Why I Wanted Vannin’s First Watch to Be a Field Watch

I’ve been into watches for a long time.

Long enough that, like most collectors, I’ve gone through different phases. Divers, chronographs, dress watches, vintage pieces, modern watches, watches I thought I needed and watches I bought simply because I liked them.

But the watches I kept coming back to were always the simple ones.

The ones you could just put on.

No thinking about whether it matched what you were wearing. No worrying about whether it was too dressy, too sporty, too big or too precious.

Just a good watch.

And when I started thinking seriously about what the first Vannin watch should be, that kept coming back to me.

A field watch.

Field watches have always made sense to me.

They were designed to do a job. They needed to be easy to read, tough enough to use and simple enough that nothing got in the way.

That basic idea still works today.

Collectors use the term GADA — Go Anywhere, Do Anything — quite a lot, and to me a good field watch is about as close as you can get to that.

You can wear one to work.

You can wear it walking.

You can travel with it.

Put it on leather and it looks a little smarter. Put it on sailcloth or canvas and it becomes something completely different.

It doesn’t need an occasion.

That was exactly what I wanted Vannin’s first watch to be.

Not something that lived in a watch box waiting for the right moment.

Something you actually wore.

This was the bit that mattered to me.

There are plenty of perfectly good catalogue cases and off-the-shelf designs available. It would have been much easier to pick one, put Vannin on the dial and get on with it.

But that wasn’t why I wanted to start Vannin.

I wanted the watch to be ours.

So the case, proportions, dial, crown, caseback and all the small details have been worked on here on the Isle of Man.

That doesn’t mean trying to reinvent a field watch for the sake of being different.

I actually think that’s where watch design can go wrong.

A field watch already has a purpose. The challenge is keeping what makes it good while changing enough that it has its own identity.

That took far more thought than I expected.

I’ve owned watches at just about every size over the years, and I knew quite early on that I didn’t want this to be a big watch.

We settled on 38mm.

For me, that just feels right for this sort of watch.

It still has enough presence, but it doesn’t dominate the wrist. It also makes sense with what we’re trying to build — something that works for a lot of people and doesn’t feel tied to a particular trend.

The lug-to-lug is 46mm, the lug width is 20mm, and the overall thickness is around 11.2mm including the double-domed sapphire crystal.

Those numbers came from a lot of looking, measuring, comparing and changing things.

It’s amazing how much difference a millimetre makes on a watch.

A lug can look fine on a drawing and then feel too long.

A case can technically be slim but still look heavy if the proportions are wrong.

That part of the process has probably made me appreciate watch design even more.

Up until a certain point, a watch exists mostly in your head.

You have sketches, references, measurements and ideas, but it still feels slightly imaginary.

Then you get proper technical drawings back and suddenly you can see it.

The curvature of the lugs.

The side profile.

The crown.

The way the crystal sits above the case.

The relationship between all the parts.

That was a big moment for me with Vannin.

The drawings in this journal entry are part of that development process.

They’re not marketing drawings made after the fact.

They’re part of how the watch has actually been developed.

Being from the Isle of Man is a massive part of Vannin.

But I didn’t want to make a watch that screamed “Isle of Man” from every surface.

That would have been too easy.

I wanted it to be there in the details.

The name Vannin itself comes from Mannin.

Our symbol appears on the dial and crown.

The names of the watches come from here.

Snaefell is an obvious example.

If you’re from the island, the name already means something. If you’re not, hopefully it becomes part of the story you discover when you learn about the watch.

That’s more interesting to me than simply putting symbols everywhere.

I want somebody to like the watch first.

Then I want them to find the Manx story in it.

This has probably been one of the biggest things in my head from the beginning.

I don’t want to make watches people are frightened to wear.

Vannin watches should pick up marks.

They should go places.

They should have straps swapped around.

They should end up attached to memories.

That’s why the specification is practical.

316L stainless steel.

Double-domed sapphire.

100 metres of water resistance.

Miyota 9039 automatic movement.

None of those decisions were made because they make the specification sheet look impressive.

They were chosen because they make sense for the watch we’re building.

The Miyota 9039 in particular made sense because it lets us keep the case relatively slim while giving us a proven automatic movement that suits an everyday watch.

One thing I love about field watches is how easily they change character.

A different strap can genuinely make it feel like another watch.

We’ve been developing the Vannin straps and accessories with that in mind too — not as things to bolt on afterwards, but as part of how the watch is meant to be worn. The site already describes the straps as a way to take the watch from everyday field-watch utility to something cleaner, brighter or more casual, which is exactly how I think about it.

That 20mm lug width was deliberate for the same reason.

I want owners to experiment with it.

Make it theirs.

I’ve collected watches for years, but designing one has changed the way I look at them.

I notice things now that I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about before.

How a lug meets a case.

How much space there is between the dial and the crystal.

Whether a crown feels too small.

Whether a hand is fractionally too short.

Whether a font actually belongs on that watch.

You start to realise how many small decisions go into something that, from the outside, looks quite simple.

And I think that’s probably why I’m enjoying the process so much.

It’s taking something I’ve been passionate about for years and making me look at it from the other side.

We’re still developing the first watches.

There will be prototypes.

There will be things we change once we see them in metal.

I fully expect there to be things I thought were right on a screen that I’ll immediately want to alter when I put one on my wrist.

That seems to be a pretty normal part of designing watches. Dan Henry describes keeping prototypes around and wearing them for months before deciding what should stay and what needs changing, and that approach makes complete sense to me.

I’d much rather change something now than convince myself it’s good enough.

Because this first watch matters.

It sets the tone for everything that comes after it.

And if we get it right, what I hope we end up with is actually quite simple:

A field watch I’d want to own myself.

A watch I can wear every day.

A watch that feels properly thought through.

And a watch that could only really have come from Vannin.

From the Isle of Man.

Peter Jones

Co founder - Designer

Vannin Watches