The story behind Timex Group’s prolific Creative Designer and dedicated Brand Curator
According to one estimate (by this author) Timex may be selling between 12 million and 17 million watches every year. There’s one man who has had a hand in the designs of most of those for the past ten years—Giorgio Galli, of Milan, Italy.
For most of his substantial 40-year career in design, Milan’s Giorgio Galli practiced his craft quietly, out of the public eye, learning watch design in the trenches working for some of the largest watch brands in the industry. Then, in 2019, Galli’s name adorned a watch of his creation for the first time—the Timex Galli S1. Since then, he has been the focus of numerous profiles and interviews, primarily related to the launch of his namesake Timex S1 design that has now seen three collection iterations in the past three and a half years. And his latest watch design, the Galli S2 is out this week. But we’ll get to that.
Giorgio was gracious in agreeing to sit on a video call with me a while back, and we spent a delightful hour or more discussing his education, early work, changing times and challenges in ‘affordable’ horology, and the development of his dedicated watch design studio that has grown steadily over decades to the present. Galli shared that his 2022 annual watch design project count far exceeded 300 watch designs. Yes. Galli is hellish busy with projects, and frequently travels across the globe to meet with Timex brand licensors like Ferragamo and Versace, and collaborators like Todd Snyder and the UFC. Consequently, we rescheduled our conversation several times as he flew back and forth to Europe and the Far East, finalized collaboration designs with artists, and readied his latest Galli S1 Edition 2 for release and worked on his latest release, the new Galli S2 featuring a Swiss automatic movement. So, it was a distinct honour to have time to sit and chat about his life and career.
Early years and a growing design network
Giorgio Galli attended art school and then design school in Florence, finishing up about 1980. But the 18-year-old Galli showed ambition early, and 1981 found him across the Atlantic, seeking to put his mark on America—in California, to be precise. After a time, opportunities in Italy called him home, and Galli did a wide variety of design work through the mid-1980s on a freelance, self-employed basis. By the mid-1980s, Galli had gained the experience and confidence to create his own design agency, Giorgio Galli Design, in Milan.
Advertisement
Projects and clients were diverse, according to Galli, but initially were largely grounded in graphic design. Examples? Giorgio designed shampoo packaging for Benetton, and a company logo/identity for European restaurant chain, Autogrill.
Giorgio was acquiring an astounding and enviable ensemble of influential business associates and friends from across various industries, and from this point in the mid-late 1980s, he was rubbing shoulders with a wide variety of clients while collecting projects and contacts. This included several nearly household names within the art/design industry. One of these is Alessandro Benetton—son of Benetton Group founder, Luciano Benetton—through whom Galli came to do that Benetton brand licensing design work, and with whom he later shared financial stake in Sie Milano – ‘You Are Milan’ (a fascinating, experimental, nearly-always-live local television news project that began in the late 1990s).
He is good friends with the renowned photographer Oliviero Toscani, the photographer and creative mind behind the sometimes controversial Benetton ad campaigns, who has taken many portraits of Galli. Giorgio has also worked closely with designer Matteo Thun. Giorgio expounded, “At one point [in the late 1980s], actually, I started to work on a project for Swatch with designer Matteo Thun – and actually both of us were involved in a specific ‘designers watch.’ Soon after, in 1990, I [was hired as] creative director at Swatch… after a year or so. So, I actually built [an office] in Milano, the design lab of Swatch Watch. I [was responsible to] choose the space and put together a team and start! We started to design many collections for Swatch.”
Giorgio is also good friends with the designer Aldo Coppola. There is even a fascinating story found online that reveals Galli was Aldo Coppola’s dinner party guest when he impulsively created Coppola’s distinctive ‘red circle’ trademark logo. In 1993, Galli participated in creating an Arabic number-themed design for Illy Coffee’s perennial espresso cup design project based on Matteo Thun’s coffee cup! Giorgio’s design is included in the recently published Illy Art Collection: 30 Years of Beauty along with designs by over a hundred other designers to participate since 1992.
