Project Skyline, Part One: Why I’m Building This the Hard Way
I’ve built a lot of watches. Hundreds, probably, by now—mods mostly. Taking apart cases that already exist, swapping dials, fitting movements, aligning hands, replacing crystals, and learning what makes a watch feel solid versus what makes it feel like a kit.
That has been my apprenticeship, even if I never called it that at the time.
Project Skyline is different.
There is no donor case and no off-the-shelf blank waiting to be modified. It is the first Persa watch being designed completely from scratch: the proportions, the case shape, the dial, the movement placement, the crown, the crystal, the caseback, and eventually every surface that changes how the watch looks and feels on the wrist.
I’m the one deciding all of it.
I want to be upfront about something before I get into the design itself: when I started, I had no idea what I was doing.
I had used AutoCAD before, on and off, through odd jobs over the years, so I was not walking into technical drawing completely blind. But Fusion 360 and actual product CAD are a different animal, and watch-case design is especially unforgiving.
You are not just modelling a shape that looks good in a render. You are modelling a shape that has to hold a movement, locate a dial, clear the hands, seat a crystal, accept a crown and stem, thread into a caseback, seal against water, and still look right from six feet away.
I learned most of that by getting it wrong first.
That is the honest version of how Project Skyline began: not with a fully formed vision executed flawlessly, but with someone who had assembled a lot of watches deciding it was time to actually design one, buying a 3D printer, and figuring it out in public.
Key takeaways
- Project Skyline is the first original Persa watch designed from the ground up.
- My starting point came from building and modifying hundreds of watches, not only wearing them.
- The project began with proportion, symmetry, and the experience of wearing the watch—not a list of specifications.
- Four early case concepts and physical prototypes exposed problems that renders could not.
- Part One did not create a finished case. It established the design principles and development process behind Skyline.
The problem I was actually trying to solve
Watch people—and I say this as one of them—can get extremely deep into specifications.
Movement architecture. Beat rate. Power reserve. Regulation. Decoration on parts most owners will never see without opening the case or looking through a loupe. Whether a screw is heat-blued or chemically coloured. Whether a bridge edge was polished by hand. Whether the movement offers an additional ten hours of reserve.
I understand the appeal.
Some of those details genuinely matter. A dependable movement matters. Thoughtful construction matters. Good finishing can reveal whether the people behind an object cared about making it properly.
But almost none of that is why someone puts a watch on in the morning.
Nobody straps on a watch because they are thinking about the finishing on the mainspring barrel. They put it on because of how it looks on their wrist, how it works with what they are wearing, and whatever quiet confidence it gives them before a meeting, a date, dinner, or simply walking into a room.
That is the actual product.
The movement is what makes the watch work. The feeling is what makes it worth wearing.
That is probably the closest thing I have to a mission statement for Persa: I am not trying to win a spec-sheet comparison. I am trying to build watches that do for you what a well-cut jacket does—you put one on, and you stand a little straighter.
A famous watch can create that feeling through the name on the dial. Put on a Rolex and part of the experience comes from knowing exactly what it represents. The object, the history, the recognition, and the status all arrive together.
Persa does not have a century of recognition behind its name, and I am not trying to manufacture that feeling by copying someone who does.
I want the confidence to begin with the object itself.
The proportions. The way the dial catches light. The way the case sits on the wrist. The sense that every component belongs to the same idea.
Before someone knows the price, the movement, or even the brand, I want the watch to look right.
A good watch rewards inspection. A great watch changes how you carry yourself.
Why another watch needed to exist
There are already countless good watches available.
The familiar recommendations are familiar for a reason. Seiko, Tissot, Hamilton, Citizen, Orient, and many independent brands make dependable watches that are easy to understand and easy to recommend.
The problem is not that those watches are bad.
The problem is that the safest answer can stop feeling like a personal one.
Spend enough time searching for your first serious automatic watch and you begin seeing the same suggestions everywhere: the same starter watches, the same movements, the same case shapes, and the same language about value for money.
Those choices can be excellent. But sometimes, the more universally correct a watch becomes, the less it feels like something you discovered for yourself.
At the opposite end, the watches that genuinely feel designed—where the shape, texture, and details have a clear point of view—can quickly cost several thousand dollars.
Other brands pursue originality by becoming louder, stranger, or more complicated than they need to be.
I wanted to explore the space between those extremes.
