{"id":789862,"date":"2026-10-02T17:46:18","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T17:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789862\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T17:46:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T17:46:18","slug":"ressence-doesnt-want-your-watch-to-look-like-a-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789862\/","title":{"rendered":"Ressence Doesn\u2019t Want Your Watch to Look Like a Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Design Mindset<\/a>, Yanko Design\u2019s weekly podcast, premieres every week with a new guest and a single animating question: what does it actually take to think differently about a design problem. The show is 23 episodes in, and this episode turns its attention to fine watchmaking via someone who arrived in the industry with no allegiance to its conventions. If a mechanical watch didn\u2019t exist today, and a designer received the brief cold, would they give it hands, a crown, a flat dial? That question opens the conversation and also describes exactly what our guest spent 16 years answering in practice. The result is Ressence<\/a>, a brand whose watches look like nothing else on the wrist.<\/p>\n

Beno\u00eet Mintiens is a Belgian industrial designer who, before he ever touched a watch, designed high-speed trains, aircraft cabins, medical devices, leather goods, and even hunting guns. He founded Ressence in 2010, the name a contraction of Renaissance of the Essentials. The Type Three BB2 won the 2024 Red Dot Award Best of Best, and 2026 brought the same recognition to the TMN. His watches are designed in Antwerp, made in Switzerland, produced in limited editions each year, and worn by people who believe the future is brighter than the past. He is a designer who walked into one of the world\u2019s most convention-bound industries and simply refused to accept what he found there.<\/p>\n

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Designing from the User Outward<\/p>\n

When people ask Beno\u00eet how he designs a watch, the answer he gives is never the one they expect, because he starts with the relation between the user and the watch rather than with the movement itself. \u201cUsually I start not with the watch. I start with the relation between you and the watch, and that is, I think, a very important step that very often is forgotten.\u201d Most brands were created by watchmakers who always build from the inside out, from the movement to the wearer. As a designer, Beno\u00eet works in the opposite direction, from the user inward to the movement. That physical 180-degree reversal of process changes everything about what a watch ends up looking and feeling like.<\/p>\n

Designing the relationship is, in Beno\u00eet\u2019s view, fundamentally an ergonomic exercise, rooted in a deep study of physiology and how people interact with objects. The ultimate measure of success is disappearance: \u201cThe best product is the one you forget when you use it. Invisible. I\u2019m using it, but I\u2019m not even aware of it.\u201d He tells customers who buy a Ressence that he hopes they forget quickly that they are wearing it, and that forgetting is the proof the design worked. In the rapid-fire round, he completes the sentence \u201cthe future belongs to designers who stop asking how to make things and start asking\u201d with five words: \u201cHow do you want to feel.\u201d That question is where every Ressence begins.<\/p>\n

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Challenging Industry Conventions<\/p>\n

Until the quartz crisis of the 1970s, watchmaking was about precision, quality, and reliability. When quartz movements arrived at a fraction of the cost of mechanical ones, the industry had to reinvent itself to survive. \u201cWatchmaking has found a way to survive by adding this emotional layer on top of their brands, on top of their physical products. It\u2019s not so much about the physical product anymore. And that\u2019s a pity, I think, as a designer.\u201d Any product, Beno\u00eet argues, needs to pass through the survival-of-the-fittest logic of natural evolution to reach the next generation. Watchmaking\u2019s functional evolution largely stopped at the quartz crossroads, and Ressence is attempting to pick it up from there.<\/p>\n

A product is defined by multiple dimensions: aesthetics, ergonomics, technique, social context, and production. In watchmaking, only the aesthetic dimension has shifted from brand to brand, and the underlying system architecture has been frozen for two hundred years. Ressence repositions every dimension at once. \u201cThe way we show the time, the ergonomics, is actually what defines the aesthetics. Is actually the way we make them. Is actually the technique that lies behind. All these things are intertwined, and they all together create what I call this new paradigm.\u201d The whole has to be logical and coherent, or as Beno\u00eet puts it, you end up with a Frankenstein.<\/p>\n

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The Human Connection to Mechanical Objects<\/p>\n

