Seiko Champion

Aha! My questions yesterday about Volna were answered, it is a Swiss brand (scroll down for details). Initially announced back in March, but their new web site is now up and they’ve done some recent advertising press releases.

I’m warming up to these watches more (the serial # label on the side, screwed-down indicator), but not enough to pay between $4,000 to $6,500 (depending on the model) for “borrowed heritage”. They also make no mention of the specific movements they are using, or who is actually manufacturing the watches. Posts on the Watch-u-Seek Russian watch forum seem to be in general agreement, nice watch but a shame it’s actually just generic Swiss.

Several articles including this one in Worldtempus identify François Candolfi as the CEO of the firm, with parters Eleonore Paschoud and Marc Calmonte. I find their comments on re-starting a heritage smaller brand interesting…

“When you are new and that you do not have a marketing budget, distributors and retailers are your best tools.” With his traveling companions Eleonore Paschoud and Marc Calmonte, François Candolfi is lucid on the conditions prevailing in the launch of a brand.

About their web site – I find it very interesting and captivating in many ways, nice experience. However it’s non-scaling and over 1300 pixels wide, so cannot be displayed on most laptops without chopping off parts, including (on some pages) the basic navigation, the location of which changes from page to page.

These are a couple of basic web design errors which are fairly common for brand advertising sites, but in this case are surprising given the quality of the site itself. (I won’t mention the issue of being overly Flash-centric with no searchable HTML text, since that seems a common design mandate for just about all Swiss watch firms for such reason.)

A meeting of two watchmaking giants.

For more than two centuries Switzerland has been a great watchmaking nation, known throughout the world for the quality and precision of its creations. The USSR also held a strong place in the world market, thanks to many joint ventures with the Swiss, and in the 1960s the country even held the position of being the world’s second-largest producer of mechanical timepieces.

Volna has brought these two together once more, uniting Soviet historic heritage and style with Swiss technical know-how.

… unique technical functions: an aperture in the dial with an indicator of water-resistance,combined with s screw-down water-resistant double crown …

… security indicator is an aperture on the dial that indicates whether the crown is properly closed or not. When the crown is unscrewed it moves from the 300 M position to the open position …

… caseback. The intentionally complex curved shape of the propeller …