How Noah Made the Hottest Affordable Watch of the Year

This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.

Last Monday, a few hours before his brand’s collaboration with Timex went on sale, Noah founder Brendon Babenzien woke up, turned to his wife, and said, “I hope we sell these watches.” He didn’t have to wait long to have that hope answered. When the watches dropped at 11 a.m., Babenzien's phone began buzzing uncontrollably with notifications. The $200 timepiece—which features a Cartier Tank-esque rectangular case and an elegant sun-and-moon complication—completely sold out in less than a minute.

Noah and Timex only produced 200 pieces of the aptly-named Sun and Moon for the watch’s initial run. That number felt big to Babenzien, but it turned out to be not nearly enough to meet the demand. “At first, the customer base was mad because they couldn't get it,” Babenzien said over the phone earlier this week. “And we were like, ‘Oh, that's awful. I would hate to feel that way as a customer—to really want something and not be able to get it.” Babenzien isn’t merely pandering to an aggrieved customer base with his words, either. After the watches sold out, he and the rest of the Noah team quickly started working on a way to make it right.

The movement powering Noah’s new Timex was supposed to be discontinued after last Monday’s sale. But recognizing the outsized demand for the Sun and Moon, Timex and Noah pleaded with the manufacturer to make one last run before they’re gone forever. Earlier this week, Noah announced the watch was back as a pre-order for as many people who want to buy the watch. While they won’t ship until April 2025, just imagine the size of the eventual shipping notification that’ll hit Babenzien’s phone now that the watch is made with soon-to-be terminated materials. I caught up with Babenzien about making the hottest $200 watch of the year and pulling together this last-minute preorder. If you’re interested in purchasing the watch, act fast—the pre-order closes today, June 21st, at midnight EST.

Box + Papers: How was this past week for you?

Brendon Babenzien: It's been totally nuts. This business, Noah, is not built on the scarcity model, selling out, and hype. But I think because of my history [working at Supreme], we get talked about a lot adjacent to other companies that operate that way. [In reality,] we buy things at these really reasonable clips.

And in this case, it was just lightning in a bottle—everything just came together. The watch is great. The price is great. And I think the way people are thinking about products right now, this watch was correct, and we just got the numbers wrong, which is cool.

What do you mean when you say that it was “correct”?

I’m not like a watch guy, right? I don't collect watches. I have a decent watch a friend gifted me once. I'm a pretty low-key person, but I have my weird suspicions about watch culture, just because of people I know. And it felt like, well, the look is great—we all know that it looks a bit like a [Cartier] Tank, and that's a gorgeous watch. It's one of the only watches that, if I were to ever buy a watch for myself, I might buy a Tank, right?

We know that people are gravitating towards more traditional, classic things again. We're moving into this late-’70s, early-’80s vibe, and this watch fits that style as well. It also feels a little bit like traditional watch people are kind of like, ‘You know what? I've got a great selection of watches, but I want a good one that's not terribly expensive, too. I want, like, a cool watch I can just throw on, and it’s not thousands of dollars. And I feel like we just kind of came along at the right time for that movement as well.

So we kind of hit it on both sides. I think we had really serious watch people who liked it and respected it. But then I also think we had people who can't afford expensive watches, who were like, “This is super cool, and it's a good-looking watch.” Those two things combined, I think, have created tremendous demand.

Since you're not a big watch collector yourself, what got you interested in doing this collaboration in the first place?

We've done a couple of watches with Timex already. We did the Ghost Nets Suck, which was our funny take on a Mickey watch. That was really fun.

And then this one is a funny story, because one of the guys on my design team had this idea to do the watch. It was secretly a little bit of a love letter to his wife, who always loved the watch that her mother wore that had a sun-and-moon movement on it. So like most things that happen at Noah, it really came from somebody's real passion.

Did you look at different vintage pieces for inspiration?