Asked why people still choose to wear mechanical watches when a phone tells time more accurately and without winding, Beno\u00eet offers a concept he has been developing for years. \u201cI call it the empathy for gears. We have, as humans, we have empathy for gears.\u201d He builds toward the idea through a Titanic thought experiment: a survivor on floating debris must choose which of two strangers in the water to save, the one he spoke with during the voyage, or the one whose language he could never understand. \u201cAs a human, you pick the one you have a relation with.\u201d Products operate by the same logic, and we form bonds most naturally with what we can understand and relate to.<\/p>\n

A circuit board is opaque; the workings of a mechanical watch are graspable, even to someone with no technical knowledge. \u201cThat is the magic of mechanical watches, is that we feel close to them. Let\u2019s not forget, they tick, they make a sound. They need care. You need to wind them. All these elements will generate a bond between you and the product. And that is why I\u2019m a strong believer in mechanical watches.\u201d Each quality that makes a mechanical watch demanding, the winding, the servicing, the ticking, deepens the relationship between wearer and object. That depth of feeling, Beno\u00eet argues, is a human need, and it deserves to be designed for.<\/p>\n

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Ressence\u2019s Innovations and Design Philosophy<\/p>\n

Ressence positions itself as a high-end brand, with Beno\u00eet drawing a specific distinction between high-end and luxury. Luxury is decorative and emotional, selling prestige and story; high-end means technically and functionally sophisticated, in service of the person using it. \u201cWe would believe that a product gets its relevance, its reason of existence, through the way or the quality the product is executing its function.\u201d The most visible outcome of that philosophy is the Ressence Orbital Convex System, or ROCS, which replaces traditional hands with rotating discs requiring approximately 200 components where a standard watch uses four. The design brief Beno\u00eet imposed on himself back in 2008, years before the brand existed, made the mandate clear from the start: \u201cRessence needs to be original, but not marginal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The oil-filled dial, defining models from the Type 3 to the Type 7, has an origin in personal memory. Beno\u00eet traces it to childhood Mediterranean sailing trips, navigating overnight to Corsica guided only by an oil-filled ship\u2019s compass in the days before GPS. \u201cThis image of the compass, an oil-filled system with inside a mechanical thing that turns around, showing the north. I\u2019m pretty sure this has been the thing that has burned in my brains, and I believe the idea of the Type Three must have come from there.\u201d Oil inside the Type 5 diver eliminates refractions between oil, sapphire, water, and dive mask, delivering a clear dial at any depth. The functional improvement is exactly the point: a diver watch you can actually read underwater.<\/p>\n

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Production, Materials, and the Future<\/p>\n

Getting enough watches from suppliers is, after 16 years of operation, still the hardest thing Ressence faces as an organization. A single watch contains around 400 custom-made parts at extreme precision tolerances, and the Ressence dial is curved in three dimensions where almost every other watch is flat, requiring five-axis machining. Some parts pass through twelve different specialized companies before reaching a watchmaker\u2019s desk. \u201cIf today I need more watches and I order them, I will only have them in between nine months and two years. There is no industry like that.\u201d Those lead times explain the prices, the waiting, and the limited annual runs; the scarcity is structural, a consequence of producing something this technically complex as an independent brand.<\/p>\n

Beno\u00eet is clear-eyed about products and unhurried about brand moving forward. Ressence has a product plan mapped for the next eight years, but brand recognition is the harder work and cannot be forced. \u201cStick to your vision, and move on and be coherent. I think that\u2019s the central thing.\u201d The reference brands held up as aspirational in watchmaking took fifty years to reach that position, and it was a consequence of what they did, not something they actively pursued. On materials, Beno\u00eet describes a fascination with mammoth ivory recovered from Siberia, finding its structure \u201cvery, very, very beautiful.\u201d Ressence can be found at ressencewatches.com, on Instagram, and in Antwerp, where visitors are always welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Design Mindset, Yanko Design\u2019s weekly podcast, premieres every week with a new guest and a single animating question:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[786,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-789862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-gadgets","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}