Exclusive: Award-winning watchmaker, photographer talks new launch and "really poor" margins on his luxury watches

Ming Thein was a photographer long before he started a watch brand. Because of that, there's one specific assumption about MING that's extremely easy to reach: that the watches are built to be photographed. However. he says it does not work that way.

"A watch is mostly a passive participant in a photoshoot," Thein told Notebookcheck. More texture, reflection and hard edges opens up possibilities, he says, but it also makes a defining image harder to land, because the watch looks like something different under every light. The company joke in the early days, in his words, was that they got into watches to have something to shoot. Instead, Ming reveals that the product gets imagined first and he photographs it afterwards.

Most of what he says comes back to what the brand cannot do. MING is an independent brand run out of La Chaux-de-Fonds and Kuala Lumpur. It holds two prizes at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève under its belt. Plus, a reputation largely built on engineering oddities, among them the LW.01, a production mechanical watch weighing a mere 8.8 grams. Its newest release is the 57.09 Secret Honey (read our detailed launch coverage here). It is a 125-piece collaboration with Massena LAB priced at CHF 7,250 (~$8789) before tax. Orders opened on Thursday.

If you're wondering what a brand gains by stopping at 125 pieces, the expected answer — exclusivity — is not it. Thein’s answer was margins.

"Have really poor margins!" he said. "There’s literally no economies of scale because for a lot of components we are at MOQ." Minimum order quantity is the smallest batch a supplier will accept. A brand doing small batches pays the worst unit price available to it. Selling orders of magnitude more, he added, would make the current level of customer service and direct collector engagement impossible to maintain. Double-edged sword, like everything else.

You can see the same limits show up in materials. MING has abandoned two. Precious metal cases didn't stick around because inflation and volatility made them a commercially poor choice against what the same money buys elsewhere (and also because demand was thin). Magnesium was dropped during the LW.01 project. The alloys they tried were not sufficiently corrosion resistant. Others have been tried and not yet launched, he says, without naming them.

The feature Thein singled out on the Secret Honey is not the dial, which impressively rotates using three stacked sapphire disks over a lacquered base. He picked the lugs. Each step on the triple-stepped case has a different finish. There's natural titanium on the outside, TiN in the middle to look like yellow gold, and TiSiN on the inside for a rose gold tone. That is only possible because each lug is assembled from separate parts, not machined from one piece. MING’s own specification puts the component count at nine. The decision was originally about getting sharp edges and alternating finishes on neighboring surfaces. The whole idea of tying the warm dial colours to the case came after.

Working with William Massena bought something analogus. A collab means you can opt for a more experimental design language, something you maybe wouldn't do with an internal release, Thein says. Here, that mostly means the color palette and the return of Arabic numerals, something MING had moved away from some time ago.

The last thing we asked was what he had bought that was not one of his own. His answer was an Apple Watch Ultra 3 (curr. discounted to $699 on Amazon), a while back. He still finds the health and fitness functions useful.