Krayon is a company so new you might not have heard of it; I certainly didn’t, not until I read about it briefly when the brand’s first watch popped up as one of the finalists for this year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Geneve (GPHG), and then again when its founder Rémi Maillat arrived in Hong Kong to show us his creations.
A world first, the Everywhere watch has the ability to calculate the time of sunrise and sunset, as well as the duration of day and night, anywhere in the world, using a mechanical movement. And we mean it; literally anywhere. AS long as you know your latitude and longitude and you have the correct date, the watch will accurately tell you when the sun will rise and set at any point of the globe.
The Everywhere watch is extremely complex, there are almost 600 minuscule parts in the deceptively thin watch – and it took Maillat years to get it right. Krayon was initially a movement maker, but Maillat, with his engineering and movement development expertise, began to formulate a new concept in his head. There are a few (mind you though, very few) watches on the market that show sunrise and sunset, but it is a difficult mechanism that requires a specific geographical location for the function to work. Audemars Piguet’s Equation of Time does that, but there wasn’t one in the market that was fully programmable. It took seven years and Maillat’s genius and dedication, to make the Krayon Everywhere happen.
How to read and set the Krayon Everywhere
Aesthetically, the watch is incredibly clean and timeless. It is also relatively easy to understand and to use, given how intricate the movement underneath is.
Two overlapping disks that are painted half light and half dark will shift to shorten and lengthen day and night accordingly once you’ve set your geographical location and local time. The hands and indicators for daily use – date and time – are in blue, marking them out for optimal legibility. The blue arrow indicates the hours of the day along the 24 hours scale around the outside of the disks, while minutes are shown by a large central hand.
To use the Universal Sunrise Sunset function, you will need to set the date, latitude, longitude and UTC offset to your geographical location. But given how complex the watch is, the Everywhere watch is surprisingly easy to use. Maillat and his engineers at Krayon have made this process the easiest possible. The pusher at 8:30 changes the parameters, while adjustments can be made by turning the crown forward and backwards.
For a watch as special as the Krayon Everywhere, most of its owners would want to jazz up the basic offering with some form of bespoke decoration, and Maillat is able to provide this as well. He pulls out a second piece to show us, one that comes with a detailed floral engraving on the entire case. It was to be delivered to a client in Asia, he tells us.
You can tell from the way Maillat handles the watch that it truly is his baby. While explaining the watch’s functions, he would continuously pause to turn the watch in his hands slowly, admiringly. He was transfixed, and so were we. For a watch so complex, the charm lay in the fact that it wasn’t a showpiece at all, quite like its maker himself; Maillat was a soft spoken man who seemed more eager to create masterpieces rather than talk about himself.
We’re extremely lucky to have met Maillat and see the Everywhere watch in person. If this is only his first ever completed timepiece, we’re excited to follow Krayon’s journey to see what he’ll come up with next.
