Full Disclosure:
I (Rob) am a co-owner of Arcanaut and work with the company as its head of brand development. The following is a presentation of our recently released Arcanaut Tiger Sh’Arc model, which is one of two pieces that currently occupy our “Experimentals” collection. WatchGecko kindly consented to publish this look behind the scenes of the watch’s development to help spread the word about our continued research into new and unusual materials.
Arcanaut Arc II — Tiger Sh’Arc Limited Edition
Sometimes, a watch almost designs itself. Those moments are rare, but as people who spend their days agonising over microns, debating surface finishes, and almost coming to blows over material choices, the easy wins are something to be grabbed with both hands whenever they float by.
The Arcanaut Arc II — Tiger Sh’Arc is Arcanaut’s first model to use a case material other than 316L stainless steel. And while its “Zircuti” case is the main talking point of this piece, it isn’t actually where the story of this watch’s development begins.
In fact, the Tiger Sh’Arc is a descendant of a mooted range of watches that never made it to market. A little over two years ago, just after I joined the brand, I got on my soapbox and declared that the world needed a model family that put the case, rather than the dial, front and centre. My suggestion of how we do this? Tone down the dials so that the striking case silhouette had space to shine. Anders had already been experimenting with dials in different materials (such as rose-gold plated copper, yellow-gold plated brass, raw German silver, and rhodium-plated sterling silver), but was unconvinced that they offered a strong enough visual to carry the concept over the line. I disagreed, but he held firm.
His logic? An Arcanaut should always push boundaries. Simply sticking a “raw” dial in an undecorated, unmodified case would never do. It was too safe, too conservative. I couldn’t unfound his reasoning and so the conversation lay dormant for a few months, but my desire to see a model that celebrated the easily recognisable lines of our case never wavered. I was convinced that making the case the star of the show would be commercially successful, but I conceded we needed to wait until we had an excellent idea of what to do to the case itself to make it stand out.
Enter James.
Months later, we were sitting on a hotel balcony in Gothenburg, inviting a stiff sea breeze to blow away the cobwebs of the night before, when James mentioned he’d been in talks with a contact of his in the US to develop a proprietary composite metal using Titanium and Zirconium for his rings, which he sells under the Black Badger moniker. As he explained it to us, Anders and I began to recall our conversations regarding the long-since-abandoned “Raw” collection. We looked at each other, the seed of an idea beginning to germinate…
James continued, “...and then when you media blast it, the pattern kind of sinks beneath the surface. It’s really subtle. It kinda looks like the skin of a tiger shark…
“Hey,” he looked up from his “coffee” and grinned, “maybe we should say, tiger ‘SH’ARC’”.
That’s the easy win I was referencing before. With that name, the whole project was green-lit. It was no longer a question of if but rather now of how, what, and when.
We pulled the rhodium-plated sterling silver dial into the conversation, added a titanium buckle, bezel, crown, crown tube, and case back, and mulled over what to do with the hands (we would eventually settle on the Chevron handset with an iridescent PVD coating that shifts from blue/green, to purple depending on the angle from which you view the watch). The Glowpatch concept came a little later, but the nosecone-inspired Tiger Sh’Arc graphic leapt into existence almost immediately after that idea solidified.
And thus, the Tiger Sh’Arc concept was born. It took us almost a year to bring it to life, lifting it from the sketches we released last December in the process. It measures the same as all other Arcanauts so comes in at 40.52 mm across and 13 mm thick (but, crucially, is ergonomically curved to sit close to the wrist). The watch is water-resistant to 100 meters and is powered by the Swiss-made automatic Soprod M100 movement.
The piece is limited to 33 units. Although sold out on www.arcanaut.watch, enquiries are welcome and some models are still available through our official retailers, which can also be discovered on the official website here .
The price is USD 4,750 excluding taxes and including international shipping and all outstanding orders will ship before the end of 2024.
