John Mayer is well aware his latest watch collaboration, his third and final with G-Shock and Hodinkee, is blue. Not a couple-cute-accents blue or that’s-a-nice-blue-strap blue—it is very, very blue. But Mayer argues that, even with this bear-hugged embrace of color, everything with this watch is in balance. When it comes to designing his own watches, attaining this visual equilibrium was always the greatest challenge. “The name of the game is creating something that visually speaks but doesn’t have that burnout from wearing something that’s a little too striking for too long,” he told GQ over email. “So, yes, the watch is light blue, but it’s also very aesthetically stable, to me.” This G-Shock’s baby blue case is an interesting paint job on what is otherwise a rough-and-tumble timepiece. While the watch may look quite different this year, the results will likely be the same as Mayer’s previous collaborative pieces: an almost immediate sellout.
Over the course of the last three years, Mayer has created a very attractive set of watches. All are riffs on G-Shocks DW6900 and each takes inspiration from a different Casio keyboard Mayer owned growing up. The first slate-gray piece took its palette from the Casiotone SK-5, while last year’s looked to the creamy white Casio PT-80. This final piece is influenced by Mayer’s first keyboard, the PT-1. The watch borrows nearly every detail from the PT-1: peach, coral, and turquoise buttons on the keyboard are used to dial up the color on the watch’s Triple Graph function; the buttons on the side are the same shade as the PT-1’s sharp and flat keys, and the text on both is navy. The only difference between the two is the watch isn’t preloaded with 10 different beats like “bossa nova,” “samba,” “rock1,” and “rock2.” The new G-Shock x Mayer x Hodinkee watch, which runs $180, will be available on the Hodinkee Shop and G-Shock’s website at 10:55 a.m. ET.
Back in 2020, I called Mayer the most influential watch collector alive, because what he decides to put on his wrist often has the power to move markets. And that was before he started designing his own instant-sellout watches that now go for nearly three times their original retail price. In a press release, Hodinkee reports it sold 4.2 watches per second of 2021’s white G-Shock before selling the whole run out in 36 minutes—that’s a total of more than 9,000 watches!
The new collaborative watch also gets in on one of 2022’s most welcome trends: a wellspring of great watches priced below $500. In addition to Mayer, other collaborators like Rowing Blazers, Bait, Todd Snyder, Swatch, and Adsum have combined interesting design with not-scary prices. We connected with Mayer to discuss why it was important to make an accessibly priced watch, how his elite-collector status helped him as a designer, and his next foray into watch collaboration.
You're well-known as a discerning watch collector—how did those many years of experience on that side of the watch world inform your approach to designing your own watches and knowing what an audience might be looking for?
This has been an opportunity for me to overlay the excitement and enthusiasm usually reserved for high end mechanical watches on top of a sub-$200 watch that’s usually looked at as separate from the “watch world.” And in a lot of ways it is: there is no mechanical movement, so there’s no focus on the inner workings—that’s a separate world. But I’ve held and looked at thousands of watches, and there’s this innate feeling I always look for, when all the elements of the design fall into place and you simply admire something you have on your wrist. That’s the feeling. Admiration. You want to admire the watch you’re wearing, no matter the price.
I really appreciate that you collaborated with a brand that enabled you to make affordable watches—why was that important to you?
The mission statement that Hodinkee and I both share is to try and democratize the feeling of watch collecting. There’s no way to make high-end mechanical watches accessible to everyone who appreciates them, but there is a way, at any price point, to create something that inspires the same feeling of involvement in terms of seeing something that appeals to you and the joy of opening the box, throwing it on your wrist and looking at your new watch with a smile. That emotion shouldn’t have to be expensive, in theory.
It feels like the watch word has become a lot more open to collaborations like yours over the past years. How do you think this has shifted the landscape of the industry?
It’s a good thing and only a good thing. This is a fairly new world we’re in, where there is significantly more interest in watches than there is the ability to own them, and it’s all about making everyone feel welcome into this world. Balancing “exclusive” with “exclusionary” is a very hard needle to thread, but when you get it right, you can feel how thankful the community is. Watches feed off of the energy around them. When the emotions around a watch are good, the emotions of wearing it feel good.
Do you have a specific childhood memory with this PT-1 keyboard you can share?
Not the PT-1 specifically, but any of the early battery powered Casio keyboards, to my generation, was like an iPhone and a Playstation 5 in one. You had to be there in that era to understand the wonder of these things when the Christmas catalogs came around. They were these perfect objects of desire. That’s why I love that these watches have come out in December. Your outer adult wants the watch and your inner child wants the toy that these watches have some of the spirit of.
Over the course of making these three watches, how did you enjoy being part of the design process? Would you be open to other collaborations in the future?
I enjoyed every one. The challenge is the same in each of them: create something that’s really balanced. A watch is an item that is purposely glanced at, and that’s what makes them unique—the aesthetics are so closely tied to the function. And there will be another collaboration with a watch brand in the future. It feels like after three runs of watches that were all relatively accessible, it’s time to create something in a world I’m more commonly associated with. There will be a high-end mechanical watch collaboration coming in 2024.
