In the age of collaborations, where brand names are often slapped together haphazardly for marketing purposes, double-signed watch dials have lost their luster.
In decades past, it symbolized horological designers and artists coming together to create something special, and Zenith is doing its part to restore that legacy. To kick off its new Double Signed series, the esteemed Swiss watchmaker invited Naoya Hida & Co., the most sought-after independent brand in Japan, to reimagine a very important watch.
Nayoya Hida & Co. isn’t the most obvious choice, but it is a perfect fit for Zenith’s new collaborative watch design series. The Japanese brand, named after its lead designer, is a small workshop that produces around 100 watches per year.
Hida and his team do everything in-house using legacy machines and craft as much as possible by hand. Each year, a catalog is released, and customers can purchase one of a select allotment of each watch before it is produced.
Zenith is a much larger, more established brand, but its leadership admires the Japanese watchmaker as a peer, and rightfully so. That respect is evident in the watch placed in Hida’s gifted hands.
