OUR STORY
We turn Time into Art
We are HUMISM, an independent design studio based in Singapore. Inspired by the watch as an artistic medium, we seek to create beauty out of time’s movement.
Our Kinetic Art watches are the culmination of a year of designing, prototyping, and testing. Launching in 2018 on Kickstarter, we smashed through our funding goal in 30 minutes, was chosen as an Editor’s Pick, and ended at 13 times our goal.
Since then, our watches have continually wowed reviewers and customers alike. Yanko Design praises our watches as “aesthetic, alluring and amazing.” Yahoo! calls them “fashionable and unique.” MSN gushes that they are “mesmerizing works of art.”
Humism is a design studio with a social heart: 2% of our sales go to charity.
Our watches are now proudly worn by customers in more than 60 countries worldwide. We continue to work on new designs and series, and can’t wait to reveal them to you.
OUR ART
Humism is as much an art studio as a watch brand, viewing the watch as a creative canvas with unique design possibilities.
Reimagination
A watch is more than a timekeeper. At Humism, we view the watch as an art canvas. An unique and challenging art canvas.
We want to reimagine watch design, to create a timepiece that makes the most of this medium's uniqueness. And the most unique and fundamental part of a watch, as we see it, is movement.
We are inspired by the potential of using time's movement to create visual beauty, and perhaps even philosophical meaning. We want to create kinetic sculptures for your wrist.
Inspiration
We draw inspiration from the Kinetic Art movement, vibrant in the early 20th century. Kinetic artists broke from traditional static art pieces, and created art that produced beauty through movement.
These innovative visual experiences created new interactive relationships between the artwork and the viewer.
Process
Design is an incremental and often meandering process as we research, experiment, discard, and refine. The journey from initial idea to final product took more than 19 months.
More than a thousand drafts were created as ideas evolved. We conducted seven rounds of reviews and testing involving more than 200 people. It didn't help that we are perfectionists, tweaking every detail and casting way too many prototypes to make sure each nanometer was perfect.
Our designs are the final evolutions of a year of inspiration and hard work.
Philosophy
Our kinetic sculptures uses the movement of time to reimagine the watch's purpose.
Our designs reject the role that time has taken in the modern world, a number that regiments our lives.
Instead of a keeper of routine, our watches turn time into spellbinding art, revealing the beauty of the flowing present.
Time is no longer a number — time is beauty, time is art. The present is no longer to be planned away, but to be appreciated, as the flow of time mesmerizes and enchants us.
OUR CHARITY
2% of our sales are donated to charity
If David had not stepped into the world of design, he would have worked in the non-profit field, having spent stints in Guatemala and Sierra Leone. Even now, giving back remains a personal necessity in each of his design projects.
To keep with this vision, 2% of our sales on this web-store is donated to charity, to make the world a better place. One watch provides a month of emergency food rations for a child impacted by natural disaster.
We believe in effective altruism, and carefully vet each charity we give to ensure measurable and sustainable impact.
Our funds currently go to Mercy Relief, a humanitarian relief agency responding to disasters around Asia, such as earthquakes, typhoons, and flood. They have provided aid to over 2 million people across 25 countries. Read more about their work here.
OUR QUALITY
For Art to endure, it needs a strong foundation. Every one of our watches is meticulously crafted from premium materials sourced from around the world. There are no short-cuts to Quality.
MOVEMENT
Japanese Automatic
Automatic watches are powered by human motion. Your arm's movement propels hundreds of precisely assembled gears and springs — a feat of engineering artistry.
The Japanese Seiko NH35A that powers our watch is famed for its durability and reliability. A generation ahead of the already robust 7S26, the NH35A is more refined and more accurate.
While we turn time into art, through the automatic watch, you turn movement into time. This relationship is symbolized in our custom rotor design, showcased through the open case-back.
The design is also a tribute to the Kinetic artists of the last century, who pondered the tensions between human and machine.
Sapphire Crystal
Sapphire Crystal is incredibly scratch-resistant, rating '9' on the Mohs scale of hardness, just a spot behind diamonds. We use sapphire crystal for both the top and bottom glass, with additional anti-reflective coating applied on the top glass.
316L Surgical Steel
To frame our kinetic art, we designed a case that is minimalistic, almost geometric, with carefully balanced proportions, symmetrical bevels, and clean, angular forms.
The case is made from brushed 316L surgical steel, a step above the more common and less resilient 304L steel.
Kinetic Art Discs
To ensure accuracy and durability, our discs are impossibly thin and light. Products of years of research, these discs are crafted with proprietary Japanese technology.
Italian Leather
We use full-grain leather for our straps — the strongest and most natural-looking type of leather, as it comes from the uppermost surface of the hide, where all the "grain" is preserved.
Our leather is vegetable-tanned — a natural leather processing method that is much more time-consuming than the more commonly found chemical-based chrome-tanning method.
All our straps are built with quick release pins, allowing you to easily change styles.
Milanese Mesh
First forged in 19th century Italy, these straps are uniquely stylish, comfortable, and hardy. Available as an extra style option, add a set to your order if you'll like to change it up, or foresee getting your watch wet.
Quality Control
We are perfectionists here at Humism. All watches are put through a series of stringent quality control tests, such as water resistance and drop tests. We manually regulate each watch to ensure they keep time accurately.
Multiple inspections are carried out throughout the assembly process, and each watch undergoes a final painstaking personal inspection before packaging.
Our watches come with an 18 month warranty.
