Meet The Designer… Fiona Krüger

Last week, the wife and husband duo behind Fiona Krüger visited Browns South Molton Street to present their artful, unisex watches to an intimate group of special guests. After meeting in Edinburgh whilst Fiona was at art school, the Scottish designer and South African entrepreneur set off around the globe, eventually settling in Alsace, France, which they now call home. Launching in 2013 and joining forces with Michael as her business partner in 2016, Fiona’s unique designs have seen her successfully break into the notoriously conservative Swiss watch market. Speaking exclusively to Browns, Fiona tells us more of the stories behind her eponymous label.

Our pieces look very different to what you see most watch brands doing, and that comes from my background in fine art. I’ve come into the watch industry with an outsider’s perspective, looking at the different techniques and mechanical aspects like an alternative to ink, paint and charcoal. 

I do a lot of research, particularly into historical watchmaking. If you go back 500 years, the pieces they made then had a real cultural significance, translating the happenings and philosophical ideas of the time into a design language. This is my approach too.

The whole idea of life, death and the memento mori philosophy is synonymous with time itself, and it’s something that everybody can relate to. Look back in watchmaking history and you’ll see that skull symbolism has played an important role throughout. For example, in 16th Century high society, skull-shaped pocket watches were like the equivalent of having a Louis Vuitton handbag. From a personal point of view, I spent three years in Mexico as a child, so going to the markets on the Day of The Dead celebration and seeing all these colourful skeletons is a really vivid memory of mine.

While the Skulls are a very human way of relating to time, the Chaos collection is about the scientific understanding of it. I watched a BBC documentary by physicist Brian Cox where he asks: ‘How do you know that time moves forward?’ He explained it very simply using the example of a sandcastle; if you build one you know that it will disintegrate and become a pile of sand. Things always go from order towards chaos but never the reverse, so that’s how you know time goes forward. I love the Chaos idea, especially for watchmaking which is so much about precision and being organised. Our pieces are almost like a Trojan horse - on the surface they look amazing, but there are all these layers of real meaning behind them. You don’t have to be interested in the layers to love the watches, but they’re an important part of the process.

I fell in love with it during my first visit to the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva when doing my Masters in product design in Switzerland. They have an historical collection of watches shaped like angels, musical instruments and animals, which opened my mind to the fact that a watch doesn’t need to be round and flat, it can literally be anything that you could imagine. For an artist that’s really exciting!

I’ve got a real thing about craftsmanship. I love the digital world, but something that somebody’s made for you by hand is really important. In this day and age people don’t just want more ‘stuff’, they’re looking for meaning. That’s why it’s important that you don’t make something for the sake of pumping out another product. If I’m going to put something else out into the world then it should have meaning.

When I’m working the house looks like a tip because there’s stuff everywhere! I’ll print everything out, doodle stuff, see it all laid out, and then do a big edit. Here I can start to see where all the connections are, and that’s where sketchbooks are really good, because they hold everything that’s in my brain.

Michael: From a partner’s point of view, you can feel when the creative side is coming out. It’s almost like when there’s a storm coming… you can sense it, and then the house explodes! But “Storm Fiona” is good! 

We’ve set some boundaries, so there’s no work chat after a certain time! Though there are times when we’re sat watching Netflix and we’ll look at each other and know we’re both thinking about work!

It’s really interesting to see how different cultures think about things. We have clients all around the globe and it’s really important to us that we don’t just sit at home and send stuff out. We really like to find a retail partner that gets what we’re doing so that we can do something special for them, or at least provide them with the tools to communicate about our brand in the right way. Unless you go and spend some time in their culture you don’t know that.

As a way to show the world where our watches come from, we’ve pencilled in time this year for developing artwork around the theme of each collection. I retook a print-making course because it’s a great process which works with my natural way of designing, so the finished artwork will be a mix of prints and drawings that are currently in my cupboards at home!

The full Fiona Krüger collection is available to shop in Browns South Molton Street

Words by Sophy Davis Russell