I won't remember the exact watches, but we were definitely looking at vintage pieces. How I work is I try not to get too hung up on which is the right thing. A lot of people in our space are always looking for the gold standard of the thing: If you buy this army jacket, it's got to be this one, right? I don't really do that, because generally you end up making the same products as everybody else—everyone's looking at the same shape, everyone's going to Japan and shopping and looking at the same vintage dealers. So actually, for the bulk of my career, I've always looked in the opposite direction and tried to find the things that nobody's looking at. When they were showing me watches, I couldn’t say that they were, like, the good ones, the bad ones, the expensive ones. There was just more of a mood—it's one of those gut things, right? I just like that and I'm not going to get too hung up on why.

The sun and moon are such fun design elements, because every brand and designer makes the faces on them their own. How did you go about designing those?

That one's always a little bit tricky, because on any given day, we can be taking ourselves really seriously over here, and then the next day, we're making a turtle with his middle finger up holding a knife. I vaguely remember feeling like, “This is a bit more serious for us, just because of the look of the watch.”

Is it different to design a watch versus clothes?

Yeah, especially because I'm not really a big-time watch guy, so I didn't really have a process. With clothes, there's a process for me. I'm hugely into materials, so I'll spend loads of time looking at patterns and colors and feeling clothes. With a watch, it's more true design. It becomes more a conversation about the culture we're living in and what we're trying to show people, almost in the design of the product itself. We're not inventing something new—this looks like a watch everybody's already seen, right? So it's more curatorial than anything else: this is a good time for this look and feel.

Is that why it's important to do it with a brand like Timex, so that the price can be the real big differentiator here?

Definitely. Anyone who spends time with me knows I'm not really a luxury products kind of person, and I'm not trying to feed into that thought process that if you don't have this car, or if you don't have this watch, or this kind of home, or this chair in your house then you’re not successful. I don't really believe in those things. So I think this feels like a huge victory in a lot of ways, because it's a $200 watch that people like and they want. You don't have to be a millionaire to own one, and that's a huge victory for a brand like Noah, because we've been pushing back against the symbols of luxury for so long.

Was any part of you inspired by what Swatch and Omega have done with the MoonSwatch?

I don't even know about that.

So take me back to last Monday. Were you expecting this to sell out in the way that it did? What were you doing when it went on sale?

No, I literally woke up and said to my wife, “I hope we sell these watches.” And I was on a phone call when it went live and I could see—I've got Shopify on my phone—my phone was going haywire. So then I went to look at the inventory, and it was gone. It was 11:01 [a minute after the watch went on sale]. That was a wild moment, because we didn't really expect that or strive for that. It was a really nice feeling. I don't think this gets talked about enough, but I think people, whether they be designers or heads of brands, we're producing things that go into the world and you want to know that people like what you're doing, and you want to make sure that you're providing something that people respect.

It's amazing that, in the span of a week, you were able to turn around and get more movements produced. Can you tell me about that process?

I was sending emails in the middle of the night to my team, and then my team was, to their credit, responding really, really quickly to the needs of this—because there are very specific needs. You’ve got to get on the phone with Timex, and you have to make it clear to them just how serious it is. Like, “There's a way [bigger] demand for this thing than we realized, and we need your help.” That part is relatively simple because you have an open dialogue with them as a partner. But then, once we found out that the actual movement was being discontinued by a separate company that makes it now, Timex has to go and then speak to those people, gather information, and convince them like, “Hey, those machines that make that movement? Don't repurpose them just yet. Give us a few more days because we can get you more orders on this particular movement. So you’re talking about international phone tag. We felt like if we hadn't figured it out in days, the window would close a bit.

How many were part of the original run?

The original run was, like, 200.

Tiny.

You say tiny, but for us, that felt like a real number. We don't produce a lot of things, and we didn't think it was tiny. Like I said: I woke up and I was like, “I hope we sell these watches.” We really had no idea how strong the demand was going to be.

Are you finding that the people buying this watch are regular Noah customers?

I would have to assume some of them are, obviously, but I’m guessing there's probably a large chunk of people who've never shopped with us who came for this watch. I mean, we have to assume that, based on the fact the volume of traffic was just so different than what we're used to seeing,

How many pre-orders have gone through since this was announced yesterday?

I can give you a sense that it's probably still smaller than people would think. We're still a small company, so from a global perspective, it's probably still a pretty small amount. It's just great for us. It's big for us.

See all of our newsletters, including Box + Papers, here.

Originally Appeared on GQ