Ahead of their time
Three Los Alamos college students launch wristwatch design company
They love wristwatches.
Will McCumber, started collecting them a few years ago. Brother Michael McCumber soon followed. Among Will’s collection of a dozen watches are a 1930s Omega and 1940 Dacal.
Collecting quickly morphed into designing their own watch. At first the brothers thought they’d make a few watches for people they knew.
“Getting an understanding of how the machining world and supply chain worked, we realized it might make sense to do a real business,” Will McCumber said. “Let’s build something from the ground up.”
They grew up in Los Alamos with Colin Hehlen, the financial brain in what has become Hyalus Watches, the dream child of these three who are now students at Arizona State University.
“This probably would not have happened anywhere other than Los Alamos,” said Will McCumber, the company lead. “Los Alamos is a place where everyone has quirks. Collecting watches does not stand out.”
The trio created an automatic winding analog watch with hour, minute and second hands that they have branded the Altum — Latin for deep. Their signature look is to have teardrop-shaped indices on the watch face.
The Hyalus crew spent the past year and a half designing the Altum, lining up a watch movement supplier, machinist and manufacturer, and now are ready to launch the company. Hyalus — Latin for glass; yes, Will McCumber studied Latin in high school — handles the design and distribution.
A one-month Kickstarter campaign began Tuesday to launch Hyalus Watches as a revenue-producing business.
They are using Kickstarter to presell at least 250 watches with the ambition to invest the potential $70,000 in revenue to transition into retail with a second set of 250 watches, Will McCumber said.
The first 20 watches are available for $230, the next 100 for $260. The next 130 or more will be priced at $300. They are willing to sell more at $300 until the Kickstarter campaign ends around Sept. 11. The retail price after that will be $350.
They are using the Kickstarter approach rather than loans or investors to launch Hyalus. But even though it is a retail business, the approach is more like a tech startup: The watches will be manufactured after the first 250 are presold, with delivery to customers expected in December, Will McCumber said.
Once the company is in full retail mode, Will McCumber hopes Hyalus can sell 250 watches a month.
The wristwatch seems archaic in a world where everybody’s cellphone is their clock, camera and nearly everything else. But Swiss watch exports have doubled since 2000, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.
“They are not plummeting at all,” Will
McCumber said. “Watches in recent years have seen a huge boom. Seiko is hugely popular. Rolex is more popular than ever. People are turning away from smart watches and becoming more intimate with time.”
The McCumbers and Hehlen got into the business as collectors, and collectors are a definite target market for Hyalus, Will McCumber said. But he believes the Altum will appeal to noncollectors, too.
“It’s eye-catching,” he said. “This will still be running long after you are gone.”
Will McCumber said the Altum is built for durability and is water resistant up to 200 meters.
The watch movement is the Seiko NH35, a variant of which is found in the Seiko Prospex watch, he said.
The watch parts are machined in Shenzhen, China, and assembled by Wiegand Custom Watch in Mentor, Ohio. Wiegand manufactures its own Lum-Tec watches and does custom orders, too.
“Their design already had a lot of good instinct by the time it came to us,” Wiegand President Chris Wiegand said in an email. “I didn’t need to make too many edits before it was viable for manufacturing. We felt their design was solid from the start and they were willing to iterate. A lot of people in this industry are very attached to their first draft and aren’t willing to accept changes.” Wiegand also likes the look of the Altum. “We were drawn to the case shape and teardrop shape indices,” he said. “Our company Lum-Tec focuses on bold, stand out designs, so we appreciated a similar angle from Hyalus.”
Will McCumber, 21, Michael McCumber, 19, and Hehlen, 20, are not veterans of the watch world and aren’t even tech majors at Arizona State. Will is a political science major, Michael an art major and Colin a finance major.
“A lot of this is trial and error, jumping in head first, learning for ourselves,” Will McCumber said. “We can’t afford to screw up.”