DESIGNING THE HELLCAT
It has now been a few years since the debut of the Hellcat - with a thousand pieces made it marks a good time to take a look back but also step towards new designs. The Hellcat was released after the Calamity. The Calamity helped me find the niche that I originally wanted with Orion. The first model, the Orion 1, used the Seiko NH35 and as a result, dimensions were constrained (and thick). At that time in the watch industry, there was a Miyota 9 series shortage which drove up the prices, it cost virtually the same as the 2824. When starting Orion, money was a serious constraint. While I love the tankiness of the Orion 1 and the models that shared the case platform, it was ultimately a concession I had to make. The early visions were for slim and small watches, which were missing from the modern day watch catalog which was, at the time, enamored with watches well over 40mm.
The Hellcat exists within the context of the Calamity as the development of the Orion design language. There’s an older blog post on designing the Calamity if you want to understand it more, but it stemmed from a dissatisfaction of the bloated, clunk, and comically large dive watches that dominated the landscape at the time. When it was released it was a bit of a feat as one of the thinnest automatic 200m divers on the market. I wanted the feeling and the essence of the Calamity to be felt with the Hellcat, but I didn’t want it to be a “smooth bezel Calamity”. Besides the passion and intrigue that came with the world of horology, part of what drew me to watch design wasn’t exactly the plethora of watches that I loved and wanted to replicate, which seems to be common for many brands, but rather my dissatisfaction with so many available watches. I see many people take design ideas from watches that they like, and to some degree this is normal, but a lot of what Orion is, is the inverse of what is so common. The dissatisfaction with so many offerings scratches at an itch, and that itch is the drive to uncover what is missing and find out why I dislike so many watches. Once that is discovered the goal is to create a watch that doesn’t seem outlandish and foreign (different for the sake of being different) but rather blends in while feeling new, authentic and novel. I do get ideas from existing watches, though at the same time I try to isolate myself from too much watch media so that I’m not influenced too strongly, perhaps on a subconscious level. Many people like to guess or state where I got perceived design cues from - for the Hellcat, which, to date, nobody has ever accurately guessed the model or even brand. No, it’s not the Railmaster, and if you look critically at each component (case, dial, hands) you will see they are all very different with similarities ending with things like the dial crosshair or the fact that Orion and Omega both start with the letter ‘O’.
Case design is important to me, it is, after all, the way the machine interfaces with your body. This, with many brands, is a source of my dissatisfaction. A combination of being sensitive to the things I wear and having small wrists, many modern watches simply do not feel good. Even if they appear to have modest dimensions, they can just be a jarring interface with your wrist. The Nomos Tangente, a beautiful watch, springs to mind. It’s wonderfully thin but the case and lugs are flat, existing in a single plane, which creates harsh lever like angles once you have it cinched down with a strap. The Tudor Black Bay is another, with a case so slab sided and lugs so pointy it can’t help but be awkwardly top heavy (fortunately Rolex has recognized this and improved it significantly on subsequent models). While there are countless examples, and no doubt case design has improved in the years since the release of the Hellcat, it still bears recounting. Many cases still suffer from neglect, with design focus being solely on the dial and maybe the hands. If a case isn’t awkwardly designed, it’s painfully generic (either lacking in imagination or quite literally a generic catalog case), if it’s neither of those there’s a good chance it’s a confusing amalgam of features that someone did well only to be reconstructed in a way that makes less sense. Now, I’m not hating on all watches, there are many exceptionally designed watches, but the large majority of watches, just aren’t for me.
There should be a flow from the case out through the bracelet that accommodates the wrist and conforms to it, not battle with it.