Something original, but not weird for the sake of being different.
Something refined, but not anonymous.
Something with enough character to feel special and enough discipline to wear every day.
That philosophy already influences the Oasis Collection, Persa’s ready-to-wear watches built around texture, light, and wearable proportions.
It also appears differently through Atelier Custom, where a one-of-one watch is developed around a person, a milestone, or a story.
Project Skyline is the point where those ideas have to become an entirely original object.
There is nowhere to hide behind a familiar case or a design someone else has already resolved. Every line has to earn its place.
Learning watches from the inside out
I was new to designing a complete watch, but I was not new to watches themselves.
Before Skyline, I had built and handled hundreds of modified and small-batch pieces. I had installed movements, fitted dials, aligned hands, seated crystals, replaced crowns, adjusted stems, dealt with dust, diagnosed loose rotors, corrected misalignment, and learned how small tolerances can create very large problems.
That gave me a different starting point from someone who had only experienced watches from the outside.
I already knew that a case could look convincing in photographs and feel cheap in person.
I knew that a poor bracelet could ruin an otherwise good watch. I knew that a dial could be beautiful on its own but feel wrong once the hands, rehaut, crystal, and case were around it. I had felt the difference between components that fit together naturally and components that felt like a collection of unrelated parts.
Building mods also taught me where the limits were.
You can create an enormous amount of variety with existing components, and there is real skill in making those pieces feel cohesive. But eventually, you are still working inside decisions somebody else already made.
The case diameter, lug geometry, crown position, crystal seat, dial opening, and movement architecture are fixed before you begin.
At a certain point, modifying existing watches was no longer enough.
I did not want to build another watch that looked like something I had already seen. I wanted to create a Persa watch where the case, dial, texture, and proportions all came from the same starting idea.
Not louder.
Not trendier.
More considered.
That meant giving up the safety of components I already understood and accepting that I would have to learn an entirely new process.
Why I’m building Project Skyline the hard way
There are easier ways to launch a watch.
I could begin with a catalogue case, choose a movement with predictable dimensions, design a dial around it, and move quickly toward a product that looks finished.
That approach is common because it reduces cost, risk, and development time.
There is nothing automatically wrong with it. Persa itself began by working with existing components, and that experience taught me almost everything that made Skyline possible.
But it could not produce the watch I had in my head.
If the case shape is the first thing that gives a watch its personality, beginning with someone else’s case means accepting someone else’s most important design decision.
I could change the dial, hands, colours, finishing, and strap, but the object would still inherit its stance from a form that already existed.
Project Skyline had to begin with the shape.
Building it this way is slower.
It has required learning software, buying equipment, creating bad prototypes, rebuilding models, and solving problems I did not even know existed when I started.
The upside is that the finished watch will have a traceable reason for being the way it is.
That visible process matters.
A small independent brand cannot rely on a famous name to make every claim believable. The sketches, prototypes, failures, and revisions are not background material to hide until launch. They are proof that Skyline is being designed rather than simply branded.
Learning Fusion 360 from scratch
My previous AutoCAD experience helped me understand dimensions and technical drawings, but Fusion required a different way of thinking.
A two-dimensional drawing can describe a shape. A three-dimensional product model has to anticipate how that shape will be created, assembled, and revised.
At the beginning, I was learning Fusion almost tool by tool.
Some early models were inefficient. Some solutions appeared to work until I moved several steps forward and realized they had created another problem. Occasionally, changing one dimension caused an entire section of the model to break.
That became normal.
I would solve one problem and discover two more behind it.
The challenge was not only learning what buttons to press. It was learning how to think several stages ahead.
Where would the movement sit?
How would the stem meet the crown?
How much space would the hands need?
Where would the dial stop?
How would the crystal be retained?
How thick could the lugs be before the watch became visually heavy?
The model was not merely a picture of the case. It was slowly becoming a record of how the watch would work.
I am still learning, but that has become one of the most valuable parts of Project Skyline.
The project is not being designed behind closed doors and revealed once everything looks effortless. The mistakes, revisions, and breakthroughs are part of the story.
Starting with the watch case
Before I touched the dial or committed to a movement, I had to figure out the case.
That is where a watch either has presence or it does not.
A watch case is a small architectural object. It has proportion, mass, negative space, transitions, and surfaces that respond to light.
