Furlan Marri intends to honor Swiss horology, but at affordable prices.
Furlan Marri is a new watch brand whose marketing tagline is “Highly Attractive Wristwatches.” The founders say there is a world of Swiss horological history in those three words, and yet their prices top out at $500.
“The main idea of the brand is to tell stories,” said Andrea Furlan, the brand’s designer and co-founder, based in Geneva. “The first story of our brand is a mechanical quartz story.”
Rather than using a mechanical movement, which Mr. Furlan and his business partner, the artist and watch collector Hamad Al Marri, had intended to do, they have chosen a hybrid meca-quartz alternative for the brand’s first model and its five variations.
The hybrid “was invented in Switzerland in the ’80s during the quartz crisis,” said Mr. Furlan, 28, referring to when the popularity of inexpensive Japanese watches all but overwhelmed the Swiss watch industry. Meca-quartz was seen, he said, “as a solution to have the same feeling of a vintage chronograph, but with the actual technology of the quartz.”
The brand’s watch case is based on another item of Swiss watch history: the decagon design, or 10-sided polygon. “Our first watch tells the story of the watch case maker of the past, François Borgel, who made cases for Patek Philippe, Movado, IWC and other big brands — the cases you see at Christie’s and Phillips.”
The watches may honor the Swiss, but to keep the price down the movement is made in Japan by Seiko, then the watch is assembled in Shenzhen, a large manufacturing city in southern China. (Before the pandemic, Mr. Furlan and Mr. Al Marri went to China to find workshops that would produce the quality work they were seeking.) The leather straps are Italian.
A Kickstarter campaign that has been selling the watches in an introductory $350 offer is scheduled to end Saturday. But within an hour of its going live on March 10, a jubilant Mr. Furlan emailed: “We just made 500,000 U.S.D. in less than an hour. It’s crazy!”
By the end of March, the site, which initially had a goal of slightly less than $80,000, had $1.02 million pledged by 1,800 backers.
But then Mr. Furlan has been in the watch industry since he was a teenager, and Mr. Al Marri has been working his contacts in the Middle East on behalf of the brand.
Mr. Furlan said that a short internship at Hublot, where Jean-Claude Biver was chief executive at the time, really changed his life: “I was 17, and I showed him my first sketches. He said, ‘Come to me after school. You’ll have a job.’”
But the day after he graduated from design school in Lausanne, Switzerland, Mr. Furlan went to work for Dominique Renaud, who was working on the DR01, the $1 million watch with a complication that he invented.
Spending four years with Mr. Renaud was an education, Mr. Furlan said, and the two remain close, “We talk to each other every week,” he said, but ultimately, “I wanted to fly a bit with my own ideas.”
Marco Gabella, co-founder of the online magazine Watchonista, said he had known Mr. Furlan since those days at the Renaud workshop and had been aware of the plans for Furlan Marri from their start.
“A few brands have used Kickstarter to issue affordable watches with an apparent reference to classic-looking watches,” he said. “Still, no one has done it with such coherence in design and quality.”
Also, he said, the new company’s upfront statement that its watches are assembled in China, but that the work is carefully monitored, will make a difference to prospective buyers.
“Today, watch enthusiasts are much more open to sincere and coherent proposals without caring if it is ‘Swiss Made’ or not,” Mr. Gabella said. “And with Furlan Marri, the price is so accessible, but the quality is phenomenal.”
Mr. Furlan said he met with Mr. Al Marri seven years ago at a Christie’s auction in Geneva. (Mr. Al Marri said his own love of watches began when he was 14 and his father gave him an Omega.)
Now Mr. Al Marri, 30, is the business’s financial and creative partner. “I talked to Andrea and learned from him,” Mr. Al Marri said from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
And in turn, Mr. Furlan said, Mr. Al Marri’s artistic background has come through in “his creativity on each detail of a watch, with his sketching and the mixing of colors.”
The men already have outlined “11 new stories,” Mr. Furlan said, adding, “Story No. 2 could be a Swiss chronograph; No. 3 is a moon phase.”
And they are not stopping there. “We want to invent some new complications,” he said. “We want to make something interesting.” And highly attractive.
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