Meet the Small, American Watch Brand Taking Playful Watchmaking Seriously

For years, if you wanted a “fun” watch — something bright and playful that doesn’t take itself too seriously — you bought a Swatch. Unless you were Rick Cosgrove.

Adam Cruft

The president of an events and marketing company in Chicago, Cosgrove needed a watch to gift his clients — something inexpensive and colorful but also built to last and meticulous in its design. So he decided to make his own.

Though not a watchmaker himself, Cosgrove did have a good friend, Andrew Perez — founder of independent watchmaker Astor & Banks and fellow Chicagoan — who was just the man for the job.

Cosgrove admits that he wasn’t quite prepared for the realities of designing and manufacturing a watch from scratch. Still, he and Perez managed to put together a batch of watches for Cosgrove’s gift-giving endeavors in under a year, an impressive feat for any watch designer.

The pair were instantly hooked, and they embarked on their next project: creating a company to develop and sell an actual commercial product. The two named their new company Sō Labs, combining the Japanese word for “beginning,” “creativity,” or “layer” and “Labs,” and debuted its first watch, the Layer 1, at Worn & Wound’s Windup Watch Fair in 2019.

Featuring a transparent acrylic 38mm case, a quartz movement and lumed, colorful dial variants, the Layer 1 is both fun and affordable, retailing for just $175. Its most prominent feature, a set of rotating plastic discs that perform the time-telling task usually accomplished by more traditional “hands,” marries the playfulness and affordability of Swatch with a design sense that is arguably more considered.

It’s not for everyone, but that isn’t really the point. “I think designing for the masses should never be the goal,” explains Cosgrove. “You want critique.”

So Labs Watch Co.

With production on the Layer 1 starting in 2020, Sō Labs hit a series of snags due to COVID-19, but the Layer 1 was available by the end of that year. Much to Cosgrove and Perez’s delight, the three colorways sold out quickly, and the pair began to focus on a second act.

Cosgrove imagined an evolution of their plastic-disc handset concept to something more robust, possibly involving brass components. Perez was concerned about serviceability and production feasibility, but eventually, the two settled on a design that retained the rotating disc hands but added a mechanical movement, a steel case and 100 meters of water resistance.

In fact, they went one step further, repurposing the spinning day and date wheels from a Swiss Sellita SW220-1 movement and turning the complication into a functionless, purely artistic element, displaying 217 unique color combinations as the days go by.

So Labs Watch Co.

The Layer 2, with its customized complication, case, bracelet and automatic winding rotor, retails for $1,295 — a good deal more than its predecessor but still a bargain for such a unique timepiece.

As Sō Labs expands its offerings, and both Cosgrove and Perez continue working their “day jobs” in addition to being fathers and husbands to their families, one invariably wonders: how do they find the time to run yet another successful business?

Perez, for one, just seems happy to be working in fields that he enjoys. “It’s a labor of love, a passion,” he says. “And as long as we can keep doing it, we’re going to keep doing it.”

Cosgrove has his own take on time management. “I think it’s natural for people to seek creative outlets,” he says, “whether they act on it or not. But you make time for the things that you want to be doing. In many cases people choose to relax. For us, this is relaxing.”

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