It also has to work from two perspectives at once.
From above, it is almost graphic: a dial, bezel, crown, and silhouette.
From the side, it becomes a physical object that has to curve around a wrist without looking too thick or feeling uncomfortable.
Watch design is unforgiving at small scale in a way most objects are not.
One millimetre of lug length is nothing on a piece of furniture. On a watch, it can be the difference between elegant and clumsy.
A slight increase in bezel width can make a dial feel cramped. A tiny change in crown placement can alter the whole side profile. A fraction of thickness can determine whether a watch slides beneath a cuff or constantly reminds you it is there.
I was targeting a diameter somewhere around 38 to 39 millimetres.
That range felt large enough to create real wrist presence but restrained enough to remain wearable.
I did not want Skyline to feel timid. I also did not want its size to become the main reason anyone noticed it.
The goal was presence without excess.
That is easy to write and difficult to draw.
Symmetry as a real design principle
The other idea I kept returning to was symmetry.
A crown on the right side naturally adds visual weight to the case. Even when the central body is a perfect circle, the complete object can feel slightly pulled in one direction.
I began exploring a counterbalance on the opposite side.
The idea itself is not new. You can see variations of visual counterbalancing in a number of more architectural watch cases.
What mattered was how it could be used here—not as decoration attached afterward, but as part of Skyline’s basic structure.
The counterbalance had to do several things at once.
It needed to make the watch appear settled when viewed head-on. It needed to give Skyline a silhouette that felt recognizably its own. It had to remain comfortable on the wrist. And it could not look like an unnecessary shape added solely to prove that the watch was different.
That last part became important.
Original design does not always mean adding more.
Sometimes it means finding a reason to remove something.
The case needed enough distinction that someone could recognize it, but enough restraint that it would still feel natural years later.
The goal was not perfect mathematical symmetry at the expense of function.
It was visual balance—the feeling that the crown and counterbalance belonged to one composition.
Four early case designs
I modelled four early versions to test how far I could push the case.
Version A was the slimmer, more restrained shape.
Version B extended the geometry slightly and gave the watch more presence.
Version C shortened the lugs and counterbalances to create the most compact form.
Version D pushed everything furthest and produced the most aggressive silhouette.
I posted all four on Instagram and asked people to vote for their favourite.
That was fun, and it brought people into the project early. It also worked well as a short video because there was a clear question at the end.
But looking back, the real value was not which version won.
The value was learning to see.
When you stare at one render for a week, your eye adapts to it. Awkward proportions begin looking normal simply because they have become familiar.
Placing four small variations beside one another makes their differences much harder to ignore.
You start noticing what a millimetre actually does.
One version looks compact but loses presence. Another looks strong on screen but becomes stretched on the wrist. One counterbalance feels integrated. Another feels like a shape attached to the side.
The four versions were not finished personalities competing for production.
They were exercises in understanding proportion.
Why I bought a 3D printer
A render lies to you.
Not intentionally, but effectively.
Lighting can make an edge appear sharper than it is. Perspective can exaggerate or hide length. A carefully selected camera angle can make a large object appear compact.
Most importantly, a screen provides no honest sense of physical scale.
A watch can look convincing in Fusion and completely wrong once it occupies real space.
The only way to know is to hold it.
So I bought a 3D printer, and every version was printed as soon as the model was ready.
The prints were rough plastic. They had visible layer lines, no real finishing, no functional dial, and no movement inside them.
They were not marketing prototypes, and they were never intended to impress anyone.
They were questions made physical.
Does the case feel too large?
Are the lugs too long?
Does the counterbalance create balance, or only visual noise?
Does the shape sit naturally on the wrist?
Would I choose to wear this if I had no personal connection to the project?
Half the time, the print told me something the screen never would have.
A line that looked subtle in CAD became clumsy in the hand. A lug that appeared elegant extended too far. A case that looked compact from above still felt broad once the counterbalances were included.
Other ideas worked better physically than they had in the render because the curvature only made sense when the object could be turned and viewed from different angles.
That became the development loop I have used throughout Skyline:
Model. Print. Hold. Judge. Revise.
The point of prototyping is not to prove the first idea was right.
It is to make being wrong inexpensive enough that you can keep going.
Why I’m showing the process publicly
Documenting Skyline publicly has made the project more vulnerable, but it has also made it more honest.
