About
The grammar of design, for those talented enough to write it, is fundamentally an exercise in small details. In watches, they are critical without exception; with such little real estate available, the execution of a good design is impossible without an eye eager to apply its keenness. You have to get it right – enthusiasts will let you know with vigor either way.
In Justin Jakobson of Camp Watches, I believe I have found a kindred soul who shares my sentiment. A Long Island native who gradually marched westward for family and later work, Justin has spent his career adaptably pioneering, testing, and executing ideas for anything you can (and can’t) think of. His design chops are buoyed by a decade of working on consumer electronics at Sony, followed by another decade working for various design firms. The range of products is expansive: there were CD changers and stereos, percussive ventilators used in neo-natal care, and even a machine made to perfectly apply phone covers, which Justin describes excitedly as inspired by Polaroid film and one of his greatest intellectual moments. “You have to take everything equally seriously,” Justin says. “Proportion, color, style – it all matters no matter what you are doing.”
“Proportion, color, style – it all matters no matter what
you are doing.”
Justin’s career is heavily informed by his parents. Growing up, they were not only a marriage of two people but of two fundamentally related schools of thought. His mother Kathleen was a math professor, while his dad John was a designer who worked on furniture and car interiors; when the time came to delve deeper into the wood, Justin took the path that his dad traveled by. He admits he has always been geared more towards mechanical curiosity than inclination, and that recognition plus a love of art led him towards industrial design. “I always wanted to be near engineers, but I wasn’t really good enough at math to be one. I like design as an alternative because it’s a nice middle road between fine art and engineering. And if you’re lucky, you can find personal self-expression in your work.”
School in the Midwest is where Justin first learned to cut his teeth. He went to the University of Michigan for two years before transferring to Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies. The Center gave Justin two things: the tenets of good design and a fear of his teachers drilling how to draw ellipses with near-autocratic authority. The poetry between Justin and his dad continues, as John actually went to the Center as well (back then, it was known as the Society of Arts and Crafts). The triangles and french curve stencils that Justin brought with him? Directly from his dad’s tool stock. The apple almost certainly didn’t fall far from the tree.
Given everything we know, it is hardly a surprise that the connective tissue between Justin and his dad naturally extends into the four-wheeled realm. “I was the kid who would take apart the family car on vacation, but couldn’t put it back together. I just wanted to know if I could take the tires off and switch them; my dad would see and come out yelling,” Justin says with a laugh. “Our driveway in the 90s was always five to ten cars, they were always around.”
Justin grew up around a plethora of neat rides; among them were a Fox Body SVO, a Datsun 240Z rally car, a Merkur XR4Ti, and John’s coral-colored Beetle (which still has its original 1958 paint to this day). Justin recalls most memorably his dad’s ’69 Chevy Stepside in seafoam green with steel hubcaps and the soul of a farmer. The last cars to be mentioned are the most important. Justin points out that his dad’s sensibilities were and remain Teutonic, and they drove German with frequency; there were multiple BMW 2002s in the Jakobson family stable while Justin was growing up.
Eventually Sony began consolidating their design work globally; when this restructuring hit the New Jersey center where Justin was based, they moved him to Santa Monica when he was just 24. The move sparked a desire to purchase what he describes as a “California car” (that’s code for classic). When the time came, Justin went German just like John. The car he purchased? A BMW 1600-2, progenitor of the 2002 and 3-series, in rare Florida Green.
“I spent a year fixing it up,” Justin recalls. “Great little car; it was the first great-looking postwar BMW and the progenitor of the 3-Series. Those little almost-fins along the edges of the hood and trunk lid get me every time.” His words strike me as being baptized in a shoal of nostalgia. Justin forthrightly admits that the immaculate condition of his 1600 post-restoration induced some level of paranoia about navigating LA traffic; after another year as its steward, he ultimately sold it. That car never quite left his mind’s eye, however, and it would inspire the watch we’ll touch on in detail shortly.
Nowadays, Justin drives a first generation NA Miata from 1992. His garage shines light on a few altars, not just one dedicated to the automobile; bicycles actually came before cars, and eventually cameras arrived too when Justin saw the world ditching film and, in words that can only turn photographers melancholic, “beautiful Leicas that were available for pennies.” Admittedly, our conversation was as much about his Voightlander (which uses a superbly cool telescoping film roller) and pseudo-Ostrich textured Polaroid (once owned by the historical enigma that is “Bill Potts”) as it was about watches.
Justin is careful not to label himself as “technologically philistine” (a phrase I plan to adopt without delay), but it is clear there is a love for the divinely mechanical. It is possible that the intersection of Justin’s professional life with watches was inevitable. The first was his Swatch GJ700 Yamaha Racer, which sparked a curiosity in watches and a small, curated collection; however, he curtailed further exploration out of sheer discipline and personal investment in his other hobbies. Most luckily for us, Justin did not succeed. “I deliberately, consciously avoided watches and collected other things for 20 years,” he says. “Watches came after my foray into the event business; a little more entertainment, a little less engineering and art. COVID happened and it was back to industrial design. I missed mechanical, I wanted to retreat into objects. Then the opportunity with MTM came along.”
“A watch is a precise instrument, so it should look precise.”
