Australia is rarely considered a hothouse of growing watch businesses, but a former architect and entrepreneur, Dilon Wong, is hoping to put that right with the launch of Mancheront, a brand that debuted on crowd-funding site Kickstarter at the back end of 2021 and is now promoting two variations of its Pacer watch collection.
Mr Wong’s background in architecture has given him an eye for detail and obsession for design that makes Mancheront watches more than just another quickly assembled microbrand.
In fact, it took five years to bring the first collection to market.
During that process Mr Wong says he worked through 32 factory visits, 25 discarded case designs and a dozen bezels before feeling confident he was ready for public scrutiny.
All the work put into the bezel has made it the signature element of Mancheront’s Pacer watch designs.
They have teeth like a circular saw, and carry a pulsometer scale, which medical professionals once used to measure heart rates.
That eye-catching bezel frames a flat black or white dial with a prominent power reserve indicator at the top, a second time zone shown on a sub dial at 6 o’clock, central hours, minutes and seconds hands and date at 3 o’clock.
It is powered by a Citizen Miyota 9132 automatic movement protected by a closed case back decorated with recessed petals.
The 41mm steel-on-steel watches are slim at just 10mm tall.
Mr Wong says he chose to give the Pacer watch a pulsometer bezel because it chimes with the current trend for people monitoring their health and wellness.
Instead of an almost never-used diver’s bezel, the pulsometer can be used daily, he suggests.”We would like to see the pulsometer function in a different perspective; rethinking it as a fitness or athlete’s watch since we live in a very health orientated world now,” he describes.
Pacer watches are for sale online now for GBP 487.
