In The Details: Aera and Moo on Material Craft

Aera has a relationship with innovative printer, Moo. Here, director of industrial design at Moo, Toby Hextall, talks to Jas Minhas, co-founder of Aera, about the enduring emotional appeal and practical benefits of the physical.

Toby Hextall: Jas, I’m curious to know how you came to work with us at Moo.

Jas Minhas: Well, Richard Moross, who's your founder and CEO, is actually one of our Aeranauts, which is what we call our customers, and he had bought one of our watches – he was one of our early supporters – and he had a problem with his strap. He messaged me and I said, ‘Hey, shall I come and try and solve it for you?’ So I went down to his office, we got his problem sorted and then we ended up talking. And he said, ‘I love what you do. Love your design.’ And I repaid the compliment, as I knew Moo because my business cards from around 15 years previously had been made by the company: a design where a coloured piece of card was sandwiched in the middle between two others. It turned out we also knew people in common, and we went from there to now being collaborators, but also friends on a personal level.

TH: So that’s how we’ve ended up creating this postcard for you.

JM: I have to say that it was Richard's idea. I was talking to him, and I was saying that we wanted to send something out to contact our Aeranauts, to wish them a happy summer, and inform them about a new personalised feature we were launching. We’re all about time, so I wanted to send a prompt to remind them that they have time now for the summer, and to encourage them to think about what they are going to do with it. Richard said, ‘Well, what about if you did something really beautifully printed, and you actually posted it to them?’ And I thought, what a genius idea. I mean, who doesn't like receiving something personal in the post?

TH: You’re so right. I think there’s this joy around receiving something in the post that makes the moment very special. It grounds us, because it cuts through the noise. When it arrives and you open it, you’re incredibly present; there’s this object in front of you that’s tactile. It’s personal. It feels very purposeful, as opposed to the thousands of emails and pings and messages you get per day. It’s amazing how a printed message can create this kind of lasting impression; very subconsciously, there’s something about receiving something physical that kind of burns into your memory and creates a really personal connection.

JM: Yes, and even though our card itself is printed, we decided that the envelope would be handwritten. I’m so bad at opening letters, but if something’s handwritten, I open it immediately, as soon as I see it, no matter where it’s from.

TH: If you post it, you can’t revoke it, you can’t cancel it, you can’t delete it. And it’s actually been hand-delivered, regardless of how many different hands it’s gone through. There’s this incredible relay effect of this crafted message, getting from A to B, that is amazing if you stop to think about it. I have notecards here that I keep – sometimes it’s really important to elevate communication from an email or from a message that might just be a quick text.

JM: Moo and Aera are both brands that are synonymous with design and quality. So, we decided to go with this beautiful postcard that has this colour paper sandwiched between two pieces of paper, like the business card I had back in the day. It shows the craft of making this product, and that time and effort has gone into it.

TH: With our paper projects we look at things that were cutting-edge technology maybe 100 years ago, that were replaced by the more mundane processes. With our thickest and most luxurious paper, Luxe, we came up with a modern process of creating a heavyweight paper product that was very bespoke to make in the past – it’s beautifully crafted from a multilayer stack of papers with the colour seam in the middle. We follow a process of looking, touching, feeling – choosing papers that look and feel just right, and that exude the emotion we are trying to get across to the customer in the end product. As soon as you can add that layer of emotion to a physical object, then you’ve created something that has done justice to the craftsmanship of the papermakers and the printers. Luxe is weighty, prints beautifully and has a tactile surface texture that feels great. Perfect for business cards and notecards; just like the postcards we made for you, Jas. 

JM: Love it. So much care and time was taken to put this postcard together – when you feel it, the weight of it, it’s very tactile; but because of the design of the paper that’s used, there’s a softness to it as well. This is also the spirit of our watches – weight and quality and a softness, too. They are considered, and everything we create should reflect that. nothing we do is just done on a whim, not even a postcard.

TH: It is all about the craft and making an emotional attachment through that. And sometimes you work with old ideas and incorporate new technology. Four or five years ago at Moo, we developed a way of making cotton paper using the offcuts from T-shirt production. It was a new idea, using waste from fast fashion, but 100 years ago some papers were actually made from collected cotton rags.

JM: With mechanical watches too, it’s old technology. In the early days, time was measured through the celestial, you would figure out seasons as they changed. Then you used sticks and stones, and you looked at shadows. From there, we moved to sundials and water clocks, and finally to the pocket watch and pendulum clocks. Finally, we got to the mechanical wristwatch in the late 18th century. That’s where Aera watches come from – they are a feat of engineering using old tech to make a modern product. If you think about the love, detail and amount of time that needs to go into making the finished piece you’re wearing on your wrist, it should actually ground you once again in the present moment. When I want to really slow down, or just have time for me, I go out with only my watch. Paradoxically, wearing it makes me feel truly free and like I’m not constrained by time. The mechanical, old-school nature of the piece is part of that. Doing something manually, like winding up the movement, does ground you.

