My SW Spirit “next tech” rundown of mobile with location, predictive & context.

© 2012  • Southwest Spirit & Stuart Wade • all rights reserved

Why does a watchmaker spend weeks manipulating strands of gold mesh into a single watch chain, when the process could be done simply and more cheaply by machine? Why would a rug producer forego the cost-efficient, machine-aided production used almost universally? In a technological age, what’s the point? 

In a word: timelessness. 

Despite the ease of high-tech production processes, many of the world’s finest products are still made by hand, mostly by anonymous artisans, using methods often perfected generations ago. From watches to pens to Oriental rugs, many of the world’s classic luxury items are created with time-honored techniques.

Classic Timepieces

“Classic watches are never in high fashion yet they never go out of style,” notes Christopher Murphy, luxury watch buyer for Harrods in London. “They are discreet pieces you can wear with either a smart suit or jeans.”

The wristwatch debuted about 150 years ago, and quickly became indispensable for the style-conscious. While surveying the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, Queen Victoria stopped to admire the new Patek Philippe timepieces. Many years later, Albert Einstein — commissioned from the Geneva-based firm a watch with large Roman numerals to accommodate his nearsightedness.

Today, watches by Cartier, Audemars Piguet and others often emulate designs from the 1920s and ’30s, when art deco reigned. The best combine state-of-the-art precision with painstaking craft, with a few containing more than 300 moving parts. Barely altered since the days of Queen Victoria, Patek Philippe’s watchmaking process combines the advantages of modern design by numerous engineers, with the skill and tradition of master craftsmen who hand-polish and finish each tiny component. Years of training and experience enable these experts to hear whether polish has been applied to a rod so small it is invisible to the naked eye — and to position intricate parts such as the spring coil, whose average thickness is four to five times thinner than a human hair.

Exterior decoration is no less precise. The chainsmith uses only his hands and a pair of pliers to weave from scratch an exquisite watch bracelet one owner described as being “fluid as mercury.” For specially commissioned watch faces, world-renowned enameler Suzanne Rohr paints miniatures on  a two-inch-diameter gold surface. Her brush contains a single strand. The 100 hues she employs are laid down in tiny dots and fired successively to harden. Because it takes up to 20 firings to harden the enamel, a single-degree variance can ruin her work, which typically requires a minimum of four months per piece, working four to six hours a day.

Patek Philippe makes no more than 20,000 watches each year. Experts liken this to a limited edition, since even the firm’s most popular models number only a few hundred pieces a year. The company tracks which artisans fabricate an individual watch, where it was sold, and often who purchased it. Watches that contain simpler movements, such as the 18-karat gold Patek Philippe Calatrava (the firm’s top-selling men’s strap watch, introduced more than 60 years ago), go for $9-10,000. For watches that have more complicated movements, such as automatic adjustments for leap years or months of 30 or 31 days, prices begin at $43,000. “Classic design appeals to those who’ll not only wear a timepiece for a lifetime but also pass it on to their children,” notes Geneva-based Philippe Stern, president of Patek Philippe. Patek Philippe’s new workshops group all their watchmaking activities under one roof for the first time, providing an ideal way to maximize productivity; visitors can tour this site, which showcases the company’s traditional andcutting-edge technology.

Power of the Pen

The Latin word stylus, meaning “writing instrument,” is also the basis for the English “style.” Evocative without being ostentatious, fountain pens are experiencing a style renaissance. “Communicating has become so impersonal it has magnified the impact of words signed by a fountain pen,” says Zurich-based collector John Hurst, head of Hurst & Freelancers, a translation and communications firm. “When you use a fountain pen, there’s a very real, tactile appreciation of the nib floating on liquid ink.”

One of the most delicate parts of pen making lies in creating nibs. At Parker, the nib of the Duofold Red Jasper is crafted in 18-karat gold with a platinum highlight. Craftsmen undergo several months of training before creating nibs used in actual production. After machine-aided processes strip the flat nib from a solid gold strip and form its curved shape, a welder adds a metal pellet to the nib point. Then a skilled worker slits the nib using a wheel that’s a slender 0.005 inch thick. The entire process takes two weeks.

Lying in State

While the fineness of the wool and number of knots are the usual indicators of quality in a handmade Oriental rug, often overlooked is the incredible skill underlying the rug-making process. “The demise of 20th-century handwoven Oriental carpets bears directly on producers’ and importers’ giving up on the old ways,” says George Jevremovic, Philadelphia-based president of Woven Legends, an internationally recognized producer of handmade Turkish rugs.

The rug-making process starts with shearing nomadic sheep, followed by scouring and hand-combing the raw wool, spinning it into yarn, blending indigenous wools and dyeing them. While virtually all “handmade” carpets these days involve machines at one or another stage of production, some companies do eschew them. Woven Legends, for example, has persuaded many Turkish artisans to return to their ancestral methods.

