In-Depth Marc Newson Opens Up About Ikepod, The Pathbreaking '90s Watch Brand That's Cool All Over Again.

The design legend and company founder hasn't given an interview about Ikepod in more than a decade.

The only way to really understand Ikepod is to understand Marc Newson, the designer behind the brand.

He is also the founder of the watch brand Ikepod, a company that – since its founding in 1994 – has been profoundly influential on the rest of the industry for its bold approach to design.

Ikepod was one of the first independent watch brands to produce true "concept" watches, a precursor to brands like Urwerk, De Bethune, and other indies.

Unlike other watches at the time, Ikepod watches were big.

Finally, Ikepod brought ideas like limited-edition production and high-end luxury pricing to watchmaking (concepts Newson also used with his other objects), giving its watches the impression of something more than just watches, but high-end objects of design that you happened to wear on the wrist.

From left: An original Ikepod Hemipode; an original Ikepod Horizon; two new Ikepod Skypods, and an original Ikepod Megapode. .

Today's Ikepod has focused on creating watches that reference Ikepod's original designs, but at lower price points.

This is likely thanks to a few factors: (1) the association with Newson; (2) the general trends toward indies and neo-vintage, both categories that Ikepod sits firmly within; (3) the trend toward different-looking watches (the Cartier Crashes, Urwerks, and Vianney Halters of the world, if you will).

In addition to my conversation with Newson exploring Ikepod's most important designs, this article also explores the growing collectibility of these original Ikepod watches.

Shortly after graduating from university, Newson began work on his first timepiece: the Large Pod Watch.

He'd made a few watches in school ("horribly post-modern," he told me), but the Large Pod Watch was different.

The idea of big, oversized watches wasn't a thing in the mid-'80s," Newson said.

"The second thing I wanted to play with was the idea of using dots, and not hands to tell the time." He'd seen all kinds of obscure watches use dots – the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, and Longines Comet – and he wanted to implement the concept in his own design.

The Large Pod Watch was one of the first objects Newson created after finishing his studies, an early work made with his own hands.

The Large Pod Watch anticipated Newson's other work – both in watches and not – and it feels like appreciation for early works like this will only grow with time, both by collectors of watches and of design.

"The Large Pod watch was, if I look at it now, perhaps the most modern and pure form that I'd ever made until that point," Newson said.

Soon after the Large Pod Watch, Newson wanted to evolve some of his ideas for timekeeping from the wrist to other objects.

It was a sculpture that just happened to tell the time." The result is a wall clock with two small spheres that appear to magically travel in concentric circles on the Mystery Clock's face (Newson devised a magnetic system to move these markers).

It's hard not to see the potential influence of Newson's concentric, rotating mystery clock design on the Nest (oh, and we know Nest founder Tony Faddell loves watches, specifically Ikepod).

By the early 1990s, Newson had created a few timepieces: the Large Pod Watch, the Mystery Clock, and the Small Pod Watch.

So in 1994, Marc Newson and his business partner Oliver Ike, a Swiss businessman who, at the time, was a furniture distributor (by then, Newson had become a well-known furniture designer), co-founded the Ikepod brand. As Newson explained, the company was initially set up to manufacture and sell that one watch, which became the Seaslug..

The Seaslug was Newson's take on a dive watch, featuring a bowl-shaped case with a bold, nearly convex bezel, and smooth, organic details that evoke many of Newson's other objects. The Seaslug also had a GMT function with its second, internal bezel ring. Ikepod produced the watch in Switzerland – "we had a real, grown-up watch factory," Newson said – and used chronometer-certified, ETA movements. "We had borderline success," Newson said. Because of the Seaslug's design, completely different from any other watch being made at the time, Ikepod received a lot of attention for its efforts. However, the Seaslug was still expensive – about $1,800 on a rubber strap in 1996 – eventually, Newson decided he'd need to start designing more ambitious watches if Ikepod was to be a successful, long-running brand..

Still, some collectors started to take notice of this new, weird brand called Ikepod. Phil Toledano, an artist and watch collector who's bought a few Ikepod watches in the past few years, recalled coming across Ikepod in the 1990s at the types of fashionable boutiques you'd stroll into just to see what's next. And that's what Ikepod was in the '90s: a kind-of-obscure watch brand with totally weird and different designs, helmed by a young designer with a growing international profile..

Ikepod had begun to establish itself as a new type of design-forward watch brand, and while it'd caught the eye of the generally fashionable set, hardcore watch collectors also started to take notice of the brand. As a perfect illustration of this: Robin Williams' 2018 estate featured an Ikepod Hemipode he bought back in 2000; meanwhile, Max Büsser also took notice – he showed us his Ikepod on Talking Watches).

Some collectors today have come to love the Seaslug as the first design from the new Ikepod brand, even if it's not as popular or recognizable as some of the later designs we'll see.

For example, the modern Ikepod recently sold a new-old-stock (NOS) example of an original Seaslug for $5,000, on the more accessible end of original Ikepod watches on the market today.

The Seaslug convinced Newson he needed to design "more ambitious" watches.

This is the mindset that led to perhaps the watch Ikepod has become most famous for, the Hemipode.

But I wasn't happy with the fact that it was so conventional in that sense – I wanted to design something that was complex and different, that wasn't made like a normal watch." Looking around, Newson felt that not many watches were being built in an unconventional manner at the time.

