Projects Watches Dials Into What Makes Gen Z Tick (Full Q&A)

Talk about timing the trend. Analog watches have found an unlikely new fandom in digitally savvy young adults; the global watch market is expected to grow from $66 billion to $113 billion over the next decade.

Projects Watches saw an opportunity. Each of its timepieces boasts a bold, untraditional, flex-worthy design from an independent artist — the company has 118,000 Instagram followers and 56,000 TikTok likes. Yet the entire lineup is priced between $100 and $200, far more affordable than Rolexes and Omegas. b. spoke with Connor Hudson, the creative director at Projects Watches, about marketing a timeless product category to a new generation.

b: I’m not a huge watch guy, but Instagram ads for Projects Watches kept appearing on my feed, and I eventually gave in and bought one. Since then, it’s spawned numerous conversations.

Hudson: That’s really great. I was never a watch guy either before this job. That’s part of why Projects works. These watches don’t look like your traditional watches and fit outside of the collectors’ mindset, where you’re just continuing to ladder up and spend more and more. We try and keep it pretty accessible. So yeah, people who just like art or cool design can jump in with us.

b: Instagram hits you with all these different ads for Projects Watches, and once you show a bit of interest, they just keep popping up. Maybe other business owners could learn a thing or two from how you pulled that off?

Hudson: That journey is something we always try and stay focused on. Hooking somebody with pretty animations and a catchy tune in the background — that’s a really solid way of getting somebody to zoom in or go to the website. We have different people talking about the watches. We have people who are showing how they can style them. We have videos that are about the story behind the watch, or we’re doing stuff that’s telling the creator’s story.

Once we get those ads out there, we have very little control over the exact journey that people can go on. What we’ve learned is being able to fill different pots with different types of content. If you’re hit with a pretty animation and you want to buy the watch, you’re going to be hit with different pieces of content to continue to remind you of us and tell a different part of our story. For us, constantly staying in experimentation mode with a lot of this stuff can move watches.

b: Tell us about your journey with Projects and how the company has evolved.

Hudson: [My wife and I] were living out in Denver and were connected with the owners of the company, who had bought it right as the pandemic started. Projects has been around for 30 years. It’s definitely gone through a ton of changes. Their first tagline was “Architecture you can wear.” They exclusively worked with architects and had a very specific look to the watches. It was a very structural design, and they were super cool.

Projects was “the architect’s watch” for 15 to 20 years and had carved out a niche for themselves. These new owners bought it and really saw an opportunity to grow that mindset into working with other types of creative people instead of just architects. That was our charter from the jump. Like, how can we be more inclusive of creative people that come in and help us bring these designs to life and color a pretty wide mosaic of different types of watches and different types of artists that we could work with?

We were brought in to give the company a little jump-start after these guys bought it, and now … we’re really trying to continue to develop this really interesting, unique, and surprising collection of products and partnerships. … The connection with the artists that we’re working with is coming through as well. … We’re continuing to bring in more folks as part of that. I think the coolest thing about the brand is that it’s exclusively a collaborative thing. We’re never just sitting here and coming up with ideas of what [we think] could be a cool watch. We’re talking to really amazing, multitalented people and bringing in the right folks to help grow this thing in ways that we could never expect.

b: How did you go about targeting people who aren’t that into watches but like the unique fashion element of it? Especially those not inclined to purchase high-end brands?

Hudson: There’s a two-pronged effort there. One, most of our watches are sold online, but then if they’re not sold online, they’re sold in museum gift stores. That was a really intentional effort to strengthen our relationship with a ton of museum partners. There’s a brand cachet there for sure, but also the people who are heading to the MoMA Design Store are likely the type of people who are gonna really line up with our brand message. That was a big way to interact with people in the real world.

We’re always trying to expand our relationship with museums. We don’t have a storefront right now. I don’t think that that’s out of the question for us to do — some smart pop-ups at the right places and everything — but I think that museums are a really great place for people to see our products in person for the first time. The people who are going there have just seen some amazing things from some pretty iconic artists. At the end of that journey, when they go to the gift shop, we can be there while they’re in that mindset.

And then on the social media side of things, we skewed way younger than most watch brands do. We made some really intentional efforts to bring in younger, more contemporary artists into our brand world, but also work with a few different influencers that are more on the TikTok side of things.

The best case study of that is our partnership with a guy named Scumbag Dad. He’s got 6 million followers on TikTok. He’s a satirical comedy guy that the kids love and we met. His wife actually designed a watch with us; she’s a really talented visual artist. He just has this unique way of connecting to the next generation. Not like super young, but I would say college-aged and a couple of years removed from college. He loves watches — and he loves weird watches. We formed this partnership where he would talk about our collection and reintroduce watches to people who have definitely never worn a watch before.

That’s where we started to see this take off. We were getting some traction with people who are traditional watch collectors, but we saw an opportunity to be a part of the watch renaissance that happened a couple of years ago.

b: The watches are telling time, but that’s not really the point. We still have our phones.

Hudson: You have a clock in your pocket at all times — if not, it’s on your computer. Being able to push the design and make it something that nobody’s ever seen before, and having it be a style piece or an accessory, is a much more enticing thing than saving up for an expensive watch that isn’t going to be a timekeeping piece for you; it’s just gonna be a status symbol.

The smartwatch era is still going strong for some folks, depending on what job they’re in and what their lifestyle is like. But people weren’t wearing analog watches for a couple of years. There’s something cool and tangible about battery-operated and movement-based watches versus a smartwatch. We were hitting our stride at the same moment that people were starting to buy into watches. A lot of that was introducing it to art fans, but also a much larger and diverse population of people who had never really considered wearing a watch.

b: Projects Watches arrive with a little index card in the box, detailing the artist’s creative journey.

Hudson: Most other watches that people are flexing are really about the value props. We’re coming at it a little bit differently with the design and what that means.

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