In March this year, a Chinese independently researched and developed watch named “Ink Pisces” attracted the attention of many manufacturers at the 2016 Basel World Watch and Jewelry Fair. An international front-line luxury brand offered to buy this watch with fishes “swimming” on the dial.
The design of this watch was inspired as a final project by a group of college graduates. The chief creators were members of the Tianjin University entrepreneurial team "Runshi Design" of Professional Industrial Design group. Recently, several of their watch designs were selected by an agent who ordered the first batch of 19,000, bringing the enterprise nearly 10 million RMB in sales. During the "Double-eleven Festival”, these watches were put on TMALL and JD Mall online and within a few days sales reached nearly a thousand.
Song Xinyu said, “Now the happiest thing for me is to check TMALL and watch the orders of our designed watch increasing sharply”, as he opened his phone to show the journalist several watches he designed. There were a total of ten models and thirty colors.
24-year-old Song Xinyu, one of the students in the Tianjin University “Xuanhuai Class”, chose to start a business as soon as he graduated from Tianjin University in Industrial Design in 2014. “At that time, entrepreneurship was not popular with the public. No venture investment or powerful policy support like today. When I graduated from college, I just wanted to do something I fancied. I was too young to be afraid, so I started my own business.”
Over the last two years, the most difficult problem they faced was capital shortage. There was no money in the account at the end of the year. They couldn’t even prepare red envelopes for kids at home. One of their clients demanded a modification of a vital technical index the day before National Day, so throughout the whole vacation they had to work late to develop a new program. ”Since industrial design was still at an early stage in China, we needed to communicate a lot with the clients when they failed to understand the technical language. Sometimes it was really depressing.” Song Xinyu said.
When talking about industrial design, Song Xinyu said he appreciated Steve Jobs. He said that it was Steve Jobs’ iphone that enabled Chinese people for the first time to truly realize the existence of Professional Industrial Design. Tianjin University Industrial Design Professor Kan Shubin said, "Basically, within this two year period, all the freshmen of the Professional Industrial Design course selected this major as their first choice. They longed to design, express and create as Jobs had done.
Xiao Song wore the "Runshi" watch, which was invited to the Basel Exhibition, the world's top watch industry summit as he explained: "This was our graduation project, and the watch shared the same name with the team.
The "Runshi" watch, jointly designed by Seagull Watch and Tianjin University, was inspired by traditional Chinese ink painting. It applied the concept to create a minimalist visual illusion of the second hand combining with the white space and integrating the animated swimming fish theme into the dial activated by mechanical movement of the watch.
Early in 2014, Tianjin University and Seagull Watch signed a cooperation agreement between the school and the enterprise. Seagull Watch provided technical and financial support for Tianjin University Industrial Design Professional course while Tianjin University integrated watch design into the student training tasks and opened up an exploration road of an integration of a school-business alliance and production-teaching-research. With this opportunity, a student graduate student design successfully created to innovative product with a Chinese cultural imprint.
It had been 2 years since Xiao Song graduated and he still frequently contacts teachers and students in Tianjin University. “We have a Wechat group of graduates and college students of Professional Industrial Design group. We often exchange our understanding of design to inspire the students.”
Tianjin University Industrial Design Professor Kan Shubin said, “Why do we help the students with ideas to innovate and start businesses? We do it mostly to set good examples for the later generations and to build confidence Chinese design. That matters most!”
