2023 at Mr Jones Watches
With 2024 looming around the corner, we can’t help but ask ourselves: Where has this year gone?
Well, you know what they say… ”time flies when you’re having fun making quirky watches”. That’s actually the saying, we definitely haven’t made that up!
In all seriousness, this year has been a blast and none of it would be possible if it weren’t for you - our incredible, loyal, inspiring customers.
This year, we released 10 new watches, two t-shirt collections and worked with some ingenious new artists. We expanded our premises and welcomed a bunch of new members to the MJW team; excitement left, right and centre. Phew!
New Releases
Our first release of the year was designed by London-based Japanese illustrator, Yo Hosoyamada, as a celebration of her hometown, Tokyo.
This watch featured a cat watching a bird with studied interest through a window, two animals alone in an entirely man-made landscape…
Berry Late! & Berry Late Again!
We also worked with another London creative, the wonderful Ana Dias. Her Berry Late! watch tapped in a sense of sweetness with tiny strawberries and a rebellious side with a pastel slur pasted across the watch face.
It was so popular that we couldn’t help but add it to our permanent collection later in the year as the iconic Berry Late Again!
Fancy a game of ‘Cat and Mouse’?
We introduced a fanciful feline into our collection in June. Mispoes! was designed by Kaat Deceuninck, a Belgian art student of Kristof Devos! Kristof set his class a fun task to design a watch to show us and Kaat’s was just purrrfect.
Her design played on the famous English idiom. In fact ‘Mispoes’ literally means “you missed, cat!” in Dutch.
A mischievous little devil caused havoc in our collection for a limited time in October.
Short Fuse was designed by London-based Romanian artist and illustrator Adriana Dincu, Inspired by a series of comic books she created called ‘Hysterical Bitches’ exploring female rage.
This limited edition Lucifer sold out all 200 pieces in just under an hour!
In November, we introduced a very special limited edition watch, Houseparty, designed by our very own watch assembly technician/artist and illustrator, Catarina Morais!
Her watch aimed to celebrate the moments and experiences we have with our families and friends, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, and reminds us never to forget them.
Mechanical Watches
2023 greeted a few mechanical masterpieces into our permanent collection too! These watches are some of our most loved, so why not make watch lovers' dreams come true with a swanky, automatic mechanical movement?
We released mechanical versions of the one and only A perfectly useless afternoon, the most to the point watch of them all, The Accurate, and of course, the friendliest alien of them all flew in with an all new mechanical UFO… sort of.
Kristof Devos was back again and how could he not be with his phenomenal designs?
Well, we added Enjoy the ride to our permanent collection in 2023. Also with a Swiss mechanical movement and an important life message, the ferris wheel ticks round as the seconds pass by.
New Premises and Team Members
In the summer of 2023, we bought and renovated a new unit a few doors down from our workshop.
This meant that we could expand our Customer Service team to four people. Now our team has much more space to pack up all of your orders!
It also meant we had a much bigger space to hire seasonal staff for the busy Black Friday period… it was like Santa’s chaotic workshop for a while.
Throughout this year, we’ve had the opportunity to welcome some fabulous new members into our small, creative family!
We’ve hired seven new assembly technicians, six print technicians, (Fiiive gold rings… *ahem*) three customer service assistants, six shop assistants and one new member of the marketing team.
All of our new starters have worked extremely hard this year and we couldn’t be happier to welcome them to the team.
New T-Shirts
Some of you may recall us releasing a very special t-shirt with a very special sausage dog on it for our 15th anniversary…
Well this year, we expanded our collection with four t-shirts inspired by the MJW dogs: Stanley, Woody, Shrimpy and Wren.
And we didn’t stop there, in November we worked with the creators of some of your favourite watches and released another collection of t-shirts based on A perfectly useless afternoon, Number Cruncher, and Berry Late Again!
Murals and Other Events
Now, if you’ve ever visited our Neal Street shop, or seen it on our social media, you may have noticed some amazing artwork has appeared on the walls…
Catarina, creator of Houseparty, painted these beautiful murals for us in April (by hand may we add). She also designed the characters you see dancing in our window. We never stop looking at them and finding new details we may have missed.
Our shop also held an event for the Watch Collectors Club, where watch lovers travelled from all over London to discuss their favourite watches. We also gave them a workshop tour and showed them how we make our watches.
We finished off 2023 with a fantastic Christmas period, our whole team met up for a Christmas tipple, we decorated both our shop and workshop, even the dogs got dressed up.
With all of that, we bring the show of 2023 to a close. Here’s to 2024, which we are sure will be filled with just as much joy as this year, more watches, more fun and more keeping in touch with all of you!