ZIIIRO AURORA PREVIEW

Hello Everyone!

We have been busy recently developing a new model launching in the next few months. Name of the watch Aurora comes from ‘Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights’ – a natural light display observed at night particularly in the polar regions. We chose this name due to its color resemblance on the clock face (green-blue-yellow) of our new watch.

So can you even read time on that thing?? Good question You bet we have an answer for you too.

Displaying the time on Gravity and Mercury was performed using a combination of two swirls (hour and minute). What we are experimenting on Aurora is to reduce both swirls into a single element without taking away any functionality from the watch. Hour indicator which is on the bottom layer uses a 100% to 0% blue gradient and the Minute indicator uses a 100% to 0% yellow gradient. Overlapping both layers create a color mixing result thus producing an ever changing clock face color! It allows the user to learn a new way of interpreting time by understanding mixture of different colors.

(Top picture left: 5:17 am/pm – bottom layer blue (100%) is near the 5o’clock position and green (100% yellow mixed with blue) is at the 17 mins position)

And not to forget, this model is fully interchangeable with the Gravity so for those who purchased before, get this clock for mix and match!

New colors for Gravity

We are launching 3 new colors for Gravity this week (Blue-Ocean , Green-Green and Magenta-Magenta).

Some photos below, watch this space for updates!

Pre-order Shipment

Hello Ziiiro fans!

We are overwhelmed by the response and our team is trying our best to process all orders.. in fact we are working over Christmas to get everything shipped! We packed our first shipment of the watches yesterday, below is a picture and these are just 1/4 of everything :O

If we are slow in replying to inquiries, please forgive us since we’re working overnight to get the watches delivered!

Questions & Answers

It’s been almost a week now since we launched our new website, and we are overwhelmed by the positive response. We’re really glad that so many of you like what we have done so far. Over the last couple of days, we were giving our best to answer all of your questions as fast as possible, and are sorry if we forgot to answer any of them. Therefore, I’d like to use this post for another source of Q&A.

So, if there are any questions, just write them down in the comments.

I’ll start with some recurring ones:

Q: How do i know if ZIIIRO Gravity fits my wrist?
A: It fits on wrists with a perimeter of 15 cm (loose fit) and above. The metal is flexible and goes back to it’s initial shape, but you can slightly change that initial shape by bending it.

Q: Why is there no seconds disc on ZIIIRO Mercury anymore?
A: We decided to remove it after all – it didn’t look very good because the distance to the discs under it was too big and we couldn’t chnage that.

Q: Is ‘Mercury’ also interchangeable just like ‘Gravity’?
A: Nope.

Q: Do you also sell seperate straps or clock bodies?
A: Not at this point of time, because it is too difficult for us to have so many different parts right at the start.

Q: How do i know that the clock body of ‘Gravity’ doesn’t rotate and shows a wrong time when i insert it?
A: You can’t insert it wrong, you can only put it in with the crown pointed to the right side, and you can set the time, using the crown as reference.

Q: Are you offering seperate straps or clock bodies of ‘Gravity’?
A: Not at this point of time, we just started, it would be too difficult for us in terms of stock items. Maybe later, when we can handle bigger quantities.

SNEAK PREVIEW OF ZIIIRO GRAVITY

To all beautiful ZIIIRO fans,

The wait is finally over! ZIIIRO watches will be coming out this month (December). Here is a teaser of the ZIIIRO Gravity – White strap / Magenta clock face.

We’ll be announcing a pre-order date for the watches very soon, so watch out for our launch site @ www.ZIIIRO.com !

Goodies

To sweeten the waiting time for the realease of our nice watches, i wanted to share some wallpapers with you. Have fun!

You can download them from the following links. I just uploaded wallpapers labeled “iPhone”, but of course you can use them for other devices as well The easiest way to download them is making a right mouse click -> “save images as”.

iPhone 2 / 3G(S)

iPhone 4

iPad

Screen 1920 x 1200

Screen 1440 x 900

Screen 1280 x 800

Preview: ZERO MERCURY

Hello guys!

Having mentioned on previous post that we had been working on a new watch, we are excited to show you a sneak preview of our upcoming model ZERO Mercury. It is a stainless steel mesh watch in combination with our trademark swirls, and this time we included the seconds!

Below you can see some of the concept images designed in July/August and we had been working overdrive ever since then in conjunction with ZERO Gravity.

These are some of the colors we have in mind, but we are also doing mix and match with different color discs to find the perfect combination.

and some real samples pics below..

Bottom pic top left: First sample with glass installed

Bottom pic top right: Second sample, improved casing (you can see circular lines are more clear and refined)

Overall, we are making every effort to ensure both models are built perfectly and right now we are aiming for an earlier release date. If everything goes smoothly, ZERO Mercury should be available around December. -Fingers crossed-

Hope you guys like our new model, feel free to comment!

interchangeability

Waiting for the development process part B (sorry, we have much work to do at the moment), I wanted to show you how the interchangeable concept works. Therefore, i simply post some parts of the booklet, which show how to take out the clock body, set the time, and put it back in. I don’t want to get too detailed about how excectly the mechanism works.. First, we had something like a turn & snap mechanism, where you would have to insert the clock body, and then turn clockwise to lock it. Later, we decided to use a simpler method, where you just have to push it in to lock it.