TH: I get it. It’s like writing things down on paper. The ability to make a permanent mark. And it being physical. It still exists when the power goes off, unlike digital content and communication. There’s something around the reliability of a bound set of pages and a pen or a pencil that means that you’ll never be let down. And that ability to make a permanent mark, it’s a way to speak your truth. It can’t be edited by anyone else. It can’t be erased or lost in the ether, it can’t be changed when it goes out, when it’s sent, it can’t be reworded before it arrives. Handwriting and making a mark utilises far more senses than just typing. There’s this act of the body being involved in what you’re doing in a very different way, and it helps to process those thoughts and keep them more present. There’s lots of research that says that when you handwrite notes you remember them better than when you type them on a screen. 

JM: You know, what you said about the work not existing when the computer is off makes me think of scuba divers who all wear a digital watch for its tech, but many also always wear a mechanical watch, too, in case of digital malfunction. Obviously, knowing how much oxygen you’ve got left is critical, especially when you’re down in certain depths. So, when they’re really relying on something, it’s the mechanical watch in case all else fails.

TH: There are so many advantages to analogue. I find it easier to skim back through a notebook than to scroll through, say, 20 pages of typed text on a screen. If the preciousness of your time and the importance of the time you spend has no higher weight than any of the 64 other apps you’ve got on your phone, that’s a worry, right? So, I wear a mechanical watch. I believe that, subconsciously, the act of wearing a watch says I care about time – my time, your time, the time we spend together. It’s a bit like handing over a beautiful business card, which is about introducing yourself properly. It’s there on your wrist. It immediately says: I care about craftsmanship, I care about great design, but I also care about the time I have in the world, and I care about how to use it.

JM: And you don’t get that from a digital watch.

TH: They are just another always-on screen that’s bombarding you with information. And they lack a depth of style. You can adjust settings to make them a different colour, and there are different analogue watch face designs you can download. But it’s not the same.

JM: Digital watches become obsolete. A mechanical watch is such that you can always find somebody that will fix it. It doesn’t rely on a power source or a cable – and how many digital products do you have that have been thrown away or are sitting in a drawer? One of the things that someone said to me that I found so profound, is that time is the most disrespected commodity that we have. What you do with your time is so important. And that’s where I believe wearing a mechanical watch gives a different experience – the ticking of it, the setting of it… It can take you to a place where you really focus on the present. 

TH: When you talk about setting the time, it brings to mind when I go on a plane and I arrive at the destination, and if I were wearing a digitally connected watch it has to sync with the internet in order to adjust the time. But with a mechanical watch there’s the confidence in knowing that you’ve hand-wound on by a couple of hours and now it’s correct, as opposed to having a glitch where the software thinks you’re still in your original time zone. That reliability of something that is purely mechanical or purely physical is special. Like when I pick up a business card, I can immediately know who that person is, and I know that these are their details. I actually keep business cards as I find it easier to refer to them than scrolling through data.

JM: I think I’ll have to re-order my business cards! Toby, one last question. I’m curious to hear from you as an industrial designer: what is your favourite Aera watch?

TH: So, it’s probably not controversial, but I think the M-1 Field. There’s something around the confidence of it and the cleanliness of it. I think it’s just beautifully stripped back, and I think it feels so contemporary. I love that. I love the big lettering on the hour markers. It’s absolutely beautiful, and I think it’s got the hallmarks of being a future classic. I also love the fact that they’re limited as well. I think that’s a really great way of not only being responsible by not oversupplying, but also a way of getting a bit of a buzz around a new launch.

JM: Thank you so much. You know, what also makes them special is that there’s a hand-filling element to everything we do. So that even when you buy one of those 300 watches, and you’ll only meet, maximum, 299 other people with one, in fact, no watch is exactly the same. Even the crown is filled in, the hands are filled in. On the bezel of our chronograph, all the markers and numbers are hand-filled. So, this, again, is something that we feel make our watches different, in addition to the quality of the materials that we use.  For example, if you put one of our steel watches in a bucket of water for 50 years, you’re not going to get any pit marks because it’s got such a high resistance to corrosion.

TH: That’s amazing.

JM: Thanks so much for chatting today, Toby. And long may Aera and Moo continue to collaborate