Optimef - Romanian Watch

I bet you never heard of this watch before. OPTIMEF was a communist-era brand of watches that were somewhat popular and with the "vintage nostalgia" that we experience these days it wasn't long until someone would revive this brand.

But, the result was really cool and really did not even hint at the old watches.

The first model is called "farazece" which means "without ten" but in fact it's a way to say time in Romanian. Like, when it's 5:50 you say "ten to six" in English but in romanian you say " 6 without ten ". That part "without ten" literally translates as "fara zece".

Anyway, although this little tidbit is mostly lost in translation the design is really cool and I feel it can speak to anyone in any language. Mostly, it has no real numbers. It is a bit intuitive but also very on the nose. Here's how it looks:

You can maybe see why thy called it "fara zece". As the face only tells you the time in minutes. Here we can see that the time is 10:1, then it will be 10: 15 but you see you have no actual "3" or "6" number but you can easily tell the time.
The cool part is that on the other side it goes the other way. This is because after 30, we Romanians tend to say "without x". Like 6:35 is not Six ThirtyFive but Seven without Twentyfive. So it makes a lot of sense the way this is designed but I wonder if it makes to you too.

Anyway, I love the idea and looks cool and it has a nice quartz mechanism going for it and a nice bracelet. for 120e, I'm not sure you can ask for more :)