Singer Reimagined: Reframing the chronograph

In 2017, watchmaking brand Singer Reimagined launched with its debut offering the Singer Track 1 and managed to astonish the watchmaking world with its concept of a central chronograph. Since then, the brand has grown exponentially with three major collections in addition to collaborations. “Day & Night” sat down with Marco Borraccino,  Co-founder – Managing Director & Creative Director of the marque to understand its genesis

Can you first tell us how the brand Singer Reimagined started?
You can trace all of it back to my passion for cars and watches. I met with Rob Dickinson, founder of Singer Vehicle Design, and fell in love with his designs. Over time, we became friends and the idea of applying the same philosophy behind the design of cars to watches became a topic that we discussed often. I, of course, come from watchmaking and one day I shot him an idea over email about the possibility of making a central chronograph as an evolution of the classic and iconic chronograph movement. We fell in love with the idea and decided that we needed to find a way to do it.

You originally were working with other watch brands?
At that time, I had my own design studio here in Geneva and was working with several watch brands. Previous to that, I had been in charge of the design department of Panerai for a little while. I began my career in the watch business a long time ago – always on the creation side. I was quite experienced in new product development.

You love cars?
Cars are the love of my life, but I got into the watch industry after my industrial design studies.

You designed the Singer Track 1; how about the movement?
We decided that we wanted to explore opportunities and we started knocking on doors in Switzerland to find someone crazy enough to develop the idea further. We could not find anyone because developing a new chronograph with a completely new way of displaying information is so difficult that nobody wanted to even listen to us. This was in 2014-2015 and I had slightly prior to that founded the Chair of Watch Design at the Geneva School of Art and Design and invited several experts in the industry to be part of our scientific committee; among them was Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, who is a very famous creator of watch movements.

One day, Jean-Marc and I were having lunch discussing our university work, and I told him about my crazy idea of creating a central chronograph. Things instantly became a bit weird as he became quite angry with me, especially because I had commented that it seemed impossible. He was convinced that it could be done, and he is very passionate about watchmaking. We started arguing about it and he then commented that it is very strange that I had the same idea that he had. He then admitted that he was working on the idea of a central chronograph that would display all the information on the centre. That was the starting point for a new chronograph to be developed. He felt that normal chronographs were not easily readable, and that exactly was the reason that I started designing a watch with a central chronograph. After the initial friction during that lunch, we realised that we were both talking about the same thing.

After this, Rob and I had a discussion with Jean-Marc and came to an agreement. We knew that the process would be painful, long, and very expensive as it is one of the most expensive movements in the market. Because of the cost factor, we decided to develop the movement with Agenhor, but to let them offer the same movement base to other brands in the future; we just could not afford to keep it for ourselves. We went through all the processes, paid in tears and in 2017, we were able to launch our new brand with a new movement and a new display of time.

How was the feedback?
It was a weird time for the watch industry in Europe. People just did not understand what was happening. Here was Singer Reimagined – a new brand coming out of the blue with an interesting case design but with something completely revolutionary. Nobody was expecting that. The original movement had almost 500 parts. We not only came with a revolutionary display but also with a movement, an architecture totally new. The movement is quite thick, and everything is different from anything else available. Even the journalists invited for the launch were blown away; half of them did not understand what we were offering while the other half were extremely excited.

Singer Reimagined offerings are available in the region at Perpétuel on https://perpetuel.com/