Bengaluru-based luxury watch manufacturer Bangalore Watch Company (BWC) has launched its new collection of watches as a tribute to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), with dials made out of Muonionalusta meteorite that was recovered from Sweden. In a move to pay homage to India’s five decades of space exploration, the collection has been named ‘Apogee’. In astronomy, the word ‘Apogee’ means the farthest point from the earth in the orbit of a moon or a satellite. The limited-edition line has 50 watches for the year 2021 and have been available for preorder on the website from 15 August onwards.
The 40 mm case watches are made out of a single block of Titanium that uses Swiss Sellita SW200 Automatic movement. Each will have a Sapphire crystal inside and a 3D engraving of the Aryabhatta satellite on the back. The meteorite has patterns which were formed due to millions of years of slow-cooling in space, thus making every dial unique. The collection consists of four watches: Horizon (blue), Supernova (dark green), Deepspace (black), and Extraterrestrial (grey), and are priced over Rs 60,000 per piece.
Co-founder and Creative Director of BWC Nirupesh Joshi said that the vision is to make watches that tell Indian stories. “My wife and I worked abroad in a cloud security company. We came back and started Bangalore Watch Company 3 years ago. The vision was to manufacture high quality wrist watches that tell excellent Indian stories. ISRO has been an inspiration for many and is one of the best space organisations in the world. We realised there’s a need to tell our story,” he said.
Co-founder and Head of Operations Mercy Amalraj and Joshi started the company in 2018.
Joshi said the team had been working for three years on the theme. “It takes a lot of time to conceptualise, design and then make the product. We’re not a big brand, but the market response has been amazing and the expectation regarding the new line of product is sky-high,” he added.