PART ‘TIME’ JOB
Two brothers and fellow college student hope to create a watch-making company
There is no time like the present for three young entrepreneurs who are looking to turn their passion into a business.
Brothers Will and Michael McCumber, and friend Colin Hehlen, all of whom graduated from Los Alamos High School and now attend Arizona State University in Tempe, are partners in a fledgling watch-making company.
“My brother and I have been collecting watches for a while as a hobby,” said company frontman and co-founder Will McCumber. “And then, about two years ago, my brother, who is a really good artist, drew up a random design on a whim.
And we thought wouldn’t it be cool if we were able to make it into a watch.”
The original idea was just
to create a couple of them “as a summer project while we had nothing else to do,” McCumber said. “In the process of researching that, we realized it was actually possible — and probably easier — to turn it into a real product. The details and the specs we were looking for were pretty unique and were pretty complex to manufacture.”
It was about this time that McCumber ran into Hehlen on the sprawling ASU campus. It turns out Hehlen is a finance major in the university’s business school and had some good ideas about funding.
Thus, a partnership was born.
“He had the know-how to make our venture make sense,” McCumber said. “He figured out how we can afford it, and the fundraising and all that good stuff. So we started finalizing the design and preparing things to go to manufacture. Basically getting everything ready to go.”
The company, Hyalus Watches (hyaluswatches.com), is raising an initial $75,000 through a Kickstarter campaign that has about two weeks remaining. The team is about one-third of its way to the goal.
The way it works is essentially through presales of the watches via Kickstarter. If the goal is not reached, no one is out any money and the trio will look at new ways to raise the money.
“We’re just college kids, so we don’t have $75,000 lying around,” McCumber explained. “We’re sort of limited in our ability to take off because we don’t have $75,000 of capital to put on the table right away. We’re trying to start something from essentially zero.”
In designing the dive-quality watch that is water resistant to 200 feet, the McCumbers pulled from their own knowledge of collecting timepieces.
The idea was to have a watch that retailed for less than $400 — they are significantly less than that on Kickstarter — with several specific features.
“When we started designing this, we noticed a couple of things in the dive category that we wanted to take care of,” McCumber said. “A lot of dive watches are inspired by and copying Rolex designs, or are way out there, using novelties for novelties sake.”
But the look and performance was key, he said.
“The first and most important thing was the overall design,” McCumber said. “The aesthetics of it. And the price to performance. As watch enthusiasts, we know what features we wanted in the watch and we also knew a good target price.”
The watches, which still feature Michael McCumber’s original raindrop design, need sapphire crystals, stainless steel construction and luminescence, Will McCumber said, while still below the benchmark $400 price.
“The idea was, since we have a really small company and, by prioritizing those highlights, we would be able to hit that price and we would still have a nice combination of features,” he said.
McCumber said he’s hopeful the fundraising campaign will pick up steam and that the company takes off in a way to provide a living.
But even if it doesn’t, he said it’s been a fantastic experience for the three college students.
“The bigger picture here is that learning all of these skills through selfteaching and putting it into a practical application has really been incredible for all three of us, regardless whether this turns into a full-time job, which I would love for it to,” he said.
“The key takeaway here is we figured out how to throw time and energy and research, and trial and error at a problem, and how to get results from that,” McCumber added. “Regardless of what happens here, we’re set up for future success for whatever ventures we have. And at the same time, the stuff that I’ve learned through this process also is invaluable.”