Baltic Watches: Ice Cold, Ice Cool

It’s hard not to like a story like Baltic’s, a contemporary and affordable French watchmaker that, despite the increasingly saturated market in which it exists in, has been causing stirs and filling conversations in the watch world for a few years now. “My father was a a photographer and a collector of watches, cameras and old cars,” Ettiene Malec, who founded Baltic in 2017 following a successful Kickstarter campaign, tells me. Driven by childhood nostalgia, Ettiene discovered years after his father’s passing a suitcase full of his watches with detailed, handwritten annotations in an old notebook. He immediately knew his calling and started collecting watches himself as well as studying his father’s collection and analysing all the pieces he had, and gathering all the information possible through the internet.

The impressive Ettiene is now 28, but his early 20s were spent studying international business and running an eyewear brand before turning his attention to his wrist and in doing so his father’s collection, which compromises mainly of chronographs, military and diving watches. “I’ve always been more hooked by the aesthetics, and the historical fact behind a watch which is something much more powerful in my option.”

“I’ve always found watches from the 1940s to be perfect in their simplicity,” he says rather excitingly while showing me his collection at Baselworld earlier this year. He continues to explain that his “design philosophy is to make simple, elegant and timeless designed watches which are inspired by vintage.” And, he’s done exactly that while taking further inspiration and his brand’s name from the cold, icy Baltic seas, which shares a coastline with Poland which is where his father was from.