“Many hours and many hands,” according to Jevremovic, are involved in creating a palette of natural dyes, from plants such as indigo, chamomile and pomegranate. Azeri folk-life rugs, made by tribal and village weavers of Turkey’s eastern Anatolia, cost $70 to $100 per square foot and are considered folk art. “If it were possible to condense into one-person time, making a single 9 foot by 12 foot Azeri carpet would take 14 months,” Jevremovic estimates. The rug owner appreciates the painstaking procedures, he adds. “The discriminating buyer looks beyond trends to the bigger picture. This is timeless art created by many.”

Recently I worked alongside a technology executive who prefers that his reports brief him in the form of a single-sided Word document.

Summarizing complex or lengthy news in such a tight space is liberating. From the point of view of the executive, it makes sense: rather than cranking out 40-slide dreck that nobody pays attention to, his people learn brevity and are able to get far more important things done with their time. As a result, weekly meetings are energetic and mercifully short. Little wonder, he’s a popular guy.

I’ve converted a 28-slide Apple Keynote document I created to such a “one pager” (below). The idea is, this (like a cumbersome PowerPoint) would be the reference document during an oral briefing. I’m not saying it’s right for all situations, but for internal staff / large team meetings, I recommend the approach.

One Page About • © Stuart Wade

(Note that regardless of the medium used, it’s still all about doing all you can to make sure your message remains clear!)

© 2012  • Stuart Wade • all rights reserved

Kid K Returns
Reclaiming an icon, the Cubs regain leadership at a critical time.

© 2011  • TimeOut Chicago & Stuart Wade • all rights reserved

Adam Dunn Gets On, And That’s the Point
Big bat, bigger personality will fit right in on the South Side

© 2011  • TimeOut Chicago & Stuart Wade • all rights reserved

The infectious personality and great, bearlike presence of the 6-foot-6 inch, 285-pounder will play well on the south side of Chicago this summer, where the identity is all about grind-it-out, no-pretense hard work.

© 2009 • Stuart Wade • all rights reserved

With the continued rise of social media, a sluggish global economy, and a shrinking media landscape clients will soon be taking the “private-label content” route.

Hotel Yearbook 2009

What should the worldwide hotel industry be expecting during this moment of economic retrenchment? From seizing opportunity in crisis to the war for talent, The Hotel Yearbook 2009 (for which I served as editor) is a forum where the world’s leading industry experts analyze the year to come.

When the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling team “turned green,” its website, The Paceline, did also. It was a pleasure to edit and publish this bicycling advocacy presentation, originally a speech presented by Trek president John Burke.

Trek’s John Burke: Advocacy Is the Future

The world keeps spinning and with it obesity is on the rise, traffic congestion keeps getting worse and the number of megacities (population 10 million or more) has exploded.

Trek Bicycle Corporation’s president John Burke believes the bicycle is the solution—if leaders in his industry are willing to shift their focus toward advocacy.

In April [2007], John told industry leaders attending a Taiwan conference that the bike truly can be a solution for these vexing issues, as well as pollution and rising energy costs.

Among John’s major points:

• The world is getting fatter. The 1960 average weight of an American child between ages 6 and 11 was 63 pounds; today it’s 74 pounds. Over the same span, both US men and women’s averages have gained the same amount: 24 pounds.
• Traffic: This global scourge continues to dump fuel, pollute our skies and cut productivity. In 2003, traffic congestion delayed people world wide for 7 billion hours and wasted 5 billion gallons of fuel.
• Urbanization: For the first time in human history, more people are living in cities than in the rural areas, and the rate of urbanization is increasing. In 1950, the world had just 2 “megacities” with populations in excess of 10 million. Today, there are at least 20. There are over 200 cities in China with a population over one million. The United Nations estimates that about 180,000 people are added to the urban population every day. By 2050, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas.

The bicycle can contribute – and in places like the Netherlands, London, Boulder, Colo. and Portland, Ore., already is serving — to solving these problems.

• Fitness/Health: Calories burned per hour: Bicycling = 500-700; Driving = 5-20.
• Environment: Percent share of urban air pollution: The car =60-70; The bicycle = 0
• Congestion: Half of all car trips taken are less than 2 miles long; commuting by bike in a major city like London can drop travel time by nearly 50 percent

While a bike-friendly environment exists in the aforementioned markets (and others), the US lags behind much of the world in bicycle commuter percentage.

John Burke views this as his industry greatest opportunity. His message to his peers: It’s our responsibility to promote these important issues – a long-term effort requiring planning and resources. Success-story examples are out there and countless urban programs are already underway in small towns and major megacities.

Creating a bicycle friendly world, John believes, is within everyone’s grasp. But we must all do more.

When interactive pioneers FG SQUARED looked for content strategy and copywriting, my work contributed to several initiatives including the company weblog.