Take an exclusive look inside Marc Newson and Ressence’s new watch collaboration

Marc Newson had been aware of Ressence, the Belgian watch brand founded in 2010 by industrial designer Benoît Mintiens, since its early days. ‘It’s not easy in the watch world to create something truly new and innovative – but Benoît did,’ says Newson. ‘For me, his very first watch was reminiscent of some of the work that I’d been doing at Ikepod [the watch brand Newson co-founded in 1994], and it was very welcome. I was really happy to see what he’d done – it felt like a lovely evolution.’

Since Ressence’s inception, Mintiens has established a distinctive aesthetic for his brand, focusing on a pure design that eschews the superfluous and rethinks the essentials, including the way we tell the time. ‘As an industrial designer, it’s your job to reconsider and challenge situations that have always been there,’ says Mintiens. ‘What is special about what we do is that we put functionality back on the agenda.’

Newson’s decision to collaborate with Ressence was a natural one, with the resulting watch, the Type 3 MN, drawing on the brand’s patented oil-filled technological inner workings and Newson’s stripped-back industrial design philosophy. Ressence’s patented mechanism of magnetically driven rotating discs, a cornerstone of the brand since its inception, offers a visually arresting and unique display. Inside the watch case, the upper chamber is filled with silicon oil, which puts a stop to any light refraction and ensures exceptional readability.

The watch’s ergonomic, elliptical silhouette is one that Newson has refined over the years, and nods back to early Ikepod versions. The designer was keen to build on this history. ‘What Benoît had developed at Ressence was a perfect vehicle for me to express a lot of the ideas I had wanted to do early on – and to an extent that I did do, but not, perhaps, to the extent that I wanted to, as we didn’t really have the technology that better enabled its expression. So it was an odd kind of serendipitous meeting of minds.’

Subtle touches of colour throughout lend a vivid clarity. In the muted palette, Newson is referencing the 1998 Hemipode watch – one of his favourite designs for Ikepod, he says – and here its combination of greys and yellows is faithfully rendered. ‘I love this green, too,’ he adds. ‘I’ve used it constantly throughout my career. I call it the colour of the universe.'

Reflecting on what characterised the creation process, Mintiens says, ‘Functionality is at the core of what an industrial designer does; the simpler you make something, the more functional it becomes. So the whole idea behind it was to simplify, even though Marc wanted the graphical execution to have this instrument feel to it. I wanted it to feel like what would come after Ikepod – what would be the next generation if we had gone further with it? There is some evolution theory in this, but I think this is the next iteration of Marc’s vision of what a wristwatch should look like.’

Newson enjoyed the process. ‘We share a common interest. You could say Benoît’s day job is timepieces, but he has a thorough understanding of industrial design, whereas my day job is industrial design and I have a thorough understanding of timepieces. It’s reciprocally sympathetic. Working with him was easy because we share the same values, sense of detail and obsession with perfection. It was sort of a geeky watch thing.’

The Type 3 MN watch, CHF46,000 (£49,858), will be available in a limited-edition run of 80 from 4 December, ressencewatches.com, marc-newson.com

This article appears in the January 2026 Issue of Wallpaper* , available from 4 December in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + Subscribe to Wallpaper* today