"The Hemipode was a culmination of all of these things," Newson said.

Building on an idea he'd had all the way back with the original Large Pod Watch, the Hemipode case was just two pieces – the body, with the bezel screwed on top.

Similar to the Mystery Clock, Newson loved the "mystery" of the Hemipode case, because just looking at it, you wouldn't understand how it's put together.

Of course, watch nerds will recognize this as the "monobloc" construction often used in watches, perhaps most famously in the original Patek Philippe Nautilus 3700, but the Hemipode was designed for more than just watch enthusiasts – it was bold, fashionable, different.

Looking closer, it has many of the signature features of a Newson design: seamless curvature, with the crystal sitting perfectly flush with the case, creating a perfect ellipse.

Add in quirky details like the hands, small window on the caseback, and eventually, the Ikepod bird logo on the crystal (the logo is actually a bird called a hemipode, a small, flightless bird), and there's a reason the Hemipode is the Ikepod watch that's become a cult favorite.

Similarly, the rubber strap had been refined since the early days of the Large Pod Watch: Not only did the strap attach flush with the case, creating a "pure intersection of two shapes," as Newson called it, but the tail of the strap also tucked under the buckle.

More importantly, the Hemipode feels like the culmination of the first decade of Newson's work in design and in watches.

Before we look at the next Ikepod model, it's a good time to discuss the collectibility of these early Ikepod watches.

Ikepod produced about 30 Hemipode Tourbillon watches with the tourbillon exposed at 6 o'clock.

Newson said that, of all his watch designs, the Megapode remains his favorite.

By the time Newson designed the Megapode in 1999, the age of the large watch had come: Brands like Panerai, Hublot, and others had begun to experience rapid rises in popularity.

"It gave me an opportunity to experiment with new materials like titanium," Newson said.

"Nobody used titanium at the time, except IWC with the Porsche Design," Max Büsser said of the Megapode in his Talking Watches episode.

As Newson talks about the Megapode, smiling as he explains all this amazing, but ultimately useless functionality that's squeezed onto the watch's dial, it becomes clear that this is what animates him, what keeps him so fascinated with watches: playing with what a watch is, the push and pull between something that's functional and something that just looks good.

Really, it's funny that the Hemipode is known for being a round watch, when, well, most watches are round.

But for a designer like Newson, it was only a matter of time before he started to play with shapes in watchmaking, and that's what happened with watches like the Ikepod Manatee, Platypus, and eventually, the Solaris.

"I felt that the Hemipode was such a pure sort of expression of that [round] form," Newson said.

It was the last new design introduced by Ikepod, produced until the company folded for the second time in 2012.

While the subsequent Ikepod brand had, as Newson called it, "borderline success," manufacturing and producing a number of models, business struggles still defined the company's history.

At relaunch, Ikepod also introduced a new design based on the Hemipode shape: the Horizon.

Retro-futuristic, like his watches.

"Other Ikepod watches still look like watches, whereas the Horizon is totally sculptural." Initially, Ikepod set out to produce just 66 examples of the Horizon in a few different metals – titanium, rose gold, platinum

In addition to the design, it's this rarity that makes the Horizon a favorite for collectors like Toledano that have fallen for Ikepod

"It allowed me have fun and play with the dial and use it to exploit some of the shapes and patterns that I'd kind of become known for at that time," Newson said

As collectors – of watches and of design – we begin to realize how rare the Horizon is, so there's certainly potential for appreciation of this particular Ikepod to continue to grow, and perhaps more quickly than for other models

Focusing on Ikepod doesn't allow us to explore the Jaeger-LeCoultre Atmos Clock designs Newson has worked on, but under the Ikepod brand, he did produce another non-watch timepiece: the Hourglass

Like the Mystery Clock, the Hourglass is an object that can bridge the gap between watch collectors and design collectors, garnering interest from both. 

"It's just this beautiful, sculptural, mesmeric object, which is all about time, but no one buys it to tell the time," Newson said

While today we're inundated with new watch collabs every day, that wasn't the case a decade ago, so Ikepod brought an idea that was already gaining popularity in other disciplines, like fashion and art, into watches

Last year, the modern Ikepod, along with Highsnobiety, dropped a NOS set of the four original KAWS watches, listed at $153,000

More than the watches though, this second generation of Ikepod, like the first generation, left its impact on the watch industry beyond just the watches it made

While watch collectors might be more interested in the first generation of Ikepod for its forward-thinking approach and design, these second-generation watches and collabs attract collectors of all types, not just those from the world of watches

Sure, Newson (and Ikepod) impacted the Apple Watch's design – most notably, using the same rubber strap

"In many ways," Newson said, "the greatest thing I did was pre-think a lot of the qualities that we now associate with higher-end watches – championing qualities like simplicity, and fundamentally good design

Besides the focus on design, Ikepod was also revolutionary for the way it produced watches: large watches, limited editions, high prices that weren't justified by the internal mechanics of the watch alone

Ikepod and Newson stood at the beginning of a new avant-garde of watchmaking, with watchmakers like MB&F, Urwerk, and De Bethune soon following to break with many of the established conventions of traditional watchmaking

"Ikepod was a trailblazer in our industry," Max Büsser said in his Talking Watches episode

Listen, Ikepod's original watches are probably weird enough – in a good way – that they'll never soar in value like so many watches did over the past few years

Thirty years ago, an Ikepod looked like a watch from the future

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