rendered fotos to get the feeling.
We listen and deeply care about your input.
Thank you,
Andi, Tzuyu, Landon and the entire HORAGE team
Hi Landon. Can you clarify the color of the hour and minute hands? Your website shows them as plain steel hands, but a lot of the photos on Instagram show as black outlined hands as shown above. Just curious what the final look will be. Thanks.
Be sure to join in on the live stream tomorrow on YouTube. We have updated Magic Orange hands to show. See you then. https://youtu.be/uoQkJW7SDGI
With regard to delivery, if we choose the Solution 1.3 should we expect a delay on arrival? (I'm in Early Bird group)
Thanks
Hi Horage team
Again thank you for the transparency and for pushing the boundary here. Not to create yet another hand debate, but I am still confused by your hour and minute hands: your renders continue to show both segments of the hands filled with lume (which I like) but your prototypes only have lume on the outer segment and have the inner one empty. Can you please confirm and make sure all images match moving forward? (Including CGI on the main the Supersede webpage ;). Thank you!
Dear Horage team, I am sorry reading that you had to suffer abuse. As the sayings goes, “haters gonna hate”. You are doing a great job and for every hater, be sure you have 100 friends. Supersede is the most exciting product launch I have been witness of. I feel privileged to be part of this community and being able to voice my opinion, and I am impressed again and again with how you take inputs and questions from us. Keep it up and keep sharing.
I would love to see some lume shots when possible.
Ok it’s been a couple days since I last commented. I like both versions of the hand—joker lollipop version and the original orange tip lumed hand. And although I prefer the PR to match the lumed hand color, that’s not that important to me. In regard to the lume itself, I have a novice concern that may or may not be valid. If the lume on the second hand and 24 hour indicator are merely painted on, wouldn’t it be significantly shallower in depth than the lume on the other hands and the hour markers? If so, doesn’t than mean that it would lose luminescence much quicker than the thicker applications? Just curious if this is of any concern at all and what (if any) are the design solutions to this. In regard to all the “controversies”, I again want to commend you all on your professionalism, transparency, humility, and flexibility. You deserve none of the personal attacks and I pray that team Horage succeeds in a massive way. Thanks for letting us be a small part of this incredible journey! I am more excited than ever in this project and can’t wait for the photos of the final design and dial colors.
Boy the orange lolly-pop on white really looks terrific, might have to change face color on order if that version is available. But excellent work by the whole team on this watch and wonderful that the original hand might work out after all.
Excellent work and communication from the Horage team. Thank you and I hope the solution 2.0 works out.
Is there anyway to get the lollipop with the magic orange? Or is that a pricey and useless endeavor.
Thank you and excellent work. Solution 2 looks great and hopefully the secret sauce is a go. As with some other folks, I'm also not a big fan of the lollipop in terms of the size and orientation (reminds me of Tudor snowflake, despite this being a legacy Horage design element). So very interested in seeing how this pans out, as I would rather have lumed second hand.
That's very exciting. I've always thought of the Horage group as an "engineering-first" type group, meaning problems are meant to be solved! I'm continually impressed with the commitment to excellence along with transparency that frankly isn't common. The convergence of design, engineering, and economics is incredibly tricky, but you all seem to optimize the high standards you have set forth for yourselves. Very exciting and I look forward to continue hearing more about the next iteration.
I must have missed this, but where do customers request changes (i.e. for hands, and the rotor?)
Red all the way heheheh.
Now… Let’s get Mr. Magical Lum to have him/her come up with a mixture of red with lum 😜
Great to see that a solution might be possible keeping the original design. I personally did not like the idea of a "lollipop" second hand, it seemed too loud on such a clean design. My only concern since the inception of the project was having 2 accent color, both orange on the hands and red on the power reserve indicator. This issue with the lume on the orange brought out the possibility of having red hands, making red all around the accent color, which made me happy. Let's make it clear, I would rather orange as an accent all around including the PR indicator, but it seems that this is not going to happen for whatever reason, so my preferred choice resolves to be red all around. I'm hoping that this will be an option in the coming August round, then I'm all in...
This is exciting news. Obviously, I prefer the original design with lume if possible, but I hope you still consider the non-lume orange option if it doesn't work out rather than the lollipop (or at least continue trying some lollipop design adjustments).
Very sorry to hear you have been targeted with hurtful attacks. That's ridiculous. I love that you are keeping us all in the loop. This is one of the things that has drawn me to your brand.
Looking forward to hearing the outcome!
I fully support Navin’s comments & thank you Andi & the team for being so responsive to the community’s issues. Hopefully the hands/lume decision will satisfy most people. It is disappointing that some comments went too far & people took advantage of your open approach to the developmental process. I’m pretty sure that there was no personal malice intended…..but…….democracy, eh?
Really excited and pleased to see that the community has been listened to and all of the extra effort that @tzuyuhuang6 and the rest of team @horage gone to in order to find a potential solution to the orange second hand problem, whilst being faithful to the original design DNA of the Supersede. I will, of course, be going for the orange tip in luminous if it works out and is feasible to scale up for production.
The back lash from many of us in the community must feel daunting at times but I do think most of it is in good faith, trying to support the challenging decision making you guys have every day as you work on the watches. And we appreciate your work. I think most of us understand that little details can and will change from the initial design concepts, as the manufacturing and physical challenges start to manifest themselves. And we can accept that. Where it becomes more of an issue is if it starts to fundamentally change the ethos of the design or concept we originally bought into as early backers. It is frustrating if you find out that what you will receive is a different product by design to that which you put your money into. For example, a dive watch instead of a versatile “all terrain” sports watch.
I do also want to say to you please don’t change your approach. Despite the discussions in the community sometimes maybe feeling or coming across as hostile, I personally really value that you ask us for our thoughts and input on the design details. It really makes it feel like I’m part of the process in making the watch. I guess you just need to have confidence and focus in your own core design DNA and purpose for the watch so that our thoughts as a community don’t change that central vision into something else. But by all means, please do keep us informed, and ask us for our opinions on the little flourishes and details that can enhance the overall design or give it a little more character of its own.
Thanks again for your ongoing efforts!