Apiar London Ltd is the latest startup to enter the watchmaking industry. The company turned stealth mode off at British Watchmakers’ Day 2025 with Gen1.0.
The new watch owes its name to generative design (GD), a design technique that founders Matt Oosthuizen and Sam White master as designers and engineers.
Designed for Additive Manufacturing in mind, the Apiar team imagined a watch that we would want to wear in extreme environments – like the Moon. This ideal watch “would need to be robust and resilient, versatile enough to work in any situation. All with a design that feels fitting for the bold, inventive and unconventional people who will be wearing it.”
Ideal to optimize the part design, particularly for an exceptional strength-to-weight ratio, GD often leads to unconventional structures and geometries that only Additive Manufacturing can create. In this specific case, the team relies on Laser Powder Bed Fusion. White shared with 3D ADEPT Media that they partnered with metal AM service provider Apex Additive in Ebbw Vale, Wales to print with Grade-23 Titanium using their RenAM 500Q machines.
“The final design for the Gen1.0 – a completely organic form, with skeletonized lugs and seemingly impossible geometry. They also developed a deep, undulating dial that Apiar describes as “the guilloché of the future”,” the team shares in a press release.
Max Resnick, designer of the Gen1.0, commented: “My focus has always been disruptive design. When it came to the Gen1.0, I wanted to create something that felt totally new, unique and challenging – like it’s just arrived from the near future – yet also somehow familiar and comfortable to wear. My vision for the Gen1.0 would have been impossible with traditional manufacturing. From the organic geometry of the lugs to the curves and multiple levels of the dial, we would have had to make trade-offs. Apiar’s approach gave me total creative freedom and flexibility so that what we see in real life is exactly what I saw in my head. No compromises.”
If for Apiar, Gen 1.0 is a watch that you would want to build yourself in the future – given the reliance on Additive Manufacturing, for now, I strongly encourage you to look for your own on Apiar’s website. Prices are yet to be announced but are expected to be comfortably under £2,000 (Including VAT).
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