It took Guillaume Laidet and Théo Auffret four weeks to raise a million dollars for what they called their “neo-futuristic horology” watch company. And a split second to lose it.
Having funded their project on Kickstarter, the two Frenchmen readied their first Argon watch for delivery in the summer of 2023, investing half of the money pledged by backers into its production.
But during the week in June when they were to receive the pledge money, a complaint arrived from a watch company with a similar name: Aragon. Without warning, according to the pair, Kickstarter refunded Argon’s pre-orders in full, leaving backers nonplused and the entrepreneurs without the means to pay their towering bills.
“We just got an automatic response from Kickstarter,” Mr. Laidet said. “It was crazy. Less than 1 percent of their projects do more than one million, and yet they just shut us down.” Mr. Laidet, who also is involved with the Vulcain and Nivada Grenchen brands, said that he had never come across Aragon; its website indicates that it was established in 1991 and that its headquarters are in Deerfield Beach, Fla. (Aragon did not reply to emails seeking comment.)
Sleepless nights followed. “We had a bill of half a million to pay,” said Mr. Auffret, who is an independent watchmaker based in Paris. “It was quite frightening.”
After Aragon filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, seeking damages and an injunction against what it called trademark infringement, redirection of sales and profits and other charges, the pair hired an American lawyer. He told them that the quickest solution was to change the company’s name.
They had planned to call the first Argon watch SpaceOne, a retro-futuristic design with a jumping hours display, so that became the company’s new name. The lawsuit was dropped in June, but it did not solve the main problem.
“We had to put together an emergency crisis communication,” Mr. Laidet said. “We did a Zoom with almost 100 people, explained the situation to them, and invited them to pre-order again via our website.” They started accepting orders on July 14 and in a few days raised half a million dollars. “Eventually, we gathered all the orders again and got back our million,” he added.
On Thursday, SpaceOne announced a second model, the Tellurium, which features what the brand calls a “heliocentric tellurium” displaying the sun, earth and moon as three-dimensional orbs that float over the dial. The earth rotates around the sun once every 365 days, and the moon around the earth every 29.5 days, completing a full lunar cycle.
SpaceOne’s founders say that this mechanical watch — which was created by Olivier Gamiette, a car designer at Peugeot, and executed by Mr. Auffret, could fetch much more than its $3,300 price.
“Our objective is to have affordable high horology,” Mr. Laidet said. “MB&F, De Bethune for all!”