Behind the scenes: making All this will pass

All this will pass was designed by our director and founder Crispin Jones, as a response to the coronavirus pandemic: it's a reminder to stay positive and look to the future.

Although we had another watch design scheduled for release in April, Crispin felt it was important to respond to the crisis as fast as possible, with a message of hope.

Crispin talks about his design:

We’re a small team at Mr Jones Watches and, like everyone else, our lives have been transformed over the past few weeks.

We wanted to respond to this awful situation in the only way we can - by creating a watch that expresses our feelings and especially our hope and belief for the future.

I realise that this isn’t a vital contribution in the battle to overcome coronavirus, but it is all we can do: share a message of hope during these dark times."

Since the UK has been on lockdown (at the time of writing, we're in our fourth week), we have divided up all our components and tools and are continuing with work from home or, where that’s impossible due to the equipment involved, from our workshop, where the skeleton team is operating in shifts and working individually.

This of course is challenging for our small team, but a challenge we have documented below!

Creating all this will pass

Crispin straight away knew what he wanted for this design - the disc hands for this watch were created quickly and we were all pleased with the results.

Next we started working on the dials. Crispin wanted the dials to represent 'the chaos and unpredictability of the current situation we find ourselves in' and felt this organic technique would work well.

Here are the first samples of the watch we created:

We made some small tweaks, which you can see here:

Next, we worked on different styles of 'splatter', in an attempt to make it look more organic.

We made some more tweaks to this effect, we tried different colour combinations and used different tools to create the splatter.

You can see the samples we created using different effects below.

As we were designing this watch, the UK was put on lockdown, which meant that we brought most of the production home with us. You can see one of our assembly technician's Cat, making All this will pass from home in the video below.

Due to the hand-made quality of these dials, we couldn't recreate each dial exactly, so when we were happy with the colours and style, we decided to release All this will pass, with a rough guide of what each watch will look like (but of course, every watch is completely unique)

Here's the final version of the watch in black:

Here's the final version of the watch in silver:

We are aware that many people are facing financial hardship right now, so we kept the price of this watch as low as possible and we added it straight to our permanent collection (usually our new designs are released in limited runs of 50-100 watches).

All this will pass is available here.

To help the global fight against coronavirus, we are also donating 10% of the money received for each watch to the World Health Organisation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.