As my online research teased out examples of Galli’s work over the years, crawling into dusty corners of the digital realm, I began to get a richer appreciation for the man. And browsing his public Instagram feed (@g.galli) his love for photography became obvious, as is the fascination he holds for architectural design. Giorgio’s photography has been the focus of an exhibit sponsored by Leica, his favourite camera. His study of light, shadow, reflections, facets, and surfaces is revealed not only in his photography, but can be seen in the exquisitely created watch designs he has created over the past thirty years.
In fact, it seems it was Galli’s desire to further explore new horizons of texture and light that helped compel him to leave his contracted role with Swatch in 1992, his first experience with watch design, and venture in new directions. Galli attributes his time with Swatch as being very formative to his understanding of watch design—a task he sees as requiring multiple levels of consideration, beginning with the understanding of the brand identity and formulation of the unique watch design embodiment of each brand. “It’s thankless work,” he says, “it is interesting to develop a design, but what’s most important is how you manage creation of individual brands. The most difficult part is not design, but the identity – the vision for the brand. You have to know how to actually capture—in motion—what the brand stands for. So, the most difficult part for a designer, a watch designer, is brand[ing]; you can design a beautiful watch, but then it stands alone—for nothing. The living brand [identity] must be included in the design.”
Advertisement
Having disentangled himself from his Swatch work, and eager to expand his business and explore watch design further, Galli expanded his work broadly—even opening a web agency. He hired teams to assist in his growing business while he tried to focus on his growing love for watch design. Relatively quickly, he found himself doing work for Citizen, then Seiko. Giorgio spent about ten years doing various design projects with Movado also. Galli added that he also engaged in design work for the brand of the first fine Swiss watch he ever owned, Ebel. He learned a great deal about the Swiss watch industry and marketplace in the first half of the 1990s.
In the mid-1990s, Galli was called on by his friend Oliviero Toscani, Creative Director for Benetton, to create some watch designs for the United Colors of Benetton brand, and one of his colourful chronograph designs with hidden lugs was the focus of a design patent. The lineage to the playful Swatch influence can be seen in Galli’s work for Benetton. Unlike his work for established brands like Citizen, Seiko and Movado, here Galli combines colours to create watch designs with a striking palette of hues; colours that could be coordinated with the bold colours of the Benetton fabrics and fashions of the era.
Galli begins work with Timex – through Nautica
As mentioned in my previous article on the history of Nautica watches, it was in the early 1990s that Galli and Nautica founder David Chu began to have discussions, even before Giorgio had left Swatch. By the time Timex secured their manufacturing arrangement with Nautica, Galli had already been working with David Chu in creating scores of Nautica watch designs, many which were manufactured and marketed by Timex-held firms like Callanen, who also managed production of the Guess and Marc Ecko brands. When Timex signed their agreement with Chu in 1996, Galli and Chu were already in a working relationship, and Timex was not a new partner to the arrangement.
As Galli puts it, the long partnership with David Chu was quite prolific; “We made like zillions of watch designs! Yeah. It was, I mean, a factory!” Galli laughs. Reflecting on his work from those days, now nearly 30 years ago, Galli comments, “I think we made some missteps..” he pauses. “I mean when I started … I wish we could have just focused on maybe just a few [distinctive] designs, you know? We were the first one to design a watch with a really big crown… it was a HUGE crown and maybe if we’d focused, we might have…” his voice faded, considering a path not taken. “See, now there is a brand that is known [just] for this…the brand is just based on that – the large crown! I think maybe we just gave it away. Always, [at Nautica] we just used a design for maybe two years and then we moved on.” He sighs. After a pause for a drink of water, he continues, “So, I think we could have made a little bit more focused product and then use the focused
to leverage the [Nautica] brand. [But] we started to [introduce] too many styles, and the same focus was not there. But anyway, it worked out.”
