Birthday Suite

Ressence Debuts 10th Anniversary Collection of Boundary-Pushing Wristwatches

By Victoria Gomelsky

This month, Ressence, the independent watchmaking brand based in Antwerp, Belgium, will mark its 10th anniversary with the unveiling of the first of four limited edition timepieces. “Collection X,” as the range is known, will feature a new watch every other month through December. The first to be unveiled, the Type 1 Slim X is certain to delight fans of the brand.

Like each of the 4 special editions to come, the Type 1 Slim X features a commemorative olive green hue on both the dial and strap. Unique to the Type 1 is a contrasting finish pattern—three of the four rotating dials is half sunray finished, half matte—that amplifies the brand’s idiosyncratic time display. Strap the watch on and you’ll notice the pattern becomes even more eye-catching in sunlight. The Type 1 Slim X ($21,500), and each of other three watches in Collection X, will be limited to 40 pieces.

Under the leadership of founder Benoît Mintiens, an industrial product designer who dared to challenge the Swiss establishment, Ressence has earned a cult following for its iconoclastic approach to fine watchmaking. The brand’s crownless mechanical watches incorporate a host of unconventional features in many of its watches, including e-Crown technology, an autonomous electronic system that automatically sets the watch to the correct time; oil-filled chambers that lend the timepieces an intriguing optical effect that also happens to offer greater legibility; and state-of-the-art bellows systems that compensate for the oil’s expansion or contraction.

All of which has earned Mintiens the respect of fellow watchmakers in Switzerland, like Maximilian Büsser, founder and creative director of MB&F, who says: “All alone in his little design studio in Antwerp he is writing a whole new page of watchmaking.”