Above and beyond the utility of telling the time, watches serve a host of other functions for their wearers. Indeed accessories, and by extension watches, are far more than mere affectations. They are expressions of who we are – windows into our taste, our ambitions, our personalities. For some, watches are talismans of self-expression.

There are almost as many reasons to get into the watch world as there are watches to choose from. But for those who are so inclined, there has genuinely never been a better time to be passionate about watches. There are more young watch brands than ever before, which means there are more options, more designs, more choices, that can resonate. One such young brand who is striking their own path, is Vieren.

Vieren was founded by Jess Chow in 2020. Despite following an initial career as a management consultant, Chow seemed fated to enter the world of watches, or rather, return to it. Chow’s parents actually met each other at Basel world in the 1980s, giving her a unique perspective on the way that companies develop and the way that manufacturing takes place. Fast forward to today, where Vieren is carving its own path in what can very frequently be a somewhat stamped out industry.

But Chow is not alone in her ambitions with Vieren. Accompanying her is designer Sunny Fong, who also followed an entirely separate career path as a successful fashion designer, prior to making the move into watches. Combining their backgrounds, expertise, and aesthetic inclinations towards distinct, modern, and the highly detailed, the synergies of Chow and Fong would be applied to creating that would immediately stand out, but was also built upon a solid foundation of traditional watchmaking knowhow.

From the beginning, the goal was to stand out from the rest of the up and coming watch brands – a far easier thing to say than it is to actually do. In order to achieve that fundamental goal, the pair went to the heart of watchmaking for many, La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. There, they would design every element of their limited edition collections from the ground up, with the key focus on not repeating what so many other brands already do.

Thus, the rectangular case concept, punctuated distinct design elements and materials for dials, was chosen. But again, as Chow says, this was easier said than done. “You don’t see a lot of rectangular watches out there. And we learned why, because they’re incredibly difficult to engineer, and then we decided to put an automatic movement in there.” Despite the challenges, they pressed on without compromise, selecting the reliable ETA-2671 as the beating heart.

Apart from the shape of the case, the size was selected to make sure it was suitable to a wide variety of wrists, thereby providing something that was intentionally gender neutral. As Fong reflected, “What I really wanted to do was find that perfect size for both men and women’s wrists. We did a lot of exploration. We had watches that were too wide, too long. Jess was the perfect mini wrist that we tried it on, and we tried it on different wrists just to really find that perfect size where it wasn’t exclusively a man’s or a woman’s watch and really has that sort of gender fluidity to it.”

The thing that is perhaps most compelling about Vieren is their willingness to depart from the conventional design language and expectations which so many young brands feel desperately bound to. In doing so, Vieren committed to designing and creating every detail of the watches and leaving nothing to a sort of ‘off-the-rack’ process. That ambition is often out of reach for young brands, but with Chow’s family history, they had an in.

Each case is crafted to be oversized yet sleek, featuring a thin profile of 9.2mm and gently sloped lugs to ensure each piece sinks in nicely to wrists of all sizes. The gender neutrality aspect of Vieren watches isn't merely an afterthought or a marketing stint – it's been thoroughly baked into the brand's watchmaking ethos, highly considered before its first watches were even released. In my opinion, some of the most compelling iterations of this line are its edgy leather-on-leather "Croc" models, which notably feature a leather dial that flows seamlessly into the leather strap. This is the novelty I'm talking about, people! This is the stuff that makes watches fun for me!

As Fong recounts “Luckily with Jess, in that her family is connected with La Chaux-de-Fonds, I wanted to design every piece on our watch, like down to the crown, down to our logo. We even created our own font for ourselves. We thought about everything, down to the packaging where we created… Because we really wanted to inspire people to wear their timepiece all the time, we created a watch stand in the packaging, so they would display, as well as remind them to put on their timepiece.”

The design of their first collection was guided by their backgrounds, tastes, and influences. “Even with the crown, it’s an inside facet, because in Chinese culture, it’s based in the feng shui world. It deflects evil in that sense.”

The follow up Stereo Collection takes this concept and turns it up to 11. The whole series is designed with the inspiration of high-end, analog stereo systems at its heart, even going so far as to redesign the date wheel. “I do intense research when I design collections,” Fong continues, “and I really fell in love with vintage audio systems and how the volume dial had a little notch, and I took that inspiration and interpreted and had the numbers etched into the ring where we had that slash, like in a volume dial, that it would rotate the 30 days that we could have that visual indicator without actually having to read the numbers. So, that was sort of my interpretation of our date disc.

This is all to say that Vieren is a brand that, despite its relative youth, has grand ambitions, inspired and dynamic influences, and the means, knowhow, and will to combine it all into a growing collection. In a sea of new brands (often beginning with agonizingly similar designs) it’s refreshing to see a watch a brand like Vieren set its own course, feeling entirely dedicated to its own vision. Without a doubt, we can expect more of the same, which is to say, very, very different watches from them in the years to come.

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