In December 2024, more than one Nordic workshop was ablaze with activity. While Santa’s elves did their best to assemble the latest iPhones and PlayStations up in Lapland, down in Copenhagen, everyone at Arcanaut was hurriedly putting together their latest models in time for pre-Christmas deliveries.

Almost one year ago, Arcanaut, one of Denmark’s most dynamic brands, announced a new model line dubbed the “Experimentals”. The concept was simple despite its road to fruition being anything but: the brand would “release” two new models on sketches alone, asking for a 10% (refundable) deposit to secure the right to first refusal of the pieces upon their completion. Both models, the Bonehead and the Tiger Sh’Arc, were to be limited to just 33 pieces each and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, the slots sold out quickly.

Over the ensuing months, team Arcanaut slaved tirelessly to bring their visions to life and land the finished product as close to the original concept as possible (with a little bit of wiggle room for improving it along the way). The results, to be frank, are uncanny. Both the Bonehead and the Tiger Sh’Arc came out almost identical to the original artist’s impressions that were based on ideas of which no one knew the feasibility at the time.

From German silver to Zircuti: The weird world of material science

The biggest change from the original sketches can be seen on the Bonehead. The original chapter ring was wider and skeletonized to echo the traditional sausage-shaped hour markers of the preceding D’Arc Matter, Havender, and Klint series. Upon reflection, the team decided a slimmer, solid ring would work better, allowing the center of the dial to shine (or, should that be, glow), and allowing for a clearer time read out against the crisply machined, matte-finished German Silver chapter ring.

The decision, as with many of the solutions discovered along the way, came as much from trial and error as it did from a single moment of inspiration. Also, it is worth mentioning that the necessity to produce multiple prototype components in a very short space of time sometimes forced the brand to use whatever materials they had available, whether or not it was exactly what they intended to use for the final product. One such material they had readily to hand was German silver, which, when paired with the creamy daytime color of the LumiCast disc, worked so well with the PVD-blued hands, that they decided to stick with it.

“It’s amazing,” says Anders Brandt, co-founder and chief designer of the brand, “how you can spend months driving yourself mad over the simplest design decision when it only exists in theory and then the second you see it (or something completely different) in real life, the penny drops and the final decision becomes easy. It’s maybe not the cheapest or most efficient way to work, but it does seem to give us the best chance of making the best product possible.”

James Thompson (AKA Black Badger) is the brand’s head of material development. His perspective on the hundreds of experiments conducted by Arcanaut during 2024 to bring the Experimentals to life is clear: “I love it. It suits my way of working. Despite attending art school, I’ve never been able to draw. And so, early on in my life, I found a workaround: I draw in the material, in 3D. I can see the thing I want to see in real life in my mind and I’m better at bringing it to life with a machine than I am with a pencil. Whenever Anders and Rob set me off to discover something new, I’m like a kid in a sweet shop. At my core, I’m a shop guy. I love my tools. I get excited to fire them up every morning and see what’s gonna come out by the end of the day. It’s a lot of fun and I think that comes through in the product. If any of our watches can make our followers smile as much as we did while making them, then I think that’s a win.”

“Yeah, it’s not always the best for stress levels,” says Rob Nudds, head of brand development at Arcanaut. “I’d love it if our first ideas were always right but of course, that’s just not realistic. Also, what we’ve learned, as hard as it is for me to accept, is that being wrong more often than not doesn’t just build our know-how and ability to tackle adversity as a team, but it also tangibly improves the product.”

Such tangible improvements can be seen in both the Bonehead and Tiger Sh’Arc’s ambitious case back designs, which have been nicknamed “Glowpatches” by the team. “Anders came up with the Glowpatch idea one day,” continues Nudds. “We laughed (hard) about it at first but then decided to roll with it because I don’t think any of us had ever had such a visceral reaction to a case back before.

“At Arcanaut, we’re not focused on the movements. There’s a real chance we’ll tackle that in the future, but right now, our role in the industry is to push the boundaries of material science. I like to think of us as an entry-level Hublot, doing the heavy lifting when it comes to R&D for the wider benefit of watchmaking. We’re working with materials other brands have never even heard of. Sometimes that’s because they don’t exist until we make them up! And on top of that, we’re reimagining how a watch can or should look. It’s not just what the watch is made of that tells the story; it’s how it looks like nothing else on the market at all.”

Perhaps the clearest example of that can be seen in the brand’s distinctive “Pentablock” crown, which, despite its unusual faceted shape is able to guarantee 100 meters of water resistance (thanks to robust twin gaskets fitted in the crown tube into which the “square” crown slots when at rest).

The crown, crown tube, bezel, and case back on the Tiger Sh’Arc are all titanium to match the darker appearance of the Zircuti (titanium and zirconium) case material. The Tiger Sh’Arc marks the first time the brand has ever used anything but steel to construct a case. It was, as with most things about the Experimentals project, not as straightforward as the team had imagined.

“That stuff bursts into flames for fun,” laughs Thompson (who happens to be nowhere near recently machined Zircuti while making that statement). “We went over to our manufacturing partners in Copenhagen to check on production and we saw they were collecting the swarf (the little bits of metal that are removed during milling) in a big bucket, and we were like, ‘NO! This stuff needs to be outside and properly disposed of.’ If you leave it lying around in that state, it can just blow without warning. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a metal fire, but trust me, you don’t want to.

“Fortunately, once the case is machined it is totally safe and an extremely stable material. We heat it after the machining to oxidize the metals slightly, creating a stronger distinction between the Ti and the Zirc. That’s what gives the case its striped effect and that’s what gave the model series its name.”

The Bonehead, meanwhile, is made of stainless steel but does feature a unique case design itself. For the Bonehead, Brandt decided to add what he now refers to as a “skeleton framing” decoration, which saw the case’s surfaces recessed but for the edges. The case is then media blasted for a dark, stealthy look that distinguishes it from the brand’s regular ARC II case platform as used on the aforementioned D’Arc Matter, Havender, and Klint collections, as well as the always-unique Fordite pieces, and the new limited edition model for Collective Horology in the US, the ARC II — Liberty Green.

“The Experimentals really changed the game for us,” says Brandt. “We’ve been lucky to be working with a unique case shape from the beginning, but now we’ve started to play around with it — the one thing that had been an unchanged constant up until this point — it feels like the possibilities are endless. Even little things like changing the finishing of just one case component can open up so many avenues for design cohesion with new dials. We’re thrilled to be entering this new phase of development for Arcanaut and we’re extremely grateful to all of the people who believed in the Experimentals concept when these watches were just sketches. We hope the fact we’ve been able to bring those visions to life so close to the original concept will be a reason for buyers to trust us to deliver in the future.”

You can learn more about Arcanaut at www.arcanaut.watch and follow the brand on Instagram @arcanaut_watches. For more information about the Bonehead and Tiger Sh’Arc and to be notified of similar releases or available models, you can sign up for mailing lists found on the official website.