One more thing There are other watches using similar mechanisms. But with most of them, it’s really obvious that they are interchangeable, because you can see the gap between the clock and the case, the whole mechanism is exposed. We didn’t want to have that, because apart from looking cheap, there also would have been other disadvantages, such as dust getting in. We wanted to make it look like the whole watch is one part, and found a solution to achieve this. If you look closely, you can see that there’s a bent metal frame around our clock body (arrow in the picture), which fits into the silicone very accurate. This way, we don’t have any gaps or areas that can collect dirt, everything is bullet proof.

In the next post, i’ll provide some wallpaper artworks, stay tuned.

Development progress (A)

Being faced with plenty of good challenges for the past couple of months, we are pleased that development is going on track and the watch is currently in production. Having mentioned challenges, I thought it would be great to share with you, our readers, a glimpse at the difficulties we faced so as to build a better and much improved watch.

Before we started developing ZERO Gravity, we were crystal clear that our mission is to create a very desirable watch for our customers, both in terms of appearance and technical aspects. Starting with the latter, the biggest problem we encountered was in the technical aspects of transforming a concept product into a real product. Based on the original design, we noticed that it was not possible to attach Silicone rubber to a piece of Stainless steel metal without the use of glue, screws or other gimmicks. Using screws seems the most obvious solution for most watches but we wanted to keep & improve our original idea of having zero loose parts. Adhesive glue was not an option either since the watch strap is based on a bracelet concept.. prolonged pulling and stretching will affect the stickiness and eventually tear the rubber and metal apart. There were many other options like slipping the metal through a channel in the rubber or hiding the metal entirely inside the rubber (like wearing socks). But none of these were convincing enough because it doesn’t provide enough stability to the watch and it changes our original design notably. Even if we manage to solve all these issues, how are we going to provide an easy way for our customers to change the battery or service the watch when there are problems? We made this possible by introducing an inter-changeable concept of the clock body. Simply remove the clock body from the rubber strap and you’ll have the luxury of changing multiple color straps to match clothing on different occasions. The problem regarding battery change was also solved by implementing a snap case on the back of the removable clock body.

Going deeper into the technical details, we had to choose between different types of rubber material such as Polyurethane (PU Rubber), Silicone Rubber and other types of rubber (list goes on). Being no rubber expert, we spent plenty of time researching and going through different types of rubber samples, each having their individual advantages and disadvantages. Our factory recommended us to use PU Rubber as it is the most commonly used rubber in watches and it is much cheaper than Silicone Rubber. However, we found out that PU Rubber is not protected against UV Rays, which means it will be discolored upon exposure to sunlight and could only last for around 18 months. So we asked ourselves: Is that what our customers want? To have a watch that could only last 18 months? Can we offer something better in terms of quality and value? The answer to that is Silicone rubber, which on the other has major benefits such as 1) Resists the deterioration effects of sunlight and rainwater, 2) Odorless, tasteless and does not support growth of bacterial, 3) Excellent resistance to tear & most chemicals, etc etc.

Apart from the rubber, choosing the perfect type of stainless steel is vital to the final product. Comfort and weight are the main issues here and the choice of metal directly affects these issues. If you ask me, I would definitely prefer wearing a light-weighted watch – compared – to a heavy-weighted stone watch. We had to make sure that the metal is thin and light enough so the wearer feels comfortable, and at the same time keeping the metal strong enough to prevent damages from prolonged pulling and stretching. I must admit that finding the correct dimensions to the metal was hard, but it was worth every effort when I know it will be comfortable for the wearer. There are many other issues not mentioned yet but I will leave them for part b of this post – to be honest, because it’s already 3am now -

Feel free to leave some comments or suggestions, we always welcome them!

Availability

Hello there,

Over the last few weeks, there are people asking “where / when can I get the watch?” by E-Mail, on Facebook or Twitter, and we are very happy to see that people seem to like what we are doing So if you’re asking yourself, what’s happening right now: We are currently working on the ZERO Gravity, and also on the special edition watch, like described in that other post. There are startups who would to take pre-orders at this point, but we prefer to wait until you can see the real product, as you only have seen concept pictures so far. Anyway – right now, it looks like we are finalizing the ZERO Gravity around Oct. / Nov. 2010, and start selling it around that time. It’s possible that the other model will be finished even earlier, we don’t know yet. But we’ll update this post to let you know. Feel free to comment on this post, if there are any questions!

EDIT: Sorry, the release date will be delayed, now it looks like first half of Dec.!

EDIT 2: We forgot to change this post: pre-ordered watches will be sent out starting dec. 23rd.