Many a watch aficionado out there would have heard by now that Horologer MING, a Malaysian luxury watch brand, recently won a coveted prize at the 2024 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG), regarded by fans of horology as the Oscars of watchmaking.
The brand’s winning timepiece, the 37.09 Bluefin dive watch, received the Best Sports Watch Prize at the prestigious awards.
In fact, this is the second time MING has been recognised at GPHG, following the Horological Revelation Prize that the brand picked up in 2019 – just a few years after the brand’s founding!
MING is named after its key founder and chief creative, Kuala Lumpur-born Ming Thein.
This is a man who is not just a passionate watch enthusiast, but also a renowned commercial photographer, designer and business strategist.
The brand was established by a group of six watch enthusiasts, led by Thein.
They have a combined experience of more than 80 years in collecting watches, ranging from vintage classics to avant-garde designs from budget-friendly options to bespoke six-figure masterpieces.
Thein, or MT for short, recalls how the idea to form the watch company first emerged.
“As a brand, we started off making watches because we thought there was a gap in the market that we could exploit.
“Of course, this notion was not in terms of a direct product, but rather, just an idea.
“I think when people started collecting watches in the early 2000s, or perhaps even earlier, there was a sense of joy and discovery that had been a little bit absent in these present times. I just wanted to try and bring that back.”
So, after a long discussion on a plane coming back from a watch fair in 2014, MT decided to do something.
“At this point, access to both suppliers and customers had become much more open, thanks to the Internet and in a way, the larger brands were also being a bit too ambitious with their pricing.
“It has evolved into many forms, though fundamentally it boils down to this: I want to make watches that I’m enthusiastic about, and that I feel represent good value at their price point.”
The brand took a while to decide on what its watches should be like conceptually: high-end or mass market, or complicated?
“Knowing that such a decision would later define us, we decided to make them versatile, everyday-wearable, suitable for all occasions, but also very robust.
“They would be manual winding to retain some interactivity, but also minimise complications as even now, we are still a relatively moderate-sized company with limited financial risk ability,“ MT explains.
He also reveals that at first, the group tried hard to search for that perfect brand name, but those early attempts ended up being either too generic sounding or didn’t quite have a nice ring to it.
“You know, we could have easily bought a defunct brand name from the past and revived it.
“But that would have been, I think, a bit dishonest,” he quips.
“And then the investors pointed out that we had to take responsibility for our creations because we were doing all the design work ourselves.
“Later, we discovered that we could get the trademarks, the domain names and all that kind of stuff without a struggle and everything just simply fell into place!”
MT graduated with a degree in theoretical physics from England’s iconic Balliol College at Oxford University in 2003 when he was just 16.
He has worked as an auditor and held several high-level executive positions – including a stint as a senior director of operations at a fast-food chain in Malaysia – and also spent years as a professional photographer and brand ambassador for both Leica and Hasselblad.
With such a resume, MT could easily rest on his laurels, but he was a man possessed with a burning desire to create and thus co-founded Horologer MING in 2017.
“In truth, it was photography that allowed me to experience and put my own spin on the watches which I couldn’t quite afford at the time,” he said.
“Soon enough, my body of work in this field included shoots with brands like IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Girard-Perregaux and A. Lange & Sohne, just to name a few.
“These days, at a conceptual level, I make the watches I want to wear,” he continues.
“On a finer level, there may be a certain concept or detail I see in another field that I want to translate into a watch.
“I use a lot of symmetry, balance, and visual layering in the form of both dynamic reflections and hierarchy of prominence of various features.
“I think a good designer always has to be open to inspiration from all sources, especially those outside their field, but also at the same time be mindful of the end goal of the thing they are designing.
“This simply means a watch still has to be easily legible, comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, at the very least.
“In the end, I’m a watch buyer myself and I truly, really care about every detail of the experience and the watches themselves.
“Now, with my own brand, I continually ask myself, ‘How can this be better?’ and ‘Would I be happy with this as a customer?’
And yes, it’s definitely all very, very personal because my name is on the dial!
“I suppose this is both good and bad, because it makes the emotional investment very high too.”
And because of this, MT reckons it has resulted in the birth of watches that speak for themselves.
“You know, there are already high expectations going in, because of what everybody else is saying about the brand’s timepieces.
“But personally, I’m still very driven to find more ways for our watches to surprise in the metal every time,” he concludes.
