Slow’s Slow Jo 17 watch. (Courtesy Slow)
Slow’s Slow Jo 17 watch. (Courtesy Slow)

Streamlined Watches Designed to Slow Down Time

Slow’s Swiss-made timepieces feature a stark, 24-hour dial with a single hand and tick marks that represent every quarter hour.
By Brian Libby
February 22, 2022
2 minute read

Putting on the breaks has long been a challenge for Corvin Lask and Christopher Noerskau. The pair met as teenagers at a remedial driving school in their native Germany—one was there for running a red light, the other for speeding—and later, after graduating from the same university, found themselves in relentlessly fast-paced, corporate jobs. Both felt like life was passing them by. To help change their lifestyles, they created Slow, a line of stark, Swiss-made watches with the aim of helping their wearers slow down.

“It seems that we don’t cherish time anymore,” Lask says in a company video. “It’s always about chasing minutes and seconds.” So when designing their timepieces’ dial, in collaboration with watch designers Gabriele Guidi and May Margot, they included only a single hand, which makes a full rotation every 24 hours, moving at half the speed of a standard analog watch. Slow isn’t the first to make a watch with a 24-hour dial, but its version is intentionally pared down, with no branding or excess functions on its face. 12 p.m. sits at the top, with midnight directly across from it; each tick mark in between represents a quarter hour. The elegant unisex accessory comes in a variety of colors, case sizes, and straps in materials including leather, black metal, gold, and stainless steel.

Telling time in fewer-than-15-minute intervals takes a bit of guesstimating. You’ll know when it’s exactly 6 p.m., but not 6:05 p.m.—and that’s the point. A Slow watch is a physical reminder to put time in perspective. Whenever you check it, searching for the second or minute hand, you may come to realize that they don’t matter. Living in the moment does.