So how did I integrate this into the Hellcat? Firstly, thinness is important. It stops the watch from being top heavy. A top heavy watch will pull on one side of the wrist, having a tendency to flop or hang out in an awkward spot. Balancing the watch on the wrist helps it to not announce its presence, I enjoy a watch that you forget that you’re wearing. Thin watches also slide under the cuff, an overused saying for sure, but fewer snags on sleeves and things in the world help keep the immersion of the feeling that there’s nothing on the wrist. Thinner and less obtuse cases also help keep the watch safer from impacts. As you recall the example with the Nomos, thinness is not the ultimate factor in comfort and ergonomic design, it’s a small part of a suite of features. Gently curving lugs are another part of that, if they curve too aggressively they’ll exclude larger wrists, if they don’t curve enough it creates that awkward fulcrum with the bracelet or strap and the wrist. Finding the goldilocks of lug downturn is important, unless of course, the goal is to make a specific watch for a specific wrist size. Thinness and a good lug curvature will get you pretty far, next up is case diameter. The Hellcat, like the Calamity, clocks in at 39.5mm. The Calamity has crown guards, a beefier crown, and a bracelet that has larger links and a bit less articulation. While it is slightly bigger, these features all add to perceived size. The mid case on the Calamity, since it accounts for a turning bezel, is thinner and gives it a bit of a race car like feel which pulls the perceived size the other direction, smaller. The Hellcat has done away with the crown guards, implementing a more delicately shaped crown. The bracelet also was newly designed for it - unlike the Orion 1 which had male end links, the Hellcat has female end links. Each link is not only exceptionally thin but short as well. Given that they’re maybe, 75% shorter than the average bracelet link, this increases the points of articulation which translates to matching the curvature of your wrist better than the average bracelet once the bracelet is properly sized. It’s normal for bracelets to flex, keep in mind the wrist is not a perfect cylinder but bracelets are generally constrained by a cylinder like shape. Bracelets with less articulation (think Audemar Piguet Royal Oak) or are more rigid, will flex and eventually bend to conform to your wrist. While it’s totally possible to design a self supporting bracelet without much articulation to be comfortable, there are many bracelets out there that don’t consider this flex or organic shape of the wrist and it creates discomfort. The lack of heft and the veritable articulation of the Hellcat bracelet continue the “doesn’t feel like it’s there” design ethos that is important in the case design. Yes, it may feel a little light and floppy when it’s not on the wrist, but once it’s sized and on your wrist, I promise it’s a different story. There should be a flow from the case out through the bracelet that accommodates the wrist and conforms to it, not battle with it.
The caseback is another key component in how the watch feels on the wrist. The Calamity debuted the curved caseback, which also had a curved sapphire crystal. The Hellcat is all steel. It’s polished not just for aesthetics, but for feel. The polished steel meshes with the wrist in a much more sensational way than brushed or blasted steel may. It’s subtle, but entirely tangible. The Orion constellation emblazoned into the mirror like back is a fun way to help folks brush up on identifying their constellations but also buck some of the more boring trends of caseback branding. The one downside I’ve noticed of this is that it’s susceptible to scratches, especially since many people lay their watch on top of the bracelet. Subsequent casebacks in new models I’ll coat with an anti-scratch PVD coating (like on the anticipated Hellcat 36). The curved caseback is a more organic shape than many of the caseback shapes out there, it matches the shape of the wrist as opposed to digging into it. Combined with the highly articulated bracelet, gentle lug downturn, and thinness of the watch, the result is something that disappears entirely on the wrist. No tugging or pulling, no lugs digging into wrists, no caseback logo stamped into your wrist on a hot day - it’s comfortable, but not in some active way, it’s comfortable in a way where it literally feels like part of your body, it shouldn’t be noticeable. This is why case design is important to me, this is what I felt like was missing in the watch world - options that disappear on your wrist. Too many cloying watches that announce their presence every time you move your hand or arm.
If you look at the technical image at the top of the page, the bottom left view shows a silhouette view. While ergonomics are important, it’s also important to make a watch that looks good - and in my view, that shouldn’t just be from the top down. You should be able to revel in your watch from all angles. Which is another serious point of neglect for many brands. The mid case is made up of parallel sides, they taper inwards, slightly wider at the bottom and thinner at the top where it meets the concave bezel and steps up to the linear dome of the crystal. If you’re not taking an active, mindful account of all of these features it may just appear “natural” or feel “right”. Adding these subtle dimensions and shapes not only makes the case more dynamic and exciting it helps it to feel and look natural on the wrist. The organic world has very little in the way of harsh angles, your body has very few. There should be a mindfulness of the harshness of the angles when creating a watch, adding relief to the angles increases the appeal, the feel, and the comfort. On the other hand, the geological world captures geometric beauty of minerals in an almost mystical way. It’s entirely possible to capture both geometric beauty and introduce the natural flow of the organic world into a watch, and a good watch will do these things. It is, after all, an assortment of metals and minerals designed to rest on your flesh, nature is one of the most powerful designers and we should look to the natural world for help.