MTM, another Los Angeles-based brand that focuses on both military-style watches as well as private-label design and development, is probably where Justin truly began his descent into our hobby. “I loved that it was a local business. The founder had been working for 30 years out of this beautiful classic car parts building that he bought in the 80s.” The fact that MTM was as far away from events as possible was a plus, but the fact that watch design requires exactness is what drew him in intellectually. Justin recalls an experience from his formative days at Sony in order to provide the connective tissue between past and present. “We designers sometimes had to be as obsessive as the engineers and product planners. I remember the craziest thing I was a part of was a lively discussion about the width of a stereo button; it was off by point one-six of a millimeter! In the watch business, a millimeter matters. A watch is a precise instrument, so it should look precise.”
Camp Watches (of 2024 vintage) is Justin’s latest creative expression. The name is a callback to learning to work with his hands at summer camp on the shores of Big Blue Lake in northern Michigan, a locale that both he and his sister remember fondly. He learned to sail there, and in predictable fashion, a bicycle and camera were always a part of his uniform. Every summer, Justin would return as a camper and later counselor; the enamel pin that comes with every watch is Justin’s memory of watching the sun set repeatedly over Big Blue. As far as his thought process for founding Camp goes, it is grounded in a relatably human desire: wanting to create something for ourselves. After his time at Sony and making enough designs for people doing their own brands, Justin decided he’d simply like to do one for himself.
The Fieldtimer is Justin’s vision of what a precise instrument should look like. “It’s not always function first, sometimes you are just selling things. There are watches where you go in that different direction for pure fun; that’s cool, but the Fieldtimers are vintage-inspired and functional. I wanted to make something simple with surprising elements that is made as well as any other watch you can get your hands on.” Unsurprisingly, it is a thoroughly Bavarian take on excellence.
The Fieldtimer’s hidden details are everywhere. The 39mm case has sweeping chamfers that cut deeply, hiding utilitarian lug holes and giving the illusion of a mid-case that floats and hides its form. There are topography changes up top, too; a double-stepped bezel wraps around the Fieldtimer’s sapphire crystal, and the hands are center-beveled so you can catch even minor light for telling the time. The manually wound Sellita SW 210-1 within is not a peak horsepower caliber, but it is still good quality and keeps time at +/- 12 s/d. Justin chose it not just for thinness or acoustics (there’s no noisy rotor here), but because the crown is solid enough to not move the minute hand when popped out like with cheaper competitors. And if you inspect closely through the display caseback, you’ll notice a neat surprise engraved into the movement’s bridge.
Most important is the dial, which comes in a trio of colors as shown throughout this article and is made from glossy, hand-polished enameled lacquer fifteen layers deep. At 1.3mm tall, their thickness presented Justin with a problem. “My dial is really thick. Even with the highest hand Sellita movement, they still had to have extension tubes in order to clear the dial,” Justin says. That translated to the pad-printed indices, which have several layers of Super Lumi-Nova but perhaps not as much as Justin would like. Regardless, they remain functional and they nail the aesthetic; these numerals sometimes look like they’re not even touching the dial, and they absolutely sing in the sunlight.
The only thing more critical than how the dials are constructed is their inspiration. Each watch is an ode to automotive influences in Justin’s life, and they are cross-pollinated in their sources. 1600 Florida Green aside, both Atlantic Blue and Malaga Red are BMW 2002 color schemes. One of John’s very first cars, a 1940 Ford Standard Coupe, is the source of the Malaga Red dial’s typography via its dash and was colored in a midnight blue hue very close to BMW’s Atlantic scheme. Despite these callbacks, Justin states that he wanted the animus behind the Fieldtimers to be stealthy. “I call it a secret car watch because it has so much family history in it, but I didn’t want it to be something you even thought was car-related when you look at it.” Call it inside baseball at its best; the Fieldtimers are clandestine totems to Justin’s family, cars and his love of design.
Camp is a homegrown operation that relies on homegrown energy; Justin inspects, packs and fulfills every single watch of his own accord, and there is naturally no brick-and-mortar location to show off his watches in person. That isn’t stopping Justin, though, and his enthusiasm around Camp is infectious. He is taking a critical eye to the first generation and “already sees a million things he wants to change.” For example, he still wishes the lume was stronger, and there are a few case edges that are sharp to the touch. Luckily, Justin is happy to report there have been no surprises in feedback received. Reception has been great, and Justin loves that, but I get that sense that progress and innovation are equally nourishing rewards in their own right. The founder of Camp Watches is clearly excited for the future of his brand.
Regardless of whatever comes next, it is undeniable that there is something special about the grassroots-level horology happening here. Brands like Camp radiate the type of authenticity that Swiss juggernauts can only dream of rediscovering. The Fieldtimer isn’t just an ode to Los Angeles or cars; it’s a combination of everything that has provided input to Justin’s career. In his first watch, Justin has merged his upbringing with two automotive cultures: the industrial spirit that is the Motor City, and the vibrant, almost ubiquitous adoration of cars that defines the City of Angels. He has taken both the lessons learned from his previous companies as well the skills of his parents and composed it directly into this watch. Simply put, it is a beautiful first sheet of music.
“My car is in this watch. My dad’s car is in the other two watches. To have somebody buy something that I designed and not hate it, to take a chance on me – that has been a crazy experience and hyper satisfying. It has been a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to share what’s next.”
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To learn more about Camp Watches, check out their website here.
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