It would be easier to disappear for a year, present a polished watch, and rewrite the story as though every decision had been inevitable.
Real product development does not work that way.
Some ideas fail. Some proportions look better in your head. Some technical solutions create new problems. Sometimes hours of work end with the realization that the simplest option was better.
Showing that process gives people a way to understand what they are eventually being asked to buy.
For someone considering a small independent brand, the concern is rarely only whether the watch looks attractive in a photograph.
The deeper questions are whether the design is truly original, whether the person behind it understands the product, and whether the finished object will feel as considered in real life as it does online.
Skyline’s development process is part of the answer.
The original Instagram videos are short snapshots of that work. The Journal gives me room to explain what those videos cannot: why a decision mattered, what failed, and how each stage changed the watch.
You can follow the complete Project Skyline journey as it moves from plastic case studies toward a fully functioning prototype.
What Part One actually accomplished
Part One did not give me a finished case.
It gave me a direction.
It established that Skyline would be built around proportions in the 38–39mm range. It made symmetry and counterbalance real design principles rather than decorative ideas.
It also created a repeatable process:
Model the idea.
Print it.
Hold it.
Judge it honestly.
Revise it.
More importantly, Part One clarified the kind of watch I was trying to create.
Original, but not strange for the sake of being strange.
Refined, but not anonymous.
Technically sound, but not designed merely to win a comparison chart.
Distinctive enough to feel personally chosen, but controlled enough to wear every day.
There was still a long list of problems ahead: the dial, movement position, hand clearance, crown sealing, crystal retention, caseback threading, water resistance, and manufacturability.
I did not have most of those answers yet.
But none of them mattered if the shape was not right first.
A watch has to earn the right to be picked up before it earns anything else.
That is what this stage was for.
What comes next for Project Skyline
Part Two begins where the silhouette starts turning into a real watch.
Once the broad shape existed, I had to think more seriously about the dial opening, the way the dial would create depth, and how the visual language of the case could continue inward rather than stopping at the bezel.
Later stages would bring much harder engineering problems: positioning the movement and stem, designing the internal carrier, retaining the crystal, sealing the crown, and creating a caseback that could actually thread into the case.
Every one of those problems would force the design to change.
That is the tension at the centre of Project Skyline.
A watch cannot only look good.
It has to survive becoming real.
For now, Part One leaves the project with a shape, a method, and the idea that continues to guide every decision afterward:
The details matter because of what they make you feel—not simply because they are there.
Frequently asked questions
Is Project Skyline a Seiko mod?
No. Project Skyline is Persa’s first original watch being designed from the ground up.
The case, dial, proportions, and internal architecture are being developed specifically for the project rather than being built around an existing donor watch.
Persa’s earlier experience with modified watches is still an important part of the story. It provided practical knowledge of assembly, movements, tolerances, and component quality. Skyline is where that knowledge is being turned into an original product.
Why did you start with the case instead of the movement?
The movement creates important technical constraints, but the case establishes the watch’s identity, overall proportions, and wrist presence.
Beginning with the broad shape allowed me to define what Skyline should feel like before permitting the easiest available component to determine the entire design.
The movement and its placement still needed to be solved later, and those requirements would influence the internal architecture.
Why use 3D-printed watch prototypes?
A 3D-printed prototype makes scale, lug length, visual balance, and wrist fit easier to judge than a render.
The plastic prints were not intended to reproduce the final materials or finishing. They were fast, relatively inexpensive physical studies used to identify proportional problems before moving toward more expensive metal prototypes.
What size will Project Skyline be?
The early case studies targeted approximately 38–39mm.
The exact final dimensions depend on later engineering, movement, crystal, and manufacturing decisions, but restrained and wearable proportions remain central to the project.
When will Project Skyline be released?
Skyline is still in development, and I do not want to promise a release date before the design and testing are ready.
New prototypes, design decisions, and major milestones will be shared through the Project Skyline page and the Persa Journal.
Three ways to experience Persa
Project Skyline is the experimental side of Persa: the long process of creating an original production watch from the ground up.
For a finished Persa watch available today, explore the Oasis Collection.
For a one-of-one watch developed around a person, milestone, or idea, begin an Atelier Custom project.
To follow the mistakes, prototypes, and breakthroughs behind Persa’s first original watch, follow Project Skyline.
Next: Project Skyline, Part Two—turning a case shape into a watch.