Note the sunburst dial radiating out through the dial, onto the bezel flat, then down to the mid case and bracelet
Finishing up the case design, there’s the concave bezel which is a choice that further encourages the dynamic and organic look I was talking about. The Hellcat has few linear and hard surfaces, all with a gentle curve (at least), a linear or flat bezel would be jarringly simplistic, looking out of place and betraying the rest of the case. The bezel has a small flat on top, which on the brushed models has a sunburst brushing pattern which is subtle but it radiates into the brushing of the rest of the case. It’s also an extension of the sunburst pattern on (some of) the dials. In fact, the original models without the sunburst dials were in the blasted cases, which, the tops of the bezels were flat polished. Drastically different feels elicited from simply types of finishing chosen for the same cases. Which gets us to the dial and hands.
When I originally set out to design the Hellcat I had the burgundy dial in mind. The first Sylph had just been a major hit and I thought the Hellcat in burgundy would be, in many ways, its successor. I was a bit surprised when the people who liked the Sylph liked it for more reasons than just the burgundy - not many of the Sylph fans were Hellcat fans. I had created a new watch with an entirely new look and feel, and as a result, a (mostly) entirely new demographic of people would like it. It was, after all, quite different in nearly every way from the Orion 1 case platform and the Sylph dial.
As noted, I wanted this watch to feel like an Orion, in the case that was through using similar lines as the Calamity, similar features, that could easily be called back to Orion design. I also wanted something unique to Orion. Something that would give it undeniable identity. The Orion Classic typeface was designed. An entire alphabet, letters and numbers, created for the Hellcat and subsequent watches and revisions. Crisp serifs, used by the pad printers of the past to increase crispness and the cleanliness of the ink when the pad was lifted from the dial, became a classic “watch” typeface styling. Open numerals, pointed tails, a familiar clarity, and sharp legibility were the driving design forces in the Orion typeface. Unique enough that it should feel novel and refreshing, but again, not so different that it feels outlandish or misplaced. The details of the Hellcat were all intended to be subtle and not overt, a treat for the discerning customer who takes time to notice.
Many of the watches that interested me before starting Orion were vintage watches, largely because they were what met my criteria for wearability and comfort, not to mention the exciting designs. Syringe hands, which are perhaps an evolution of cathedral style hands (which I love), were the choice for the Hellcat. The goal here was to remedy what I felt was the agitation I felt with many (not all) brands execution of syringe hands. Which is that they all felt disproportionate. Other brands often had hands that were seemingly bloated, or perhaps the minute and hour hand were too close in size, or too similar that differentiation of hour and minute at a glance suffered, the list could go on. I wanted the syringe hands to be proportional, but I also wanted to make them easily discernable from each other at a glance - a well designed watch should be highly legible very quickly, a design that forces the wearer to labor over discerning the time is either poorly designed or a concept piece. I wanted to do these things while bringing an elegance to them, soft angles but defined well. The minute hand has an arch in it, which took some work to finally be able to have it a sharp chevron and not muddy looking. The blade of the seconds hand is also much thinner than the industry standard, while some people complain of legibility of the seconds, I do feel it falls in line nicely with the needle section of the hour & minute hands as well as the overall look of the watch.
The dial, even with things like Orion Classic and balanced hands still looked off. Early Hellcat renditions struggled with looking too generic, to combat that a lot of work went into finding the best design for the minute track. Looking back, I recall seeing a good deal of the watch already completed in my mind’s eye but the minute track took many, many iterations to bring the watch together. Below is a gallery of the Hellcat (before it was named the Hellcat) with a basic minute track and some of the crown iterations/studies it went through. It probably had more than a dozen crown versions. Now, you may know why I’m short with people when they ask, “Have you thought of…..” because most likely, I have I thought of it. You can see how with the more Calamity-esque dial that it wasn’t quite as lively or “right” feeling as the Hellcat we eventually landed on.
An early Hellcat with a more plain railroad style minute track and a red colored minute hand chevron.
Above are just a few of the numerous iterations we went through. In ways, designing a watch can be like pouring water down a mountainside and watching the various paths the water takes to go down, then following the best ones - but it requires careful observation of many of the tributaries to find the right ones. Kyle and I spent a considerable amount of time working on the Hellcat and we’re both very proud of the watch. It shines with its comfort and ergonomics, its size and proportions, and just being loaded with details that take a some quiet observation to truly appreciate. Of course, it’s not perfect, but perfection is the end of pursuit. I am excited to produce the Hellcat 36, the even smaller successor to the Hellcat which will take some features and evolve on them, like adding applied indices to the dial, but also finding new ways to express the Orion design language. If you haven’t taken some time to really look at the Hellcat, I invite you to.
The upcoming Hellcat 36 in black mother of pearl