Galli reflected on his innovation in case design next. “At one point (in 2019) a cut-out case came out from a brand that was really big in watches (the Audemars Piguet Code 11.59) but, you know, the cut-out case that I used actually in the [2019 Timex] S1 was actually first designed for Nautica in around 1996 or something – I don’t remember exactly.” At this point I hold up my Nautica chronograph with its metal-injection molded case to the camera for him. “So yeah!” he explodes, “exactly that one! I think I was the first one to do that [create the cut-out case style using metal injection-molded technology] for Nautica.”
Galli sums up his work with Nautica simply, “Nautica has been a good experimental brand for design. It has been like a laboratory for experimenting with many designs. Over time, I have taken many of the pieces first designed for Nautica and evolved them into something else, for other products. [The 1990s] was a very precious time for me to develop my own style. The time was right, and I gathered greater understanding of watchmaking and watch design.”
“At one point, the CEO of Timex began to insist that I begin doing design for Timex—and it’s not that I refused, I just had too many [projects] going on!” But the future was already being written on the wall for Giorgio. Timex was observing the work he was doing for Chu at Nautica, and they were impressed. “Timex and I [eventually] started doing projects, not only for Nautica [under the license agreement], but for new licensees, like Versace,” he notes. “And we had Ferragamo and at one point we had Valentino [Garavani], so my involvement in Timex design [was] building. [Their licensed] brands became quite large and the collection became bigger and bigger.”
Galli insists that his next point is the real limiting factor in how many projects he could take on. “So the most difficult part is to find a vision for the brand, so in the beginning of every single project, [for] every single new brand, that’s the biggest part. It’s thankless to me. It’s a lot of work! But it’s the most important!” he emphasized with a head nod. “Eventually, we decided that maybe it was time to join forces—and they offered to buy my company.”
Advertisement
Throughout the early 2000s the design relationship between Timex and Galli grew stronger, to the point that in mid-2007 Timex purchased Galli’s watch design firm outright, dubbing it the Timex Design Center/Giorgio Galli Design Lab. By about 2010, Galli’s firm had grown to include offices across Europe – in Monaco, and Monte Carlo, and Germany, England, and Spain. “It was big. Too big,” he says. Galli sold many of his other design offices and focused on watches. “It was the right time,” he opines.
The Timex work kept growing, from Guess to Gc, and then Missoni, and Puma, and Timberland. It began to make sense for Timex to put Galli in charge. In 2013, Galli was appointed to the role of Timex Group Global Design Director. Since this time, Galli has not only continued to support the design of dozens of Nautica watch collections, but he has worked on the reinvention of the Timex brand itself, coordinating and managing collaborations with numerous brands and individual artists/designers, including Todd Snyder, Jacquie Aiche, NASA, UFC, Fortnite, Nigel Cabourn, Hodinkee™, Worn & Wound, Stranger Things™, Pac-Man™, Supreme, and more.
Now, ten years on, and thousands of watch designs later, Galli is introducing his next premier series, the Galli S2, with a Swiss movement. To speak with him about this evolution on behalf of Timex, it’s like he’s just getting started. “To bring back a brand, I have to say, …you will see more in social media in the future because we finally found the way to bring the curve back upward, you know, on the increase… and get back to what Timex was before…” He trails off for a moment, “but we found a different path now. It seems to work! We are trying to rehabilitate and revitalize the brand.” The Galli S1 and S2 Series have a role to play in that rehabilitation, and by nearly all accounts, it is succeeding splendidly.
About the author
Michael Compeau has made a career of education, organic analytical chemistry, new product development, and technology marketing. Somehow, over time, he acquired many, many watches, as well as the stories which bring them to life. You can follow him on Instagram.
Off The Cuff articles are full-length, hands-on reviews of the watch in question and represent the opinion of the author only. All photos are original, unless specified otherwise. If you would like to have your watch reviewed on this site, contact us here.
Please understand that using any links to products on this site might result in us making money.